Digex transparent proxying

Sat Jun 27 15:28:01 UTC 1998

On Sat, Jun 27, 1998 at 06:07:57AM -0400, Rich Sena wrote:
> On Sat, 27 Jun 1998, Karl Denninger wrote:
>> The proper response to that is for the people who have the right to determine
>> how, and by who, their content is viewed, to deny those people access to that
>> content unless they can determine who is viewing the content, how often it is
> > being viewed, and that the content being viewed by those people is actually 
> > correct and up-to-date because it is coming directly from their servers.
> 
> If the web-designer "understands" how caching actually works then this in
> the other issues you raise are not really issues Karl.  HTTP Cache-Control
> Headers work wonders when actually used.  Caching and Proxying are out
> there and being actively used whether transparent or not - it's simply how
> it is - a web designer should guarantee their stats and validity and
> freshness of their data by using HTTP headers correctly.

And as soon as people doing advertising actually do this, then the proxy
becomes less useful, leading proxy owners to ignore the headers so that their
multi-thousand-dollar investments in these things are not wasted and
actually HURT performance (performance for the FIRST fetch through a proxy
is SLOWER - it HAS TO BE, since the proxy must first get the data before it
can pass it on).

> > Not if you can't count them at all!  A transparent proxy cache reports
> > nothing back to the originating site, ergo, those "views" are lost and 
> > never reported, even by inference.
> 
> Why would you want to rely on the proxy for accuracy - would you bill
> advertisers by someone else's accounting methods? No - you would take
> steps and measures to ensure that your's were not circumvented by a cache
> or proxy.  Usually that means you talk to your content provider and make
> sure they are parsing your meta tags on the server correctly so that some
> of your content will be dynamic to any cache or proxy that they will
> encounter on the way to any end user on the planet.

And how do you guarantee that the proxy server is parsing the tags and not
ignoring them?

See, that's the problem.

Proxies are fine WHERE CUSTOMERS HAVE AGREED TO THEIR USE.

STEALING someone's packet flow to force it through a proxy is NOT fine.

--
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