[Gllug] Proxy awareness campaign

[Rob Andrews]

[17-Oct-2001 11:16.57 (BST) / Jake Jellinek]
 > Well that is why I would call it an awareness campaign more than an 
 > "anti-proxy" campaign. I know there is a lot of strong anti-proxy feeling 
 > and I am more than aware that the theory of proxies is extremely good.

I'll put my hand up and say that I'm anti proxy. I'll give good reasons,
and allowances though.

1. Allowance - Free ISPs. Since the service is mostly coming straight from
   their own pocket, I don't see why they shouldn't try and make things
   bandwidth conservative. But as I've always maintained - you get what you
   pay for. Some free ISPs are better than others, though.

2. If I'm paying for a service, I want to be told what I'm getting. I have
   been disappointed in the past, when finding $ISP that I've just signed up
   to are transparent proxying the service. Tell me, or don't put it there.

3. I've coded (and still do code) both dynamic content pages and control
   portals. Most of us know the nightmare of ensuring browsers don't cache
   material in these cases - and it's a complete pain finding that your
   browser presents you with an old page when you request one. Badly
   setup/bad/over enthusiastic proxies often don't know/don't care
   about/don't notice some of these methods of preventing caching.
   Australian ISPs in particular suffer from dodgy proxies that cache a
   little too eagerly. This sort of behaviour can leave support desk
   staff/programmer tearing their hair out in distress, especially when you
   alert an ISP of their mistakes and find $MONKEY grunting "uh?" at you.

4. The majority of browser users=Windows users. They use their fluffy setup
   program to setup those nice dialup notwork icons and set put a corporate
   logo in the place of the transfer spinner. Enable proxying in there -
   then if the user finds it's being awkward, they can disable it. Don't
   put it in a transparent position.

Speaking from a personal perspective - I know the benefits of using proxies
- and hence I use Demon's proxy. But even so, since I'm paying good money
for the service, I'd be annoyed to find that they were transparent proxying
anyway. From time to time I find myself turning off the proxying because the
proxy server is being funny about retrieving pages. And if I didn't know
that Demon's proxy was well setup, I wouldn't use it.

-- 
nine      <e> rob at impure.org.uk <pgp> 0x8bb5c71e <w> http://impure.org.uk/
* only the good die young. the rest are forced to code perl for eternity *

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