[Gllug] Proxy awareness campaign

Jake Jellinek jj at positive-internet.com
Wed Oct 17 08:37:01 UTC 2001 

Hi,

I think someone (preferably someone who has a little more time than I do, 
although I would be interested in helping or perhaps even sponsoring it) 
should start up a Proxy Awareness Campaign.

As a web hosting company we have nightmares supporting our customers 
because of broken proxies. The transparent ones are the worst of course. 
The issues are varied, including yesterday many of our customers using BT 
telling us they were seeing versions of their sites 6 months old appearing 
in their browsers. (No doubt some sort of dodgy backup restore gone wrong 
on the BT proxy).

Our customers obviously are often updating/changing their web sites, and 
e-mail our support to say they don't see the changes they are making. 
Naturally, any problem is assumed to be on our server, and explaining to 
people over and over about transparent proxies, and then persuading them 
that the issue is with their ISP and not us is a difficult task. It often 
makes us appear to be just trying to blame someone else. Naturally, the 
proxy owners themselves don't often admit to being at fault.

Another regularly occuring problem seems to be sites being hosted by 
HTTP1.1 name based virtual hosting (ie. sharing the same IP), get swapped 
in the proxy, we had a case when a scout club web site owner was seeing a 
soft porn sex shop web site instead of their own, and was thinking they got 
hacked)

It's not always ISP's themselves either, in office situations, there is 
often a company firewall/proxy (guess what OS we come accross most often!) 
and we have to persuade individuals to be brave and demand (sorry kindly 
request) their systems administrators properly investigate or reboot (in 
the case of our well known friendly OS) the proxies.

Anyway, apart from the obvious issues that proxy servers are evil, I think 
that there is a general awareness issue, where the majority of 
consumers/ISP users simply have no idea what is going on, or in what way 
they may be affected by proxy servers. There are also ways to prove that 
problems you are seeing are proxy related, which again, a lot of people 
don't realise.

Users should be able to make an informed decision to choose providers who 
don't force proxies. They need to understand how proxies work, why some 
ISP's choose to use them or force them, and what differences they make. 
This would also benefit those providers who don't force proxy their 
customers.

A proxy awareness campaign should benefit the general consumer, ISP's who 
offer non-proxy solutions and (of course!) web hosting companies like my 
own.

I've mentioned this to one or two of our customers who've been affected and 
they've expressed a real interest in getting involved. I'd like to get a 
list of interested parties perhaps for taking this further. As I say, my 
time is minimal (I'm a company director and father of (virtually) toddler 
triplets) but I do have a genuine interest in this project.

I do have connections with the now "completed" Campaign for Unmetered 
Telecommunications, who did manage to get massive press interest, 
parliament interest and OFTEL involvement in their campaign, and who could 
arguably be seen as responsible for getting products like ADSL eventually 
out on the market. This does prove to me that a well run and organised 
campaign does work, but they also did have some very dedicated and hard 
working members, and I guess their issues could be more easily seen and 
understood (yet even then they were often mis-understood!)

Anyway, this is just my first public step in getting my thoughts out. Even 
if it just plants an idea in someone elses head, I think it'll have been 
worth it :)

Please feel free to pass this idea/e-mail around to anyone you think may be 
interested. Also, perhaps someone knows of an existing campaign doing this, 
in which case I can be quiet and just go join it :)

Cheers,

Jake.



--On 17 October 2001 09:03 +0100
--French, Alastair apparently said about the subject "RE: [Gllug] Re:  [OT] 
Google 403 Forbbiden":

> Blueyonder's transparent cache has been tits up since Saturday lunch time
> (I think it was fixed last night, but it is still not wonderfull) The
> upshot of this was no port 80 traffic was getting out from HSI users.
>
> A temporay fix was to add webcache.blueyonder.co.uk port 3128 to your
> manual cache settings in your browser.
>
> Alastair
>
>> -----Original Message-----
>> From:	Walid [SMTP:walidshaari at yahoo.com]
>> Sent:	Wednesday, October 17, 2001 12:59 AM
>> To:	gllug at linux.co.uk
>> Subject:	Re: [Gllug] Re:  [OT] Google 403 Forbbiden
>>
>>  --- Tom Gilbert <tom at linuxbrit.co.uk> wrote: > * Walid
>> (walidshaari at yahoo.com)
>> wrote:
>> > > Hi,
>> > > I can not manage to get any search in google anymore.
>> > > it comes up with "Your client does not have permission to get URL
>> /search
>> > from
>> > > this server." See the Terms of Service posted on www.google.com.
>> > >
>> > > Is it just me?
>> > >
>> > > I tried Opera and Mozilla to no avail! :(
>> >
>> > I had the exact same issue a while ago, but that turned out to be my
>> > browser talking HTTP1.1 to my junkbuster proxy (which only speaks 1.0)
>> > and it consequently getting all confused. You using a proxy?
>> Well BlueYonder help page says I am :
>>
>> "All Broadband(cable modem) and Dial Up users are transparently cached.
>> This
>> means that you do not need to enter any cache settings into your browser"
>> Transparent proxies are hard to bypass!
>> >
>> > Tom.
>> > --
>> >    .^.    .-------------------------------------------------------.
>> >    /V\    | Tom Gilbert, London, England | http://linuxbrit.co.uk |
>> >  /(   )\  | Open Source/UNIX consultant  | tom at linuxbrit.co.uk    |
>> >   ^^-^^   `-------------------------------------------------------'
>> >
>> > --
>> > Gllug mailing list  -  Gllug at linux.co.uk
>> > http://list.ftech.net/mailman/listinfo/gllug
>>
>> =====
>> _/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/
>>
>> walid at melinux.com
>> http://www.MeLinux.com
>>
>> "Learn whatever knowledge you wish to acquire, and act upon what you have
>> learned."
>>
>> ____________________________________________________________
>> Nokia Game is on again.
>> Go to http://uk.yahoo.com/nokiagame/ and join the new
>> all media adventure before November 3rd.
>>
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>
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