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. -- -- Karl Denninger (karl@MCS.Net)| MCSNet - Serving Chicagoland and Wisconsin http://www.mcs.net/ | T1's from $600 monthly / All Lines K56Flex/DOV | NEW! Corporate ISDN Prices dropped by up to 50%! Voice: [+1 312 803-MCS1 x219]| EXCLUSIVE NEW FEATURE ON ALL PERSONAL ACCOUNTS Fax: [+1 312 803-4929] | *SPAMBLOCK* Technology now included at no cost