[This is a FORWARDED MESSAGE from comp.dcom.telecom]
In article <telecom16.653.2@massis.lcs.mit.edu> Alan Bishop <a@corp.webtv.net> wrote:
Howdy. I'm a software engineer at WebTV Networks. I certainly don't speak for the company, but I can clear up some misunderstandings.
dr@ripco.com (David Richards) writes:
[snip]
The box talks to our proxy server over an encrypted channel (using TCP/IP). This allows us to provide a better service to the user in several ways:
- privacy for the user. The number of places that someone could snoop on a user's session are greatly reduced. We should be publishing a statement on user privacy in the near future describing what we will and won't do with information in our possession. I believe it's designed to answer the same questions as those posed in http://www.cdt.org/privacy/online_services/chart.html. We use strong encryption, and as some of you are already aware, we've been declared a munition by the US government, and the boxes have a "do not export" stamp on them somewhere.
- response time for common sites is more consistent. The time to connect to a common site is the time between a user's box and the proxy server, not N different sites on the internet.
- we transcode images and other media types. For example, image creators often make their images too detailed or store them in a format that doesn't compress as well as it should. We fix that in the proxy before transmitting them over the slow link to the user. It also means that if we want to support a media type, we don't need a new client release: we just add it in the server and convert it to an existing one.
[snip]