Security Risks in HTTP Proxy Agents (Re: Anonymizer rocks! (Re: Anonymity at any cost, from The Netly News))

Bill Stewart stewarts at ix.netcom.com
Wed Nov 26 01:36:21 PST 1997



Besides the risks of using proxy.evil.nsa.mil or proxy.blacknet.net,
there are other subtle things that a proxy server could do.
For instance, replacing banner ads is easy - you can't recognize them all,
but ad.doubleclick.net and linkexchange.com are easy targets;
an anonymizing proxy might replace those ads with its own,
or at least with static images that load faster.
This has a lot of implications when using the proxy to access
advertising-supported web sites, and there have been lawsuits over
web services that provided access to other web-based news services
while adding their own advertising banners in another frame
(one such target was totalnews.com.)

Of course, if you want to make advertising banners go away,
you can start by aliasing ad.doubleclick.net to 127.0.0.2 or whatever;
I've found it loads much faster this way :-)
				Thanks! 
					Bill
Bill Stewart, stewarts at ix.netcom.com
Regular Key PGP Fingerprint D454 E202 CBC8 40BF  3C85 B884 0ABE 4639







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