[WikiEN-l] Transparent proxy blocked - again

Fri Jun 24 23:55:50 UTC 2005

On 24/06/05, Jake Waskett <jake at waskett.org> wrote:
> On Friday 24 June 2005 17:53, David Gerard wrote:

> > > As can be readily seen from a reverse DNS query, this IP address is a
> > > transparent proxy server, use of which is forced upon NTL users (a large
> > > UK telco).
> > > manc-cache-5.server.ntli.net
> >
> > Trouble is that admins can't actually see what IP a username is coming
> > from. So there's no indication until someone calls it to their attention.
> 
> Hmm. There seems to be a clash between anonymity and usability here, as is so
> often the case with security systems.
> 
> Perhaps we could allow admins to see part of the reverse DNS, but not all of
> it. If we strip off the last two parts of the name (in this example, leaving
> just "manc-cache-5.server"), we'd get something that nine times out of ten
> would identify a proxy or not, but would not be personally identifiable.

Hmm. Set recent-changes to show only anons; 250 edits comes to about
175 unique IPs (busy people, these - one was there four or five
times). Converting them to names, then stripping off the two trailing
sections, we get this list - http://www.generalist.org.uk/wiki.txt
(somewhere along the line it went to 126 addresses. Buggered if I know
why.)

Of those, only 20 have proxy or cache in the name.

Thoughts on how useful this sort of data would be, given the
reasonably sized sample above?

-- 
- Andrew Gray
  andrew.gray at dunelm.org.uk