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May 26, 2002

What's the big deal?

Okay, please, someone tell me if I am missing something here. Comcast is being sued over web recordings. I heard about this a while back, but didn't really read much about it. Now that I do I'm a little disturbed.

I'm not a huge fan of Comcast. I think a lot of their policies about how you can use your connection through them are lame. But, if I understand this article correctly it appears they are being sued for running a caching proxy server. I bet most large ISPs do in fact. For most companies it is a way to provide faster access to their customers.

Basicly, it's a kind of network service that watches all the web traffic on their network. Say you go to a web site. The proxy server keeps a copy of that web site in its memory. That way if you or someone else go back there within a short amount of time it can just give you the information out of it's cache instead of going back to the original web site. To the user, they see increased response time (since you don't have to go all the way back to the original site).

Back to my original question. Is there something here I'm missing? Is comcast doing something out of the ordinary here? Does this mean we all have to get rid of our caching servers? Anyone know what vendor Comcast got theirs from (or if they rolled their own)?

Posted by snooze at May 26, 2002 4:06 PM