Re: forged dates and other anti-cache practices
Benjamin Franz (snowhare@netimages.com)
Wed, 16 Aug 1995 15:29:28 -0700 (PDT)
On Wed, 16 Aug 1995, Balint Nagy Endre wrote:
> Hi all,
>
> I'm here again, and want to summarise discussion on cache disabling
> techniques.
>
> Why people are against caching documents?
> 1. I can only guess intentions of people, never seen personally, but I can
> imagine only one cause: they want precise access statistics.
Shopping basket applications and dynamic documents. *FAR* more important
than precise stats.
It never even occured to me that it might provide more precise access
stats when I designed a site to explicitly defeat caching
(<URL:http://www.psiloveyou.com/>, for those who care). The problem
with caching is it makes dynamic documents (as in some shopping basket
applications) hell. Between Mosiac's "Expire:? What's that?" behavior and
cache corruption in Netscape, I couldn't run a reliable site without
explicitly munging URLs to prevent caching in addition to expiring
large sections of the site instantly. Believe me - I tried.
It wasn't until later discussion by people trying to claim AOL has
millions of accesses hiding behind single hits to their proxies that it
occured to me that it was also a way to defeat the stats unfriendly
behavior of caching browsers/proxies. Incidentally, based on the stats
from the cache defeating site - AOL undercounting is no more than a
factor of two or three. I would speculate that the massively broken
nature of their browser, combined with a huge speed gap between 'Native
AOL' graphics and inlined Web graphics turns AOLers off the WWW. Paying
high per hour charges to download graphics from the web seems a
no-brainer (to me anyway).
> 2. they aren't paying for non-cached and otherwise cacheable requests.
I am not at all sure how to parse this. At first I thought you meant that
the provider charged by the hit, then I thought the opposite.
Could you clarify what you mean?
--
Benjamin Franz