Proxy List/GoDaddy Update 06/14/2008

Very soon after I put up the Proxy List I became disappointed with it. Although it's running fine (with caveats), I regretted not classifying the proxies I had collected into Transparent, Anonymous, High Anonymoity, etc.

I took a random sampling and re-tested. The results were dismal. A few were already offline, and although that happens a lot, they were just barely hours old.

As if that wasn't bad enough it turned out there was an extraordinary number of CoDeeN proxies popping up.

As I mentioned before, I never had much luck with CoDeeN servers. Whenever I used one it was down. That state of affairs has changed. All over the globe, they're taking requests and working just fine, thank you. Some are a little persnickety and will give you this kind of response:

You are trying to use a node of the CoDeeN CDN Network. Your IP address is not recognized as a valid PlanetLab address, so your request rate is being limited.

Very nice of them to note that. Other nodes don't seem to care, but they greet you with a warning that all your activities are being logged and that the system does not work with Anonymizer and that they're happy to cooperate with LEAs (Law Enforcement Agencies), so don't fuck around, buddy!

After ten seconds they forward your request.

Obviously if you have a privacy agenda of some sort (whatever your motivations may be), you'd probablys want to stay away from CoDeeN proxy servers.

There are some interesting side effects to connecting to a CoDeeN server. They note your IP address and browser USER-AGENT string and if they see you again, you don't get the warning. As a result, if you're using a proxy judge to test a proxy server, it goes right on through and for all intents and purposes the CoDeeN server looks like a "High Anonymity" server (no HTTP-VIA or X-FORWARDED-FOR headers).

That could be a Very Bad Thing, depending on how you use their network.

This was all very new to me, probably because for years (until I found my own) I used ProxyDetect.com as a proxy judge. Can you say "PWN3D!" boys and girls?

It's a good thing I never had an Evil Agenda. I do this for educational purposes, dontchaknow.

It was kind of a trick to convince CoDeeN they never saw you before, but I found a workaround that ferrets them out without a question (the easy thing to do is look for the string "planet" in the DNS hostname, but that's only 95-ish% reliable).

Now, I'm trudging through all the proxies I've harvested since March and re-testing every one of them. The Proxy List should be re-done in a week or so. Until then, use with caution.

As for GoDaddy, they are still chewing up ftp transfers and they are still clueless as to why it's happening. It started happening with the Proxy List yesterday morning. The page was cut in half, the file truncated on the upload. I pinged them almost immediately and sent them a screen capture of the transfer and "426" response received from their server (see Incident ID: 4042264).

Their response? You'll love this one...

Unfortunately we are unable to duplicate any FTP problems as you suggested as we have successfully connected to your account and also successfully performed a file upload test. If you are still experiencing problems, please respond with a screen capture of any errors you may be receiving, or the behavior of the application that is causing difficulty. Also, please provide a detailed description of the issue at hand, and steps that we can take to reproduce this issue.

Duh. I sent them a screen capture. I gave them a detailed description. I told them it was intermittent.

This has gone out of the realm of Tech Support and into Customer Satisfaction territory.