Testing For Access From An Open Proxy
Because proxies might be used to abuse, administrators have developed a number of ways to refuse service to open proxies. Many IRC networks automatically test client systems for known types of open proxy. Likewise, an e-mail server may be configured to automatically test e-mail senders for open proxies. As they are typically difficult to track, open proxies are especially useful to those seeking online anonymity, from political dissidents, to computer criminals, to people who simply require privacy because it is within their rights to do so. Some users are merely interested in anonymity for added security, hiding their identities from potentially malicious websites for instance, or on principle, to facilitate freedom of speech.
Groups of IRC and electronic mail operators run DNSBLs publishing lists of the IP addresses of known open proxies, such as AHBL, CBL, NJABL, and SORBS.
The ethics of automatically testing clients for open proxies are controversial. Some experts, such as Vernon Schryver, consider such testing to be "very bad form". Others consider the client to have solicited the scan by connecting to a server whose terms of service include testing.
Read more about this topic: Open Proxy
Famous quotes containing the words testing, access and/or open:
“Bourbon’s the only drink. You can take all that champagne stuff and pour it down the English Channel. Well, why wait 80 years before you can drink the stuff? Great vineyards, huge barrels aging forever, poor little old monks running around testing it, just so some woman in Tulsa, Oklahoma can say it tickles her nose.”
—John Michael Hayes (b.1919)
“The Hacker Ethic: Access to computers—and anything which might teach you something about the way the world works—should be unlimited and total.
Always yield to the Hands-On Imperative!
All information should be free.
Mistrust authority—promote decentralization.
Hackers should be judged by their hacking, not bogus criteria such as degrees, age, race, or position.
You can create art and beauty on a computer.
Computers can change your life for the better.”
—Steven Levy, U.S. writer. Hackers, ch. 2, “The Hacker Ethic,” pp. 27-33, Anchor Press, Doubleday (1984)
“What is not in the open street is false, derived, that is to say, literature.”
—Henry Miller (1891–1980)