Yeah, tin foil hats on... but SOMETHING weird is going on
and I suspect this is the best place to find people who can
tell me what. And after all my webserver does run Debian :-)
I've been noticing some very strange activity in my webserver
logs over the last few days. It only seems to happen to
people using American ISPs, mostly Comcast and Verizon.
What happens is I get a sequence of requests
for all the images off the root page of my website
http://pigeonsnest.co.uk - and only that site, it doesn't
seem to be happening to any others. The requests come in
the usual order corresponding to the order in which the
HTML references them, and have the expected Referer:
header of http://pigeonsnest.co.uk/ . But there is no
request for the actual HTML page, only the images off it.
Sometimes the sequence of requests for the images is
immediately preceded - as in so close in time that
the process forked to serve it gets the immediately
preceding process ID - by a request for the HTML page
which comes from an IP owned by Google.
So it looks like Comcast, Verizon and some others are
somehow proxying the requests for my HTML via some
server owned by Google. And unlike a normal proxy,
it caches the HTML for a long time but the images
not at all.
And it's not people reading the cached copy of my
site from the "Cached" link on a google search. When
people do that it is obvious from the Referer: headers.
And I can't see any reason why ISPs would proxy the
requests for the HTML and not the images unless they're
doing some kind of content filtering or censorship on
the HTML. How do I know that what Comcast/Verizon/etc
customers are seeing is what I published?
No doubt there will be several Comcast and Verizon
customers reading this message so I hope some people
will have some useful input.
--
Pigeon
Be kind to pigeons
Pigeon's Nest - http://pigeonsnest.co.uk/
Lucy Pinder Television - http://www.lucy-pinder.tv/
GPG key: http://pgp.mit.edu:11371/pks/lookup?op=get&search=0x21C61F7F
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