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:
“No testing has overtaken you that is not common to everyone. God is faithful, and he will not let you be tested beyond your strength, but with the testing he will also provide the way out so that you may be able to endure it.”
—Bible: New Testament, 1 Corinthians 10:13.
“The nature of women’s oppression is unique: women are oppressed as women, regardless of class or race; some women have access to significant wealth, but that wealth does not signify power; women are to be found everywhere, but own or control no appreciable territory; women live with those who oppress them, sleep with them, have their children—we are tangled, hopelessly it seems, in the gut of the machinery and way of life which is ruinous to us.”
—Andrea Dworkin (b. 1946)
“In the greatest confusion there is still an open channel to the soul. It may be difficult to find because by midlife it is overgrown, and some of the wildest thickets that surround it grow out of what we describe as our education. But the channel is always there, and it is our business to keep it open, to have access to the deepest part of ourselves.”
—Saul Bellow (b. 1915)