History
Squid was originally developed by Duane Wessels as the Harvest object cache, part of the Harvest project at the University of Colorado at Boulder. Further work on the program was completed at the University of California, San Diego and funded via two grants from the National Science Foundation. Duane Wessels forked the "last pre-commercial version of Harvest" and renamed it to Squid to avoid confusion with the commercial fork called Cached 2.0, which became NetCache. Squid version 1.0.0 was released in July 1996.
Squid is now developed almost exclusively through volunteer efforts.
Web proxy caching is a way to store requested Internet objects (e.g. data like web pages) available via the HTTP, FTP, and Gopher protocols on a system closer to the requesting site. Web browsers can then use the local Squid cache as a proxy HTTP server, reducing access time as well as bandwidth consumption. This is often useful for Internet service providers to increase speed to their customers, and LANs that share an Internet connection. Because it is also a proxy (i.e. it behaves like a client on behalf of the real client), it can provide some anonymity and security. However, it also can introduce significant privacy concerns as it can log a lot of data including URLs requested, the exact date and time, the name and version of the requester's web browser and operating system, and the referrer.
A client program (e.g. browser) either has to specify explicitly the proxy server it wants to use (typical for ISP customers), or it could be using a proxy without any extra configuration: “transparent caching”, in which case all outgoing HTTP requests are intercepted by Squid and all responses are cached. The latter is typically a corporate set-up (all clients are on the same LAN) and often introduces the privacy concerns mentioned above.
Squid has some features that can help anonymize connections, such as disabling or changing specific header fields in a client's HTTP requests. Whether these are set, and what they are set to do, is up to the person who controls the computer running Squid. People requesting pages through a network which transparently uses Squid may not know whether this information is being logged. Within UK organisations at least, users should be informed if computers or internet connections are being monitored.
Read more about this topic: Squid (software)
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