Re: accelerated download proposal

On Friday 13 April 2001 06:03, Henrik Nordstrom wrote:
> Download accelerators is mainly about being greedy, trying to get more
> bandwidth at the expense of other users performance.

Greedy perhaps... but it should not ruin other's performance. Especially in
telco return cable modems.

> There are reasons
> to why some ISP's puts per connection rate limitations, it is not only
> to fuck you.

True enough, but many cable modem providers with telco return periodically
disconnect the user despite active use. With rate limiting, this can become
an issue when downloading large files. (such as ISO images) I get
disconnected every 4 hours making it impossible to download a file over ~550
megs. (Note: I don't use warez. I download linux ISOs) Plus the ISP
advertises 50x faster than 56k. It is... with Download Accelerator. Otherwise
you get 5x. And do I care about thier network (except for it being up)? no.

There are lots of reasons why ISPs put limits in place, and lots of reasons
why we should circumvent those because they are too restrictive.

> "download acceleration" in this sense will not get implemented in Squid
> by many reasons, both technical and political.
>

A *truely* technical reason is understandable, however political reasons are
not. Why does squid has a URL redirection system? To circumvent ads put on
websites to pay for the "free" content. I don't care about technical
religion, just technology.

>
> HTTP is striving at becoming a well behaved Internet protocol, download
> acceleration is striving at becoming the worst behaved Internet
> application, abusing protocols for apparent single user gains.
>
> If all users were to use "download accelerations" then the effect is
> quickly nullified and a part of the internet collapses in retransmission
> storms.
>

In the most extreme case, yes. In reality, no. I download a large file to use
it. When you get done downloading, I do something with it. (burn a CD,
install linux... etc...) I don't think there are people who continually
download for the sake of downloading. Also, lets face it. Most internet users
are not capable of installing windows software.

It seems this may be unwanted in squid. That is fine. I just didn't want to
write a proxy unless I needed to.

--
Nick Yarbrough
Security Hacker