Hinky’s Proxy Obsession

It turns out that was a form letter from the ISP.  They didn’t “perform a scan”.  They had a complaint.

They included five lines from a log.  The time zone was CET (Central European Time).  Each line was a GET request to one of my proxy judges.

This fellow is obviously running a proxy.  If I knew which one I’d stop checking it to get him off my case.  However, I can’t trace it since I don’t keep a history of re-checks.

The five log entrys are sequential, so I have to hope I have a backup close to the most recent entry (I probably do) if I want to get him off my back.

I suppose the best way to do that would be to complain to his ISP or host provider that he’s running an open proxy.

lol

Until I can ferret him out I’m stopping all rescans.  The list may get a little stale.

UPDATE 12:30PM EST

I pulled the backup from the 22nd and queried for the right proxy judge at the right time and found nothing.  The closest I can get is a request six minutes earlier than the other log showed, but it’s the right country in the right timezone and the right proxy judge.

And I’ll be god damned if it isn’t a FUCKING CoDeeN server!  That is hilarious.  Here it is:

195.116.60.34:3127  a.k.a.  planetlab2.olsztyn.rd.tp.pl

FUCK THEM!  Run a public proxy network and bitch and moan when people use it?  Get serious!  

I split off the USA-based CoDeeN servers into a separate file.

I’ll admit I did this mostly for my own benefit. 

I found it odd that the number of US servers was less than half the total count (42.5% at the present time).  For some reason I expected a bigger chunk.

I suppose the next step would be to split off a file with non-USA servers.  It would only take a couple of minutes but I’m feeling lazy today.

360+ CoDeeNs have been reclaimed and the file is on the server.  The page doesn’t reflect this at the moment and the servers are still in the Main List.  I plan to take them out of the list and keep them stashed away in the text file (updated and tested, of course).  The CoDeeN file will be updated every other hour, just like the Main List.  It’s randomized each time, so don’t depend on a hash to detect changes.  It’s a very static list, but some servers may drop in/out over time.

Speed, country of origin, and all the ancillary data is not in the text file.  That is not the point anway.

Remember, the main idea is using it with the >SwitchProxy tool for FireFox, but if you have other uses (like starting a proxy list with servers that actually work), then go for it.  Don’t do something silly like uploading the list to a proxy forum because they don’t generally like CoDeeN proxies (in fact they despise them) and the 312x ports are a dead giveaway.

No big surprise there. 

The junk filter worked flawlessly.  However, I never intended it to take out the CoDeeN proxies.  Some would say that’s no great loss because they are, in fact, junk.  But I’ve grown somewhat fond of them, so they will be back, but not in the main list.

I have been using the SwitchProxy Tool for Firefox for quite some time.  It’s very handy for testing proxies, although it does some silly things now and then (for instance, when you select “None” it clears whatever settings you originally had in the browser), but one of its main features is it lets you use a text-based list of addresses and ports that it will cycle through either sequentially or randomly. 

This is not very useful for testing, but if you have a big list of known good proxies it works very well.  The problem is getting that big list in the first place.  The CoDeeN list works great for this since there are so many of them and they’re all – with some exceptions – “fast enough”.

So, I’m going to split off the CoDeeNs and make them available on the left side menu as a text link.  You can then add this link to  SwitchProxy and browse through multiple CoDeeN servers.

From the SwitchProxy toolbar, select Add->Anonymous->Next and you’ll see the interface.  Just plop in the link, decide how often you want to switch, and you’re ready to rock’n'roll.  I haven’t decided on a name for the link yet, but it will probably be:

http://www.mrhinkydink.com/codeen.txt

Original, no?  Don’t get excited because it’s not there yet.  I have to resurrect them from the database first (since they got junked by the junk filter) and hack the code around.

Stay tuned.

Earlier this week, everything went dark.  Even the Japanese list I’ve been hitting since the beginning of this project back in March, which was good for at the very least a half dozen new proxies a day, was blank.  BLANK!  NOTHING!

And the Russians went on holiday.  At least they were kind enough to say as much on their blog (what would we do without Google Translate?).

Even the 4AM run, when I hit the listers I despise so much, was weak (weaker than usual, that is).  

But slowly everything came back to normal.  The Japs got their game on and the Rooskies came home tan and refreshed.  The proxies started coming back in, only a trickle at first but back to Full Tilt Boogie by Friday.

Work has been a bitch, so I’ve had to let the Proxy Business slide a little myself.  We are in the throes of a Web Migration.  After spending about a quarter million a year on Web Hosting for the past five years, the Boys in Mahogany Row decided it was time to cut their losses and bring the servers home.

This is turning into a huge fiasco, although the technical side has gone surprisingly well (so far).  It seems we spent all that money on a slew of Web sites that aren’t getting any traffic at all.  It is glaringly obvious that the Webbies have been lying about how well the sites were doing (as they must – it’s part of their “Performance Measures” to make certain traffic increases).  Rolling heads may be seen in the near future, but most of them have been re-orged into positions that will probably be eliminated in the near future anyway.

I get to monitor the IDS on these things, so I have a pretty good view of the traffic they pull.  From a security perspective, it’s a good thing no one uses our servers.  They’re just not worthwhile targets.  Nobody cares enough to hack them, although the way they’re configured they could be pwned at the drop of a hat.

Sometimes it keeps me awake at night.