Hinky’s Proxy Obsession

What on Earth does Canadian health care have to do with proxies?

Well kidz, in the last few days a number of proxies located in Surrey, British Columbia (Canada, eh?) have popped up in The List.

Normally I avoid Canadian proxies.  They’re just too close to home (Mexico is fine, an exception I’d rather not get into).  But these were all fast and they all came from the same netblocks.  I did a few quick spot checks using telnet, got a connection each time, but failed to get a proper proxy response.

I did a whois on the IPs and discovered the netblocks are owned by Surrey Memorial Hospital.

I determined immediately that this was Not A Good Thing.  The last thing a health care facility needs is to have its bandwidth eaten up by SEO spammers, Cameroonian 419 puppy  pushers, and your run-of-the-mil skriddies.

I was going to put my white hat on and notify… somebody, but I discovered to my dismay that I don’t have a white hat and since I definitely don’t like making trouble for myself I decided the best course of action was to lay low and see how it played out (perhaps this could be the result of Black Hat shenanigans, since that conference is on-going as we speak).

And besides, the testing I did indicated the proxies weren’t working.  The List was pushing a thousand this AM so I ran the recheck on the database, just to clear these – apparently dead – hospital proxies out.

But they stuck.  After the recheck there were just short of one hundred Surrey proxies listed as active.

Like I said, I avoid Canadian proxies like the AIDS, so I’m definitely not using them.  I would urge you to do the same, considering interfering with these particular proxies might jeopardize someone’s health or life.

Play nice.