The List was up to 850 proxies this morning, many Chinese, so I ran the China Recheck. By the next page publish, about a hundred of them dropped out.
Since it’s my goal to have active proxies – a very rare commodity – rather than dead ones in the list, I’m going to run the recheck/purge after the page is published (every other hour). This isn’t really going to help because it means that dead Chinese proxies will be in the list anyway. The way I move things around in the database, I can’t really do a recheck unless the address has already been published. They shouldn’t be there for more than a couple of hours, when, if things keep going the way they have been, a new set of dead Chinese proxies will take their place.
Hopefully this problem will eventually work itself out.
As an experiment, I ran the Resurrection Hack on the dead Chinese proxies to see exactly how dead they are. The vast majority time out. The rest are closed. A small handful came back from the dead.
Using the SwitchProxy Tool for Firefox, I pulled one of the resurrected proxies, 58.17.3.2:80, and I’m putting it through its paces. The speed is reasonable, but the first time I tried a Google search through it I got the “looks like you have a virus” page. You know what that means.
I’m not sure how representative 58.17.3.2 is of the rest of the Chinese bunch. I first encountered that address back in February (on four different ports – it may also be a SOCKS proxy). It appears to be a business, registered to “Nanchang Jianmin Nuitrition Products Factory” (proud makers of melamine, I’m sure), does not reverse-resolve, and the IP itself can be found on no less than “ about 9,270″ Web sites, according to Google (very good results there – that particular search is going into the Google Hack).
Obviously, a well-known, heavily abused proxy (due to the Google warning and a permanent IP ban at 4chan.org, which is always an excellent abuse acid test).
I think a combination of agressive purging and selective resurrection of the Chinese Junk will result in having only the most available proxies show up in the list.
We’ll see what happens with that theory.
