forged dates and other anti-cache practices

Hi all,

I'm here again, and want to summarise discussion on cache disabling
techniques.

Why people are against caching documents?
1. I can only guess intentions of people, never seen personally, but I can
imagine only one cause: they want precise access statistics.
2. they aren't paying for non-cached and otherwise cacheable requests.

Why I want cache documents:
1. to reduce my phone bills. (I have dialup slip connection to the net)
2. to reduce the time spent watching the hourglass cursor. (I have better
entertainment choices to spend that time)

What I expect from the ongoing http version:
1. to satisfy people wanting good access statistics.
2. to give me chance reducing phone bills and time spent watching hourglass
cursor by some percents.

What we, as http-WG can do:
1. adding extensions to protocol to make possible those hits counted.
2. documenting good practices to make effective caching possible
3. giving people standard tools to prevent cacheing of sensitive documents
 - already done: Pragma: no-cache and Expires: <now or even sooner>

I don't want to list all techniques seen to fool caches, these are numerous.
Better I repeat proposal, already done:
1. Pragma: hits = #
2. modified Forwarded: header containing hit counts.
3. Hit-reports-to: header for requesting more detailed stats than bare counts.

I repeat again: if document owners will have nearly the same stats trough
caches, which they can collect from direct requests from its servers, they
never want to fool caches.
And that will spare our time and money too.
Because cache fooling techniques are now in practice, we shall state,
that fooling caches is spending other peoples money and time.

Andrew.

Received on Wednesday, 16 August 1995 13:52:05 UTC