From: Cameron Kaiser <spectre@floodgap.com>
Message-Id: <200311202332.PAA13094@floodgap.com>
Subject: [gopher] HTML abuse of the gopher proxy
To: gopher@complete.org
Date: Thu, 20 Nov 2003 15:32:15 -0800 (PST)
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-type: text/plain; charset=US-ASCII
Content-Transfer-Encoding: 8bit
Sender: gopher-bounce@complete.org
Errors-to: gopher-bounce@complete.org
Precedence: bulk
Reply-to: gopher@complete.org

Well, I was dismayed to find that the gopher proxy is getting abused to
turn someone's gopherspace into web hosting -- they put up HTML pages,
and then use the proxy to "transparently" access them, and make it all
look like a website.

It's not a major drain on my resources (right now), and the site in question
seems honourable enough (right now), but I'm not happy about their usage of
it and I doubt the site that's giving them the gopherspace would be wild
about their use of it either (I'll give the URL to those interested offlist).
I'd also like to discourage the practise from being employed in the future.

My plan is to rewrite the proxy so that 'h' itemtype can be downloaded to
disk for offline viewing, or the source viewed directly, but no straight on
transparent access. If anyone can suggest a good reason why this is not
a good idea, I would love to entertain it. With this approach, the document
can still be viewed, but it will discourage people abusing the proxy to
make websites out of their gopherspace when they really should be using
proper gophermenus.

Incidentally, just as a reminder, the public gopher proxy has moved to

	http://gopher.floodgap.com/gopher/

Update your bookmarks.

-- 
---------------------------------- personal: http://www.armory.com/~spectre/ --
 Cameron Kaiser, Floodgap Systems Ltd * So. Calif., USA * ckaiser@floodgap.com
-- TRUE HEADLINE: Astronaut Takes Blame for Gas in Spacecraft -----------------