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[OM] OT: Cloudfront

Subject: [OM] OT: Cloudfront
From: Chris Trask <christrask@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Date: Sun, 2 Apr 2017 11:30:27 -0700 (GMT-07:00)
     Here in the ancient land of dialup, Cloudfront is a significant problem in 
internet usage as it can sometimes download multi-megs of data into your 
machine, leaving you dead in the water.  It's a system owned by Amazon that 
tracks your internet browsing.  Basically, every time you visit a new website, 
data is sent to the system and stored.  When using Firefox and other browsers, 
a link is initiated where they will download tiles onto your browser screen, 
sometimes stock images to click on, and sometimes images of sites you've 
visited recently.

     According to a few blogs I've read, this activity is inherent in Firefox 
and other browsers, which may answer why it is not detected and removed by 
malware or antivirus software.  However, Firefox has an add-on called "New Tab 
Override" that so far seems to block that activity.  You have a choice of their 
stock tiles, your recent activity tiles, or no tiles at all.  If you choose the 
last one there is no connection established to Cloudfront when you go to a new 
tab.  Or at least my TCPView software shows that no connection is made.  
Connectivity speed is noticably better.

     Amazon AWS and Google 1e100.net are still problems.

     I've been using PeerBlock on the WinXP machines, but I cannot get it to 
work on the Win7 machines.  I found that there is a Win7 version of the earlier 
PeerGuardian, so I'm going to give that a try later on.  They use the same IP 
blocking lists, just the features of that and PeerBlock are a bit different.

     Using these two programs together with TCPView shows how Cloudfront and 
other intrusives get around firewalls.  They are routing through ports 80 and 
443, whereas my Proxomitron firewall only monitors port 8080 activity.  Same 
with the native hosts file.  Now I can block anything, though building up a 
list is tedious, especially when you first start using PeerBlock/Guardian.

Chris

When the going gets weird, the weird turn pro 
     - Hunter S. Thompson
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