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Re: [OM] OT: Cloudfront

Subject: Re: [OM] OT: Cloudfront
From: Chris Trask <christrask@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Date: Sun, 2 Apr 2017 15:39:10 -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. 
>
>Web tracking has been around for years (remember all the 'web-beacon'
>emails?)  'Cookies' are stored on your system when you access a website
>(with relevant info stored at the server), so they know who and where
>you are without having to continually ask for this data.  You implicitly
>agree to accept the offered cookie (browser config), or you can turn
>this off.
>

     Yes, in Firefox they call it "safe browsing", and it is routed through the 
Google 1e100.net server.  They warn you not to turn it off.  But, I've watched 
that system download quite a lot of bytes my way, so I doubt it it is simply a 
passive system.

>
>> 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.
>
>Note that your browser is asking to download these things, either
>directly or by following included references/links, so as far as your
>system, and any firewalls, are concerned, these are legitimate accesses.
>

     Yes, it certainly is.  I watch TCPView for illicit activity, and when I 
see some I look at the data from PeerBlock.  If my IP is in the left column 
it's me contacting them,  If mine is in the right column it's them contacting 
me.  Those are the ones I block.

     Oddly, I see quite a few that are not being contacted by me or me being 
contacted by them.  It's as though they are bouncing something off me from one 
server/system to another.  One of them is poplist.net bouncing to Earthlink.net.

>
>>      Amazon AWS and Google 1e100.net are still problems.
>
>These are Content Delivery Networks (CDNs) belonging to the respective
>organisations. Space and download from these servers are 'rented' to
>customers. You may find if you block these domains, many other seemingly
>quite unrelated things will stop working.  
>

     I've seen a couple of instances of this already, and I'm keeping track of 
which IPs are involved so as to determine if the connections are consistent.

Chris
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