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Old 25-04-2008, 17:36   #4833
Dephormation
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Join Date: Apr 2008
Location: Bristol
Services: Aquiss.net and loving it. No more Virgin Media, no more Virgin Phone, no more Virgin Mobile.
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Re: Virgin Media Phorm Webwise Adverts [Updated: See Post No. 1, 77, 102 & 797]

Quote:
Originally Posted by GeoffW View Post
- The redirection between servers must be bad for performance, and even if people don't care much about ads they don't click on, they will care about anything that impacts performance.
I've been meaning to post some thoughts on the question of performance.

Given the mythical white lists, black lists, user agent filters, opt in/out/shake it all about cookies...

The processing of every request, in real time is going to be a big overhead isn't it?

For each request Phorm must;

- Check for cookies, and perform redirects if necessary to set cookies*
- Check the URL against a black list of 25 (up to 60,000+) private sites**
- Check the user agent against a list of target user-agents***
- Check the request for http auth params to avoid protected content****
- Filter the page and URL for names/addresses/identifiers/sensitive words****

* caveat, opted out users must use different infrastructure
** caveat, this will never be complete no matter how long the list
*** caveat, this will still result in non-browser apps being profiled
**** caveat, inadequate because many unencrypted yet private txns are not authenticated
***** caveat, this will never ever work ... it will capture names & identifiers of all kinds

And that's for every request, before you even start profiling the content.

The overhead on an http request will be immense.
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