[Koha] AOL users and koha logins?

Thomas Berezansky tsbere at mvlc.org
Thu Sep 25 02:41:11 NZST 2008


I've seen AOL use a different IP address for the HTML page, the CSS  
file, each image on the page, and each javascript file on the page,  
yet know it was all the same person due to all being from the same  
login session. Each request goes through the proxy farm and comes out  
a random point in it, making IP authentication of sessions useless  
when dealing with an AOL user. I have had to modify several other  
things in the past to use an overridden IP address for session  
authentication when the user was on AOL due to this.

They think that by doing this they are "protecting" their users, BTW,  
or at least that is their excuse for it. The last time I saw the  
option to stop doing that there were three warnings associated with  
turning it off, each of them designed to be scary-looking. The last of  
the warnings urged the user to turn it back on as soon as they could.  
That part may have changed, I haven't actually looked at an AOL user's  
computer in a couple of years.

Thomas Berezansky


Quoting "Jason Stephenson" <jstephenson at mvlc.org>:

> Quoting "MJ Ray" <mjr at phonecoop.coop>:
>
>> Krishnan Mani <krishnanm75 at yahoo.com> wrote: [...]
>>> it is likely that your AOL user may be experiencing a change of
>>> their IP addresses. [...]
>>
>> Unless AOL change their IP addresses more often than once per minute
>> (anyone know if that's the case?), that doesn't seem likely to me.
>
> AOL proxies can change that fast, because AOL can dynamically switch
> proxies on the customer between HTTP requests. They run a proxy farm
> as I understand it.
>
>
>
>
>>
>> Thanks anyway,
>> --
>> MJ Ray (slef)
>> Webmaster for hire, statistician and online shop builder for a small
>> worker cooperative http://www.ttllp.co.uk/ http://mjr.towers.org.uk/
>> (Notice http://mjr.towers.org.uk/email.html) tel:+44-844-4437-237
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>
>
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