news story / By Hank Sims

Cache Flow Problems

Malfunction at cable Internet provider leads to stale Web pages, private information exposed

(Feb. 3, 2011)  Last Friday morning, Andrew I. Jones — a McKinleyville-based publicist, Web designer and publisher — logged onto his popular parenting blog, Thingamababy, to add a comment to one of his posts. But he was having some problems. He refreshed and refreshed, but thingamababy.com wasn’t showing his comment. So he tried again, but received the same result. The administrative portion of his site showed that he had posted the comment twice, but the public part of the site remained unchanged. The comment was nowhere to be seen.

Meanwhile, over on the popular Humboldt Herald political blog, some people had been noticing odd Internet behavior since the night before — odd, and arguably somewhat sinister. Like Jones, readers of the Herald noticed that pages on the site weren’t changing very often. New posts and new comments were unavailable to some users. Even more strangely, the comment forms on the site — the place where people can enter their thoughts on the topic of the day — came pre-filled with the names or pseudonyms of other readers, as well as their e-mail addresses. In a forum where anonymity is often at a premium, this appeared to some to be a serious and frightening breach of privacy. And it wasn’t just happening on the Herald. Other local blogs, such as Redway attorney Eric Kirk’s SoHum Parlance and the anonymous Humboldt Mirror, were affected as well.

Readers of the Heraldcompared notes and quickly came to a conclusion. The users being affected by these glitches in the Internet all had one thing in common: They were all customers of Suddenlink, the cable company/Internet provider that serves a large portion of Humboldt County. They reported that sites all over the Web, including the North Coast Journal‘s, were affected to one degree or another. Problems mounted. Readers were confronted with pop-up boxes asking if they wished to “download” a Web page, rather than merely visit it. Visitors to the Herald were, at times, given a version of the site optimized for mobile phones, despite the fact that they were sitting at their home computer.

Jones reported the matter to Suddenlink Saturday morning, but received no response from the company for a couple of days. In the meanwhile, an impromptu mailing list amongst a few local technical professionals and website publishers sprung up, and this list quickly came up with a provisional theory: The cable company appeared to be caching Web pages — saving them on their own machines, then serving those saved pages to their customers. Every so often, it appeared, the company would refresh the cache with updated versions of the pages. This is not a completely unknown practice, but something was terribly wrong with the way Suddenlink was going about it.

In the case of Wordpress — a popular publishing platform used by all of the blogs mentioned above — it appeared to work like this: One user would post a comment with his or her name and e-mail address. The Wordpress system would send that user back the same page, updated with the new comment and with the submitted name and e-mail addresses entered into the new form. Suddenlink, it seemed, would cache that page, and then serve it to all other customers — name and e-mail included.

Perhaps no one saw the danger quite as quickly as Mitch Trachtenberg, a computer programmer in Trinidad who wrote the software used in the Humboldt Transparency Project, an open system for verifying the results of local elections. On the Humboldt Herald, Trachtenberg’s name and e-mail address were among the first to be handed out to other users of the site who happened to be on Suddenlink. He wasn’t too concerned with the breach of privacy in his own case, but he quickly saw how such a thing might affect others who might wish to keep their identities or contact information secret.

“If I’d cared about anonymity, I would have stopped using my real e-mail address when that started,” Trachtenberg wrote the Journal. “I haven’t been harmed, except by lousy service. I think others may have been harmed severely.”

By Monday, everything seemed to have returned to normal.

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