Indiggnant at Globe DSL

I've been getting a blank page trying to login at Digg. It seems that a lot of people are having this problem, likely due to some bad transparent proxying by the ISP.

So I did a tcptraceroute to check if Globelines was using one:

# tcptraceroute digg.com
Selected device eth0, address 192.168.1.250, port 51873 for outgoing packets
Tracing the path to digg.com (64.191.203.30) on TCP port 80 (http), 30 hops max
1  192.168.1.5  3.372 ms  1.052 ms  0.651 ms
2  203.177.x.x  18.164 ms  18.177 ms  18.692 ms
3  222.127.x.x  18.108 ms  18.133 ms  18.378 ms
4  digg.com (64.191.203.30) [open]  18.395 ms  18.258 ms  20.177 ms

Aha! Time for a bypass.

Since I have SSH access to a number of servers, I just set up a SOCKS tunnel,

$ ssh -ND 8888 my-remote-server

then setup my browser to connect to localhost:8888 (SOCKS v5). I tried logging in to Digg... voilà!

Globeline's transparent proxy (apparently Blue Coat) does work for most sites, so I also installed the FoxyProxy Firefox add-on. It allows me to specify which proxy to use with what sites.

If you don't have access to an external SSH server, and are having similar problems, you could probably just use a public proxy server instead.

UPDATE 1: It seems Globelines has turned off its transparent proxy. A tcptraceroute to digg.com now shows 11 hops, following the same path as the normal traceroute. I wonder if this has anything to do with all those cut underwater cables, or it was just that too many people complained.

UPDATE 2: And... it's back again. Get your act together, Globelines!