Bleeding Edge: Vodafone UMTS caused WordPress.com “edit link” to be broken in Google Chrome. #fail
Posted by jpluimers on 2010/07/05
Last week I wrote about Bleeding Edge: version WordPress.com “edit link” broken in latest Google Chrome stable build – or is Vodafone causing this? #fail.
Since then I have researched this further: I verified that the http://1.2.3.4/bmi-int-js/bmi.js link indeed was caused by Vodafone.
They use a mechanism of directing all HTTP traffic through a transparent proxy and rewriting both the HTML and images in compressed form in order to save bandwidth.
There are a few problems with this:
- The only way to turn this off is if your UMTS card or USB dongle is connected to your laptop (mine is on a router) and use the buggy “Vodafone Mobile Connect” software (which managed to add 32 virtual COM ports to one of my systems, and made that system not recognize any other USB devices any more).
If someone finds out a way to disable this “feature” in a generic way, please net me know. - They screw with your images, so you loose quality (pretty useless if Vodafone UMTS is the only connection you have on a certain location, and you need to verify image quality)
- They interfere with HTML editing (ideal when posting through sites like WordPress: now I need to check if none of my posts from last month have strange HTML in them).
- Somehow parts of the rewritten HTML end up in the cache, and since they use an hard-coded IP address, you are basically hosed.
The solution is simple:
- clear your browser cache when you switch from Vodafone UMTS back to a regular connection.
- switch to HTTPS connection when you are using Vodafone UMTS so you skip their transparent proxy
(this only works if your sites can be accessed both by HTTP and HTTPS; for instance https://wiert.wordpress.com works, but their “Press This” bookmarklet defaults to HTTP).
–jeroen
The Wiert Corner - irregular stream of stuff 
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