Google Web Accelerator Just Exploiting ISPs' Local Cache? - Important Limitation for Bittorrent Users

I wrote about the GWA in a previous post, one that seemed rather popular with the Opera users in the forums. Hence an update.

Apparently their "web accelerator" might be doing something as simple as exploiting your isp's local cache. When I browse using it, my IP gets redirected to a different IP, identified as cache.myisp etc. Which makes me wonder first who's doing most of the work, whether my ISP should be offering this rather than Google etc. But I suppose ISPs are looking to minimise support issues as much as possible yes/no? And they probably don't mind people being efficient and using their cache. Still, it seems to take the mystique out of google's little miracle app.

Well, what this means is that if you belong to any registration based BT site, you're going to want to turn GWA off for those sites. Because if you don't you might not be able to down/upload, and your stats might not get counted - basically you'll be registering the site with a different IP than your BT client. You turn GWA off for those sites by going to the settings menu - right click on the system tray icon, under preferences. It'll launch the local web page with your settings in it, and you should add in the domains that you want to exclude, eg: .filelist.org, .uknova.com. Simple enough, but took me a bit to realise. That preferences menu is also quite useful to twiddling the settings of the app.

Adding the urls to the bypass list in Proxo isn't the way to go apparently, since that didn't make a difference (obvious to some, probably, but not to me). I'm assuming passing Azureus through the proxy would be ill-advised. If only because it'd clog up the traffic through the cache, and I think the cache is clever enough to stop that - well at least it was with the Uni network back in the old country.

Oh, and I find out that it makes a hash of handling me going to my admin panel on my forums, so that's out as well.