Hello Everyone, As some of you may know, during last years Presidential protests in Iran, I developed a distributed, multi-level, Twitter proxy service called TweetFree. For the first time in almost a year, I'm revisiting the code in an effort to update it and make it more useful for people outside of Iran but still in oppressive cultures.
The system has several components: a Windows Mobile, iPhone, Android, and Blackberry application that connects to a TweetFree Relay server, the TweetFree Relay Server itself, and the main TweetFree Network Servers. How this all works together is unimportant so I won't bore you with the details. Now, the TweetFree Network Servers maintain a network block list. So every time the Relay Servers send a post, the Network Server checks to make sure the client that the relay is posting for isn't blocked from the network. If it is, it says no and the relay tells the client that it couldn't post its message. The problem with this, of course, is that you might have thousands of Relay Servers hitting the Network Servers (as happened during the Iranian election) and each of those requests have to be processed. That puts a bit of a load on the server that I'd like to alleviate. So my thought is to maintain a blacklist of client keys on the Network Servers and have the Relay Servers download this list every few minutes. Then, clients could be blocked at the RELAY level instead of at the Network level and less load would be put on the Network Servers (of which there are only about 10). My problem is that I'm not sure how to protect this list. The list is a simple text file that contains client keys. No identifying information, but client keys nonetheless. If it's a .txt file then the contents are viewable publicly which *could* pose a security risk in highly volatile environments. If I name it with the .php extension, it's handled like a PHP file and, thus, the text in it can't be read. What is the best way to handle this? I need to protect the users privacy while still reducing network load. Any ideas? Thanks! Anthony Papillion
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