Using MouseHole from behind a password protected proxy : timeout...

[Leslie Wu]

I couldn't get mouseHole to work with HTTPS connections, as Mongrel doesn't
try to support SSL last I checked, but I had guessed that it might be
possible to use another reverse proxy such as Nginx to handle the SSL
indirectly.

Alas, I haven't had time to work on the mouseHole of late -- I spent some
time instead exploring the possibilities of the curious Firefox extension
POW, which I got to half-work as a pseudo proxy.

I'm not sure how much POW has progressed since I last looked at it, but I
think in the long term, building on something akin to POW might be the way
forward, even if Ruby isn't yet directly supported in most browsers. I
described some of these concepts here in "Remixing the Web":

   http://graphics.stanford.edu/~lwu2/ (third paper link)

essentially trying to replicate a mouseHole-like programmable proxy within
Firefox itself, driven by jQuery and JavaScript, which at least reduces the
programming burden if you've read jResig's JS book and feel comfortable
enough in that tongue with jQuery at your side.

Since that work, I have also heard about Jaxer but not read much about it.
It might be what some of us are half looking for?

On the one hand, there's something _why elegant about the tight combination
of mouseHole, Hpricot and Mongrel, but on the flipside, Firefox's core can
support SSL, is HTML/DOM compatible with itself, and can make use of
extensions such as POW, GreaseMonkey, and the like.

To reiterate, it's a common reductionist pattern to think of the
alternatives as being either the browser as the point of modification
(extensions) xor programmable proxies as the point of remix (for example,
see Bolin's MIT thesis where he makes this exact bifurcation), but we're at
a point now where we can have our programmable proxy cake and eat the
browser kiddies too.

Does that help? Googling for "jaxer programmable-proxy" doesn't seem to show
any hits right now, and while I've seen discussion of doing mouseHole-like
programmable-proxy ish things in POW, I don't know if anyone else has
followed up on that vector of attack, beyond the proof of concept we built
for "re:mix", but to me it seems like the Right Enough way forward as we try
to democratize these tools of production and ICT.

~L

On Sat, Apr 5, 2008 at 11:20 PM, Robert C Corsaro <rcorsaro at optaros.com>
wrote:

> Bah.  No one answers in here.  Maybe we can figure it out.  I'd also
> like to intercept outgoing requests and modify them.. any ideas?
>
> Pierre-Yves Gérardy wrote:
> > Dear _why, dear Leslie, dear anyone who might help despite this place
> > looking creepily deserted...
> >
> >
> > I'm trying to use MouseHole 2 from behind another proxy requiring
> > authentication. I've properly set up the HTTP_PROXY environment
> > variable, and hardcoded my usename/password in proxyhandler.rb
> >
> >
> http://code.whytheluckystiff.net/mouseHole/browser/trunk/lib/mouseHole/proxyhandler.rb#L49
> >
> > Nevertheless, all requests going through mousehole (if I set it up as
> > a proxy in Firefox 2.0) timeout.
> >
> > I'm using OS X 10.5.
> >
> >
> > As a side note, I've tried to post a support request on Trac, but I
> > can't post. The log in form tells me my user name has aleready been
> > granted access, but I can't create tickets.
> >
> > Kind Regards
> > Pierre-Yves
> > _______________________________________________
> > Mousehole-scripters mailing list
> > Mousehole-scripters at rubyforge.org
> > http://rubyforge.org/mailman/listinfo/mousehole-scripters
>
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