Altavista Translate

Factual Questions
1

In work we have a ridiculously restrictive web-monitoring program, that blocks pretty much everything that isn’t directly work related.

However, I have found that if I go to http://babelfish.altavista.com/ , I can choose to “translate” an English language page from say “Korean to English”, since there is no korean on the page, the page displays pretty much as is, within the Altavista window, with the URL http://babelfish.altavista.com/babelfish/tr

No big fuck-off red-blinking full-screen message “YOU ARE ACCESSING NON WORK RELATED”… blah blah. All well and good.

My question is, could the sys admins know by looking at the server weblogs that http://babelfish.altavista.com/babelfish/tr had actually been a translation of a web-gambling page or some-such, or would they just see that I had translated something, and not be able to deduce anything further. This is assuming that they can’t / don’t / won’t access my PC directly.

Anyone know ? Any Sys Admins know ??

Thanks

2

The translated page is in frames, and the URLs of the pages in the frames contain the URL of the page that was translated (check the source). So presumably they could find out what you translated. I’ll bet that what eventually happens is they ban babelfish.altavista.com altogether, as well as any other translation sites they can find, once they realize those sites can be used to get around their monitor.

3

You’re probably right about them banning altavista translate.

But would the server weblogs keep a record of the source code of the webpage ?? I imaginged that they’d only keep the url.

Anyone know fer sure ?

4

They won’t know the actual page you are looking at from request logs but they could find it if they log http headers or actual content. I’m not a sys admin so I don’t know how likely this is.
What you are doing is using the translation site as an HTTP proxy. A server (in this case the alta vista server) is requesting the HTTP message (mainly HTML source code) doing some work on it and then posting the reponse back to your browser. Your browser never directly request a page from the source site which is why your admins won’t know about it and why it doesn’t get blocked by your filter (they both just see a request to, and a response from, the alta vista server).
You can get free HTTP proxies (I run one at home to get round my companies draconian measures!) which request the page you want and gives you the response without doing any processing on the page at all.

5

Does anyone know how likely this is ?

Cool ! Can you point me in the right direction ?

6

PuTTY is the fella you want! Here is a fairly good explanation of how to use it.

7

Aren’t images passed through directly? If so, then your sysadmin would still see a lot of images being downloaded from the site you’re looking at.

8

I don’t know - does anyone have any answer to this ? There’s not much point in hiding the URL, if I’m still downloading banners for paddypower.com.

Help anyone ?

9

That’s a very good point. Having translated the hotmail page (web-based email is blocked from my work) all of the images seem to be relative (which means that they will be requested from the alta vista server). I had a quick look at paddypower and this didn’t seem to work as well (it uses iframes which wouldn’t load).
Altavista translate would have no reason to proxy images as there is no translation service that it could carry out on those resources.
Safest thing is to use your own proxy and make it proxy all content.