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Comment by a1k0n | Hacker News Reader

I tried to use the Range header feature to resume downloads in an autoupdating app once, and it worked beautifully...for about 90% of users; the others had all kinds of weird issues thanks to transparent proxies and caches not handling the Range header correctly. This was years ago, but I'm not surprised they chose to be safer than sorry.

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> I tried to use the Range header feature to resume downloads in an autoupdating app once, and it worked beautifully...for about 90% of users; the others had all kinds of weird issues thanks to transparent proxies and caches not handling the Range header correctly.

One of many reasons to use HTTPS: prevent tampering with your requests and responses.

Youtube recently did a writeup on their long road to HTTPS: http://youtube-eng.blogspot.com/2016/08/youtubes-road-to-htt...

I find it particularly telling that switching to HTTPS caused many streaming errors to mysteriously vanish, and I suspect ISP / proxy tampering to be part of the cause. I'd love to know more about what their engineers saw though.

We had similar issues when I was at iHeartRadio. We got reports from a number of users that were getting a lot of playback issues. Once we saw that the users were all in a relatively small area in the southeastern US, it took a few days of dealing with local ISPs to sort out the issue: all requests on a certain local ISP were being rewritten and certain headers were getting removed altogether.

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