Hacker News Reader

You can. And you can do fun stuff.

Look at the upside-down-ternet: http://www.ex-parrot.com/pete/upside-down-ternet.html

But here are the problems you'll run into today:

Cache hit rate. How big is your cache? Large enough to get a hit rate that economically saves you money vs the cost of the SAN?

Can you cache YouTube videos? Can you intercept YouTube videos? You'll need a root cert installed on your client devices. And, here's the worst: many applications do cert pinning so they'll refuse to load, even if the signer is in the root store. They require a specific signer.

I had this same idea around 2012ish. And had the naive impression that you could cache youtube videos on a proxy level (using Squid). Boy was I wrong, even then YT was employing heavy tactics to prevent people from caching videos at the native http cache header level. And it was at that point I realized something was wrong with the internet.

https has put the kibosh on a lot of this type of stuff, unless you’re willing to set up a local CA and trust the root cert on ~every device that will use your network.