You might be here because you see some strange traffic from 12.160.37.10-14. Most likely, the traffic that you see is because I own the domains wpad.com, wpad.net, and wpad.org. As you may know, WPAD is the Web Proxy Auto Disocvery Protocol. This is a protocol, invented by Microsoft, and implemented in their web browser. They documented it as an Internet Draft, which is now expired. I also talked about it in my Book, "Web Caching," published by O'Reilly and Associates.

Basically, it works like this: When the browser starts, it issues a DNS address lookup for "wpad.foo.com" where "foo.com" is the domain name of the computer. Due to some Microsoft bug, some browsers look up "wpad.com," which is my host.

If the address lookup succeeds, the browser connects to the IP address on port 80 and makes an HTTP request for 'GET /wpad.dat'.

Every now and then, network administrators get really pissed off about this. They write or call me. Before making stupid threats, I suggest that you closely examine your network traffic.

If you don't want your clients talking to my server, try one of these ideas:

• You can disable WPAD in IE by going to Internet Options, Connections, and then LAN Settings. Unselect ``automatically detect settings.''
• Upgrade to a newer version of Explorer
• Check the domain name setting of your computers.