what are private headers? i googled, and am now confused

Try this:

 

http://www.abelard.org/technology/red_x.php

Cheers.

 

At a guess, is this a header?

 

GET /forums/showthread.php?t=12388 HTTP/1.1
Host: www.scienceforums.net
User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.7.8) Gecko/20050511 Firefox/1.0.4
Accept: text/xml,application/xml,application/xhtml+xml,text/html;q=0.9,text/plain;q=0.8,image/png,*/*;q=0.5
Accept-Language: en-us,en;q=0.5
Accept-Encoding: gzip,deflate
Accept-Charset: ISO-8859-1,utf-8;q=0.7,*;q=0.7
Keep-Alive: 300
Connection: keep-alive
Referer: http://www.scienceforums.net/forums/...splay.php?f=54
Cache-Control: max-age=0

 

which would make Referer: http://www.scietc, and possibly the cache-control, the 'private header', that was inserted by the server rather than my own PC?

 

maybe?

No. Referrer is sent by your computer to tell the server where you're coming from.

ok...

 

then im still a tad confused as to what headers/private headers are

Headers are the information sent to the server saying "I want x page, I can accept it via gzip, and I came from ____ to get this page" and so on. Private headers are a term used by firewalls that remove certain parts of the header such as the referrer that the firewall considers "private".

oh. so it's not like, if i go from this page to another, SFN could insert stuff into my header that i send to the next page?

 

You know, ever since i heard the term 'private header' -- from a free trial of zone alarm pro -- i suspected that it was a normal thing made to sound 'scary', in a "oh noez, i must buy this program to protect my bank details from teh evil private headorz!" kinda way.

oh. so it's not like, if i go from this page to another, SFN could insert stuff into my header that i send to the next page?

Right. The headers you send are controlled by your computer only.

I should just point out quickly that headers are sent in both directions. That is, on the client side, they can be used to send referrers, specify which page to grab, etc. On the server-side, they consist of things like Content-type: text/html, the size of the output, any cookies which are to be altered, and soforth.

Cheers all