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thepossum · 08-16-2013, 09:12 AM

I have a Kobo Glo that I have to sync every day, because I have a newspaper subscription. This has become an aggravating daily experience, because it takes much too long.

Once the Glo connects to the wifi, the newspaper downloads in mere seconds, and then sits there spinning away on the "Loading Content" screen for approximately five or six minutes. That is a very long and very unnecessary amount of time, forcing me to recharge the device more often then otherwise necessary. Eventually this process finishes and I get a new tile on my homescreen showing me today's "Recommended" books.

Now, I'm more technically inclined than most folk, so in order to get to the bottom of this I set up my laptop to be my Kobo's wifi access point, with squid running as a web proxy. This would let me see all http requests my Glo makes when it tries to sync, and this is what I found:

On initial connection to the wifi, it downloaded http://www.msftncsi.com/ncsi.txt

Then it did this ***360*** times!

POST http://mobile.kobobooks.com/#####/mobileRequest.ashx

where the '#####' was a five-digit number, possibly linked to my account. The 'POST' means that it is *uploading* something to the Kobo servers, not downloading information.

Once that was done, it pulled something from this page 7 times:

http://ecimages.kobobooks.com/Image.ashx?

and finally a 'HEAD' request to http://download.kobobooks.com/ereade...s/dicthtml.zip

There may have been more data being passed, as the proxy server only handles requests on http port 80, not https port 443, or other internet protocols.

What I really want to know is what the heck my Kobo thinks is so important that it needs to make 360 separate uploads during a sync that only needs to download one single file each day.

I have a lot of epub books on my Kobo's internal storage, mostly free downloads I got from Baen. I have all my marketing stuff disabled, my Kobo is not linked to my Facebook account, I have not activated my Adobe, I told my Kobo not to use any of the reading stats.

So I find that having my Glo sending Megabytes of data to Kobo to be nothing short of creepy. And wasteful.

08-16-2013, 09:12 AM	#1
thepossum Zealot Posts: 123 Karma: 20018 Join Date: May 2010 Device: Kobo	Syncing takes forever I have a Kobo Glo that I have to sync every day, because I have a newspaper subscription. This has become an aggravating daily experience, because it takes much too long. Once the Glo connects to the wifi, the newspaper downloads in mere seconds, and then sits there spinning away on the "Loading Content" screen for approximately five or six minutes. That is a very long and very unnecessary amount of time, forcing me to recharge the device more often then otherwise necessary. Eventually this process finishes and I get a new tile on my homescreen showing me today's "Recommended" books. Now, I'm more technically inclined than most folk, so in order to get to the bottom of this I set up my laptop to be my Kobo's wifi access point, with squid running as a web proxy. This would let me see all http requests my Glo makes when it tries to sync, and this is what I found: On initial connection to the wifi, it downloaded http://www.msftncsi.com/ncsi.txt Then it did this *360* times! POST http://mobile.kobobooks.com/#####/mobileRequest.ashx where the '#####' was a five-digit number, possibly linked to my account. The 'POST' means that it is uploading something to the Kobo servers, not downloading information. Once that was done, it pulled something from this page 7 times: http://ecimages.kobobooks.com/Image.ashx? and finally a 'HEAD' request to http://download.kobobooks.com/ereade...s/dicthtml.zip There may have been more data being passed, as the proxy server only handles requests on http port 80, not https port 443, or other internet protocols. What I really want to know is what the heck my Kobo thinks is so important that it needs to make 360 separate uploads during a sync that only needs to download one single file each day. I have a lot of epub books on my Kobo's internal storage, mostly free downloads I got from Baen. I have all my marketing stuff disabled, my Kobo is not linked to my Facebook account, I have not activated my Adobe, I told my Kobo not to use any of the reading stats. So I find that having my Glo sending Megabytes of data to Kobo to be nothing short of creepy. And wasteful.