Ah, imitation is the sincerest form of flattery!
Although we are obviously primarily focused on IIS around here, we do look around from time to time to see what developers are up to on other Web server platforms. We've long respected Apache for its module architecture and attendant abundance of supplementary features, and indeed we make no secret that this has served as a model for our own efforts on IIS.
But it's nice to see some of the HTTP laggards starting to catch up in this regard. It seems that the new 4.0.10 version of AOLServer now supports gzip compression -- AOL are calling it the “major enhancement” in the current build. Meanwhile, it had slipped our notice until now, but they've been busy over at Sun too. The 6.1 version of the Sun Java System Web Server (aka SunONE, aka iPlanet, aka Netscape Enterprise -- and, by the way, has there ever been a product to go through more name changes in such a short time?) now supports compression as well. We sense a trend toward increased acceptance and use of the technology, even beyond the IIS world, and we will certainly keep our eyes peeled for confirmation of this.
Even more gratifying to us, we note that the Sun Web server is now offering some elementary built in anonymization capability. As their doc says:
Header masking
Hides Web server header details. Since most attacks exploit some known vulnerability, and most vulnerabilities are vendor specific, removing Web server vendor information from the headers limits the effectiveness of probes, "script kiddies", and would-be attackers.
Why, we couldn't have said it better ourselves!