> I guess since the usual answer for compression was "use what SSL > provides you for free", it's rather unlikely that someone bothered to > make a proxy just for that purpose, and really, a proxy is just > another moving part in your setup: not everyone will be thrilled to > add that.
It just doesn't sound like a feature that should be implemented separately for every single application that uses TCP. Granted TCP proxy is not the most convenient way to solve a task. Maybe it could be implemented in OpenVPN
Which is another moving part with its own setup and maintenance overhead.
or on Linux TCP/IP stack level.
Yes, but if you want to have both compression and encryption it is crucial to apply compression *before* encryption and I don't see how this can happen with this approach.