p2pnet - rss feed: Canadian ISP hijacks Google
p2pnet news | Product News:- Please observe closely the image to your right, “showing the home page for Google Canada,” blogs Lauren Weinstein, going on:
Does anything seem a bit odd about the normally clean and pristine Google front door? What the blazes is all that ISP-related verbiage taking up the top third of the page? Why would Google ever give an ISP permission to muddy up Google’s public face that way?
What indeed?
And the answer is, of course, Google had given no such permission
The day before, “The topic has arisen of ISPs spying on Web traffic and using the derived data to insert their own ads into the user data stream,” Weinstein had posted, continuing:
“In my view, such behaviors by any conventional general purpose ISP with their paid subscribers is unacceptable, even when opt-outs of some sort are supposedly available (from the spying or just from the ads? - Not clear!) This appears to represent a clear violation of basic network neutrality principles.”
He goes on to cite a “fairly new patent application” which “demonstrates the depth of intrusion that has been contemplated for the associated enabling devices,” namely, United States Patent 20070233857 (Application):
Abstract:
A network device for monitoring and modifying data traffic between a client device and a server device is disclosed. The network device is configured to provide targeted advertisements to a user based on some or all of the data traffics generated the user. Different from a proxy server, the network device operates transparently from both perspectives of a computer being used by the user and a website being visited by the user. The network device is disposed in line between the computer and the network so that all data traffics are examined. The data packets exchanged between a computer and a website being visited are altered or modified in such a way that the head of the packets remains largely intact while the payloads of the packets are changed to suit the need of delivering transparently the targeted commercial information.
In his Canadian Google item, the ISP in question is Rogers and it, “simply decided to modify Google on their own, demonstrating a real world example of ISPs Spying On and Modifying Web Traffic that I was discussing yesterday,” says Weinstein, adding:
“While Rogers’ current planned use for this Deep Packet Inspection (DPI) and modification system (reportedly manufactured by ‘In-Browser Marketing’ firm ‘PerfTech’) is for account status messages, it’s obvious that commercial ISP content and ads (beyond the ISP logos already displayed) would be trivial to introduce through this mechanism. By the way, PerfTech is even using Google for one of its linked promotional examples on the PerfTech home page. I wonder if they bothered to ask Google’s permission for that?
“Anyway, the fact that there’s an opt-out present for future account status messages on the Rogers page insertions hardly changes the extremely problematic and network neutrality unfriendly aspects of such situations, as I noted in yesterday’s blog item.
“Question: Will Web service providers such as Google and many others, who have spent vast resources in both talent and treasure creating and maintaining their services’ appearances and quality, be willing to stand still while any ISP intercepts and modifies their traffic in such a manner?
“I can’t say for sure of course, but I suspect that a likely reaction might be discerned by paraphrasing Bugs Bunny: ‘Eh, he don’t know them very well, do he?’ ”
Definitely stay tuned.
Also See:
Lauren Weinstein - Google Hijacked — Major ISP to Intercept and Modify Web Pages, December 8, 2007
posted - ISPs Spying On and Modifying Web Traffic — With Patent Application, December 7, 2007
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December 11th, 2007 at 11:14 am
It’s time for fiber optic open source neighborhood area networks.
December 11th, 2007 at 11:52 am
I believe that AT&T was going to do something like this in 2001 or 2002. If I remember correctly, it was calling the system Sharinga. New York was going to be its testbed, but they canceled the project.
December 11th, 2007 at 12:02 pm
I will sue the ass of anyone messing up with my website and more!
December 11th, 2007 at 7:24 pm
I have no doubt that this will be chalenged in court, if the company doesn’t settle before, and I’m sure that it won’t stand. But, if I’m wrong, the obvious solution to this is to have all sites enable SSL by default. This will put a greater strain on web servers, but it will make spying at the ISP level a little more tricky.
December 12th, 2007 at 1:20 pm
So it seems that the time has almost arrived for net neutrality to be decided, either for or against.
December 12th, 2007 at 10:19 pm
This would be a very excellent reason to begin a movement to some form of light encryption for 100% of Web traffic, so that even though it would be trivial to break and examine, it would be minimal enough that servers would experience little added strain, yet ISPs wouldn’t have sufficient time to crack, inspect, insert, and rebuild the packets without making their service so bad that it became unusable.