ISP Inserting Content Into Users' Webpages 396
geekmansworld, among other readers, lets us know that the Canadian ISP Rogers is inserting data into the HTTP streams returned by the Web sites requested by its customers. According to a CBC article, Rogers admits to modifying customers' HTTP data, but says they are merely "trying different things" and testing the customer response.
Read between the lines (Score:5, Informative)
Re:What's the problem? (Score:4, Informative)
My data on Rogers and Shaw is dated the last I checked they didn't meter. Even if they did meter odds are you're not going to go over your limit surfing the web so any injected web based waring isn't going to be that useful.
Redirection on the other hand... not so bad.
Web sites need to enable HTTPS properly (Score:4, Informative)
Web sites need to enable HTTPS properly over their entire site. Then your ISP can do nothing more than just prevent the secure connection from being established. And if they do that, they break all kinds of stuff like shopping checkout and access to bank accounts.
Right now, Slashdot's own HTTPS URL [slashdot.org] just redirects to the HTTP URL. This needs to be changed to just leave things in the HTTPS mode. Eventually this should be changed so that HTTP redirects to HTTPS. Google [google.com] does the same boneheaded redirection.
Re:No problem as used in this case (Score:1, Informative)
email...
pcapdiff is your new friend (Score:4, Informative)
On Fedora you can do "yum install pcapdiff".
It's an early release, but there's bound to be a lot more uses for pcapdiff ahead...
Copyright infringement (Score:5, Informative)
Even better, the CBC article concludes with a reference to the Telecommunications Act, which states that "a Canadian carrier shall not control the content or influence the meaning or purpose of telecommunications carried by it for the public."
Rogers has a long history of playing as dirty as it can get away with. If the old pattern repeats as before, Canadian regulators will respond and Rogers will be forced to back down, leaving everyone -- regulators, investors, competitors, consumers -- slightly more pissed off with it than before.
Re:Getting away with murder (Score:2, Informative)
I experienced these problems. Torrents becoming unusable (one week I could download an Ubuntu ISO at 550K, the next week it dropped to 0.6 and continued to drop from there, making my one hour download a 62 day download had I kept using bittorrent). I started to use an encrypted proxy, but within weeks, that ceased to work, and my work VPN went with it.
After that, I switched to a local ISP [teksavvy.com], and never looked back.
Re:You've been rogered. (Score:5, Informative)
You may not know this, but "Rogers" is already synonymous with "taking it up the arse" up here in Canada. After all, who else charges $210/month for 500MB of wireless data transfer? Or creates a 3G broadband network but refuses to allow actual 3G phones to access it (restricting you to this huge BRICK of a wireless "modem" they provide you)? Or raising their prices almost 30% in the last 2 years?
I just wish someone like Google or Microsoft sues Rogers into oblivion for this crap. I'm pretty sure impersonating another corporation's official communications (loading the Google homepage, for example) is fraud.
Join the Rogers Fan Club... (Score:2, Informative)
Rogers has a history, and I have unresolved anger. (Score:4, Informative)
"The little cable company that could." They practically invented negative billing, starting their reign of aggravating barely-legal business practice as far back as the early 80's with the stupid bundling of the new pay-channels. They successfully lobbied to crack open the Bell monopoly so that they could compete on the phone market. Everybody believed their bullshit campaign and as a result, everybody pays many times more for phone service which has fallen from one which was affordable and which worked hard-core in favor of the consumer, (if Bell tried to screw you around, a quick call to the CRTC, and they'd be nodding yes-sir to you. Monopolies are great in this way because the public can very easily punish them through government pressure to do the right thing if they start getting greedy and evil), --phone service through bell and all the competitors has since devolved into a system which is now expensive, punitive, crappy and generally mean-spirited, (all contrary to the whole 'competition breeds excellence' meme which should be obvious for the falsehood that it is to anybody with a brain but which somehow remains an elusive truth; I blame the same American ideological propaganda which has landed us in Iraq and which is responsible for rolling black-outs and for people whose lives suck because they can't afford medical insurance. Thanks, guys! Keep on championing the lie while you take it in the rear.) (Ahem. Did I say all of that out loud? DO pardon me.)
Anyway. . .
Rogers argued that it had the right to use Bell's cable system because it had been built in part with public money, and then they turned around and refused to share its own cable system because they claim to have made it with private money. --All claims which are so riddled with lawyer-logic as to make anybody aware of the situation hopping mad, especially when one considers the huge tax-breaks and government hand-outs Rogers managed to weasel away with; they use the publicly-funded telephone pole system, on public land, to hang its infrastructure, over-charge for their rotten service, don't share and don't pay their taxes. Nice job! --The whole thing reeks, but they got away with it because the public was asleep and easily fooled by promises that, "With competition, your phone bills will go down!" Stupid, stupid Torontonians! Even as a teenager I could see the way the wind was blowing, and yet today few even grasp that they've been screwed. Sigh.
Rogers is one of those companies which has been sneaky and crafty and generally foul from the get-go. This latest move is entire par for their course. I don't own a television and I don't use a cell phone partly because of players like Rogers. Anybody ignorant enough to sign up with Rogers deserves exactly what they get.
-FL
Re:Read between the lines (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Read between the lines (Score:3, Informative)
You appear to be correct [webpronews.com] sir.
Re:Read between the lines (Score:3, Informative)
I would argue that the differences are:
So, in my opinion, very different than the IP creating a new data stream that uses the original content, pretends to be true to it, but stealthily creates a derived work out of it.