dstates writes "The Washington Post is reporting that some Internet Service Providers (ISP) have been using deep-packet inspection to spy on the communications of more than 100,000 US customers. Deep packet inspection allows the ISP to read the content of communications including every Web page visited, every e-mail sent and every search entered, in short every click and keystroke that comes down the line. The companies involved assert that customers' privacy is protected because no personally identifying details are released, but they make money from advertisers who use the information to target their online pitches. Deep packet inspection is a significant expansion over tools like cookies in the ability to track a user. Critics liken it to a phone company listening in on conversations."
In response to another article, I said that we should start encrypting all of our traffic and asked for programmers to start adding that functionality and making it the default so that even unsophisticated users' trafic would be encrypted.
But with the revelation the other day that the Bush administration believes the Fourth Amendment (right to privacy and protection from searches without cause), this becomes just another good reason to get cracking with all traffic encrypted.
Yikes - What I meant to say was that the Bush administration believes the Fourth Amendment does not apply to them and that they have the right/power to monitor and wiretap at will.
Also, another point about this is people have always said that users should understand that their activities on the Internet could be monitored by third parties. This, however, is different (at least to me) in that it is systematic snooping on the part of ISPs.
The situation has somewhat changed in another way, too. It used t
You think these guys don't like BitTorrent, wait until everyone starts a process to spider the web to obfuscate where the fleshies are really browsing at and run that 24/7 to overload their deep-packet inspection devices.
The militia is of the STATES, so National Guard does not apply. In fact National Guard would generally be illegal as Quartering troops because the State Governors do not have control over their troops. The Army does not have legal right to operate in the States unless specifically asked by the state.
They knew exactly what they were writing. The frontier was subject to constant "terrorist" attacks from indians and french at the time. The British had specifically forbidden the smaller villages from maintaining arms caches to defend against attacks in the middle of the night. Instead they demanded British troops be stationed in people's homes ruled only by the crown and not by Colony or local rules. It was the right of you and your neighbors to defend yourselves without "asking permission" from any government and without reprisal for doing so. Note that Britain as basiclly out lawed self defense even in your own home today. Even if your daughter is being raped, in your home, you can be brought to charges for having any kind of weapon used to defend her if the attackers die.
I think that GWB has been more destructive to America than we can really contemplate right now, but I have to give the credit to "the other side" on this one.
There was a time when encryption-by-default could have become the norm for Internet communications. It was largely passed by because the Clinton administration treated encryption technology as if it were chemical weapons. Even though the math to do it was a genie out of the bottle, they forbade American companies from trafficking in encryption technology if it involved overseas clients. So either it wasn't pursued, or the companies went overseas (e.g. F-Secure) but the end result is that encryption did not become a fundamental part of Internet communications.
Even weirder, one of the few to take a stand against this was John Ashcroft. Though, to his credit, he stood up to illegal wiretapping in the Dubya years as well. I don't agree with him on very much at all, but I have to give him credit for being a rare principled individual on this score.
So, to sum up, had the Clinton admin not squashed crypto so badly, we might not have to worry about mass spying on the public. They'd still be able to get around the encryption when it really mattered; they do black bag jobs and put keyloggers in mafioso computers when they need to do that, and I think that's a good balance of civil liberties and legitimate law enforcement, assuming warrants are involved.
Sadly, America has apparently decided that the First Amendment is tolerable, the Second is awesome, and fuck the rest of them. What an insult to our nation.
My favorite amendment? The Ninth: any rights not explicitly delineated in the Bill of Rights probably exist. Of course, the current Supreme Court (and conservatives in general) shit on that amendment, for some weird reason.
Thats it, I say webservers move to SSL only transactions. All other plaintext transmissions should get encrypted at the endpoints transparently. Then when the government whines about not being able to find the terrorists they can blame datamining companies that paid for their election campaign. Then they can make a law that forces a back-door, which would create a need for some nifty-ass steganography [wikipedia.org] which would lead to massively excessive processor and network overhead (encryption and steganography respectively) for the most basic of transactions which would lead to NSA funded algorythms to find these hidden messages which would. ..holy shit it's almost 10AM, I need to hit the sack.
Thats it, I say webservers move to SSL only transactions.
I agree completely, but keep in mind that even with encryption, ISPs can still collect
quite enough information on us to put together a truly impressive profile. Sure, they
won't know exactly what you read, but if you visit Erowid, I'd call it a good bet you
don't want recommendations on a cheese to go with dinner.
For targetted advertising purposes, the simple "where" counts for 90% of the "what".
As far as I know, IIS and Apache don't quite support TLS yet (although it's in-progress) which means every SSL-enabled website would have to be on it's own unique IP/port...making the IP 'crunch' even more of an issue.
You could have 10,000 domains that share a common cert provided by the hosting provider. It does squat for authentication but it does prevent snooping. With ISPs starting to snoop, suddenly this has real value.
Combine this with 3rd-party SSL-enabled DNS, and you've got some reasonable countermeasures.
Your ISP will know you talked to dns.ssldnsprovider.com over an encrypted channel and then immediately carried on a series of conversations with 1.2.3.4 over port 443, but he won't know which of the thousands o
I second this! I was trying to get SSL working on our different domain names just the other month and when I found out you can only have one cert per IP address, I was like "who the fuck though this was a good idea?? Like no one ever had multiple domains point to one IP before? GAAAAHH!!" Sorry, I get worked up:(
The problem is that SSL happens before any HTTP does, and SSL is a general mechanism that can be used for any kind of TCP connection.
How does the webserver know what to give you when foo.com and bar.com map to the same IP address, and the browser requests something like index.html that exists on both? This works only because when the browser makes the request it also tells the webserver which domain it was trying to access. The browser sends something like this:
GET/index.html HTTP/1.1 Host: foo.com
Now, this breaks for SSL, because SSL happens before the connection is established, so there's no way to decide which certificate to use based on the domain.
To fix to this is adding the support directly to SSL. rfc4336 contains a mechanism to do this with TLS.
I do believe that one could make that point. Comcast already has ways to throttle Bittorrent. If they are doing deep packet inspection, I would think that they would know down to the data block what files were being transferred.
Let's start turning over rocks in the private lives of telcom CEO's and see what scurries out. I'm sure they won't mind, it's in the interests of an open society and free debate, don'cha know.
1. Find his adress 2. Intercept his snailmail (which later is returned). 3. Scan it and post it to our small group of Slashdotters. 4. Ask him if he thinks that this is a violation of his privacy? 5. ?? 6. Profit!
7. Go directly to Federal-pound-me-in-the-ass-prison for postal fraud. Do not pass go, do not collect $200.
Seriously, if the USPS, UPS or Fedex started doing this can you imagine the outrage? Yet somehow it's ok to do it with electronic communications? WTF?
Fedex and UPS open your packages to look at what you are shipping so they can sell that data to advertisers?
rather they're searching through it looking for things that look suspicious
Did you even bother to RTFA? Wait, dumb question around here. This has nothing to do with looking for 'suspicious activity'. The ISPs in question are allowing third-party companies to build profiles of their users by spying on their traffic in order to do targeted advertising.
Never mind that it's evil, or that it's a great step to losing their common-carrier status.
Never mind that it's a true violation of privacy.
Never mind that I block cookies pretty well and I run with NoScript most of the time and I don't see very many ads, and besides, half of the time I'm inside my employer's VPN.
But even more than that, I have seven other users in my household, half of them teenagers. If they want to sniff all of my NAT-ed packets coming out, they're going to discover that I'm a geek who has four Facebook sites, likes art and hates it, plays Runescape incessantly (the 10-year-old), likes the Wiggles, and works as a beauty consultant. So go ahead and hand me the ad for the latest XBox game (I hate games). Offer my kids server hardware, and see if you can get my wife to click on fun games to play with the Backyardigans. Oh, wait, you already do. It's called "not targeting advertising", and it's free.
So what we have is a thoroughly broken high-cost borderline-illegal absolutely-unethical service offered to advertisers in a difficult economic period. By people who we all hate a lot, and who will rapidly become targets for everything from blocking to legislative action to you name it.
I knew there would be some kind of career move for spam kings in the future. I just thought it would pay better.
I predict a less than stellar outcome for these idiots, and they deserve every painful moment.
However, you still get more accurate data on user trends as a whole - you no longer have the old problem of the fact that only the sort of people who fill in surveys will fill in your surveys, and they're not generally a representative sample.
Any data at all on user trends more than their competitors will help advertising companies make money.
> If they want to sniff all of my NAT-ed packets coming out, they're >going to discover that I'm a geek who has four Facebook sites, likes > art and hates it, plays....
Silly person, they are much smarter than that. Each of those PCs can be identified, see previous slashdot articles on the subject. Especially since each PC in a network serving a diverse family as you are describing will probably have obvious differences in OS and browser versions. Then there is detailed packet header inspection (DEEP INSPECTION, remember?) to seperate out OS subtle version differences, etc. And each PC/account will offerup different cookies to the same websites like Google.
NAT won't stop them. SSL won't stop them. Laws might. This sort of snooping isn't 'like' listening in on phone conversations. It IS listening in on conversations.
I pay for a dedicated server (essentially colo but they provide the hardware) from a company with a decent AUP. I put linux on the server and run squid on a non-standard port, allowing connections from localhost only. Then from the machine I'm surfing from I tunnel into the squid server. Say squid is running on port 1234 and sshd is running on 4567:
Configure firefox to use a proxy to localhost:1234 and all traffic is encrypted to the squid server.
Of course, I could just use Tor, which is great, but can be slow. In fact, you could run a tor server on your colo machine and have all tor traffic bounce off of the server, which would be pretty fast if you leave tor running as a daemon and dedicate a decent amount of bandwidth to the tor network.
> I pay for a dedicated server (essentially colo but they provide > the hardware) from a company with a decent AUP. I put linux on > the server and run squid..... And you are a fool with more money and tech knowledge than you have the brains to use wisely.
Exactly what are you hoping to accomplish by going to all of that bother? Your last mile ISP can't monitor you but the hosting company and THEIR ISP can so you have just shifted the point of attack.
You presume I am doing anything illegal in the first place. And if using ssh raises red flags for the gov't then they are going to be very very busy as it's really the de facto remote login protocol for all Unix machines.
My example is a case where if the AUP of the colo company explicitly states that they do not monitor traffic, and your ISP for the last mile does, you can avoid your ISP's deep packet sniffing.
It's illegal for anyone to open mail not intended for them. The same should be done for electronic communication.
And if I hear one libertarian say we need less laws, I'll puke. It's as if they though they had a magic wand and all the troubles of the world would disappear by removing government. Unfortunately, the world hasn't worked that way since we left the caves 12,000 years ago.
We *do* need fewer laws. However, the ones that remain need to be effective and of value, and actually enforced.
The law to protect your right to privacy already exists, it just needs to be enforced. Creating more laws doesn't help with lack of enforcement of what is already there.
Brilliant post!
The problem, though, is that the citizens will not stand up for their rights, because our current culture is taught to depend on the government to fix all of the problems. If citizens were to take a stand on the issue, government and corporations would see that it is not in their best interest to continue these practices. What needs to happen is (as has previously been posted) citizens encrypting their communications and taking other steps (Tor, Freenet, etc.) to prevent snooping, governmen
If these are the ISPs (as opposed to the visited web sites) doing the spying, then how are the advertising companies involved supposed to deliver the content? Are they going to use the same "deep packet" method to inject the advertising? If the advertising delivery is away from that deep packet inspection, then how do they identify which user was interested in penis enlargement products vs. which user was interested in replica watches? Or are the ISPs going to lock-in the IP address, now?
Search for info on heartburn... get some post cards advertising the latest antacid. Search for info about Lasik eye surgery... gee handy flyers about your local providers appear.
You get the idea. If I were selling a service and an ISP offered to sell me names and addresses based on keyword searches, why wouldn't I buy that list?
> If these are the ISPs (as opposed to the visited web sites) doing > the spying, then how are the advertising companies involved supposed > to deliver the content? Because the visited web sites already aren't the ones delivering the advertising. You go to CNN.com and view a page. The ads come from an outside site. That site partners with your ISP. They toss a packet with the IP and perhaps other info (like browser info so the ISP can determine which PC behind the home NAT is making the request a
Critics liken it to a phone company listening in on conversations.
Um, my ISP IS my phone company. If they can get away with reading my emails and stuff like this comment, what's to stop them from listening to my phone calls?
We're really at a crossroads: either the law makes ISPs common carriers with no interest in, or control over, content like a real phone company, or we lose most of the potential of the communications tech revolution.
Phorm argues it doesn't break the law because they offer an "opt out" clause and so isn't effected by the RIPA act. BT's trial last year of Phorm against 10,000 users is being investigated as potentially illegal as users wern't given the chance to opt out. It should be a easily won case since BT by supplying 121media and not asking if they can share this information have broken the Data Protection Act. BT maintains plans to implement Phorm with the ability to opt out (through a cookie on your PC.)
I've already sent a letter to my service provider (virgin media) informing them I want no part of Phorm and if they implement it (which they are considering) I will be prosecuting them under the Data Protection Act. I suggest all BT, Talk Talk and Virgin Media users do the same.
The Data Protection Act in the UK is the best defense against this sort of thing, it defines how companies my handle personal data, the right a person has to that data and what responsibilities the organisations have with it. The biggest problem with it tends to be phone operators who've never read it trying to tell you the section you read to them is wrong.
I believe someone is trying to prosecute Facebook because they were unable to remove their information from Facebook (when you leave a service you have a right to have all information on a companies database to be deleted) If I were to go into a police station and demand all the CCTV footage they have on me they would have to supply it (my right to see) finally if I don't agree that companies can share my information with 3rd parties then they aren't allowed to share it full stop if they do you can prosecute.
121Media argue phorm doesn't violate the Data Protection Act because you are visiting public websites (it being akin to walking along a public highway and so no right to privacy) Hopefully the Information Commisson won't see it that way and will enforce the view that sending unencrypted http packets through port 80 is the same as making a phone call and so falls under the same protections.
For all its promise, however, the service providers exploring and testing such services have largely kept quiet -- "for fear of customer revolt," according to one executive involved.
Guess what pal..the word is now out.
Ever get the feeling the the Internet just isn't worth it anymore?
Time has shown that nobody will protect your privacy besides yourself. It's time for ALL Internet traffic and ALL phone traffic to be encrypted with an option to get SSL keys for each machine or phone from trusted authorities in different countries. This way a particular person asserting privacy is not labeled a terrorist, Comcast can not selectively block bittorrent, Chinese firewall is out of business and phone companies do not need immunity for spying on subscribers. IPV6 will have to be adopted anyway in the next 10 years and it included encryption, so the time is right to make both switches at once with little extra IT overhead.
The government may have the resources to break strong encryption in real time, but even the largest ISP's do not. So maybe now the FreeS/WAN project no longer sound like tinfoil-hatted paranoiacs when they push opportunistic encryption at every node [freeswan.org]. Everything gets encrypted automatically and transparently when talking between two OE nodes, regardless of the protocol.
This was their goal, but hostility and forking ensued when most people really wanted to just have an IPsec implementation on Linux. OE is still a good idea, though, and that's what they're focusing on now.
The obvious design win would be if Linksys and Netgear built OE into their consumer grade firewall/routers. Then everyone would have it, not even know it, and when large site operators started deploying it on their network edges, massive amounts of crypto would start traversing the Internet, and no one would be bothered by it.
That's really the key to good system design: add complexity, but don't bother the end user -- it's not his problem.
NebuAd products do collect and use the following kinds of anonymous information:
Web pages viewed and links clicked on
Web search terms
The amount of time spent at some Web sites
Response to advertisements
System settings, such as the browser used and speed of the connection
ZIP code or postal code
Now that's way out of line for an ISP to collect, let alone send to an ad agency.
We may be able to do something about this.
We run SiteTruth AdRater [sitetruth.com], which rates advertisers. We have a Firefox extension which displays a rating icon for each ad served.
When an ad link goes by, and it's not in the browser cache, the extension contacts our server for a rating of the advertiser. So we collect, over time, a list of advertisers for various ad systems. We're not collecting data about users; we're interested in advertiser behavior.
(You can read the source code for the plug-in, so there's no mystery about what we're doing.)
We're not currently tracking NebuAd, Front Porch, or Phorm ads; we've been focusing on the bigger players. It looks like we need to be tracking this behavior. If anyone can find ad links from those services, please post the ad link here, or mail it to "info@sitetruth.com". We need some examples so we can modify the plug-in to recognize them.
If we can collect sufficient information about this class of advertisers, we may publish their customer list, which would be useful for boycott purposes. Thanks.
I have a bit of history with two large service providers in the US. While I have not been involved directly with the deep packet inspection teams, I have had direct contact with all of them and helped them design networks using this technology. The technology was never sold to upper management as a way to track our users and target ads to them. It was never intended to capture a web page hit that was directed at a specific company to see what that consumer was interested in. Instead, it was always meant to monitor users (and more importantly, user aggregates) and determine what kind of traffic they were sending.
It was, and is, always about the network profile. If they find out that 10% of the traffic on the network is VoIP traffic, they want to design the network shift this traffic to have lower latency.** If they find out that 50% of the traffic is BitTorrent, they may put rules in place around such services. In my opinion, the service providers that I have dealt with do not have the technology in place to target down to the user. Also, they do not appear to be developing this technology.
**Some can argue that providers are instinctively evil and want to destroy this traffic, but I'm not going to fight this here.
Advocates of deep-packet inspection see it as a boon for all involved. Advertisers can better target their pitches. Consumers will see more relevant ads. Service providers who hand over consumer data can share in advertising revenues. And Web sites can make more money from online advertising, a $20 billion industry that is growing rapidly.
So the consumers' benefit is better targeted ads? Woohoo? Sounds like the only ones who are winning are the corps and that's it.
So which ISPs are doing this? What can we do to protect our selves? It sounds like it's "enabled" by a cookie placed there by your ISP or NebuAd? Would Adblock and/or PeerGuardian be enough? Implementing blocking at the home router level? What can home users actually do?
It'd be nice at least to know who's actually participating in this so we could know who to avoid.
The difference is that in the first case, the data passes through a dumb machine that compresses, caches, etc. The result is cached like it is expected (RFC 2616 is pretty clear about that), even though it is done transparently. No need to keep logs about who downloaded what.
In this case, the data is explicitly mined, by a company interested in building a profile of each user. It doesn't say it is limited to web traffic only, only that "Nor does NebuAd record a user's visits to pornography or gaming sites or a user's interests in sensitive subjects -- such as bankruptcy or a medical condition such as AIDS.", which I doubt both on technical grounds and because it is a market and someone will want to take advantage and "The company said it processes but does not look into packets of information that include e-mail or pictures." which I think is in contradiction with other parts of the article and even if they didn't, it's a matter of time before they do.
Basically, it's the intent that counts. The ISP can intercept everything they want because they're in the middle. When they start doing so for reasons that are not part of maintaining the communications as specified (like forwarding, maybe firewalling and proxying depending on the conditions), alarms should go off.
Like the post said, so are voice phone calls, but we expect phone companies not to bug our phones. Hell, you could go to those little green boxes with a generic uniform on and listen all day and nobody would bother you. Of course they're be hell to pay if you were caught. Why is "internet" communications any different than normal ones, why should telcos be "listening in" to our conversations?
So, it's bad and evil and wrong if a computer at your ISP reads all your packets for marketing research purposes, but when Slashdot's favourite pet company Google does the exact same thing with all your messages in Gmail, it's perfectly fine and justified?
Yes. You may use gmail or not, and if you do then you agree that they will use your email contents for advertisement.
No one authorized ISPs to inspect packets for any purpose.
However if they provided their service at the same price google offers gmail in exchange for authorization to inspect packets, I'm sure there would be lots of people willing to take the deal.
I think Slashbots need to get their kneejerks straight.
And I think whoever modded you insightful was on crack.
So what's the status on IPSec? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:So what's the status on IPSec? (Score:5, Insightful)
But with the revelation the other day that the Bush administration believes the Fourth Amendment (right to privacy and protection from searches without cause), this becomes just another good reason to get cracking with all traffic encrypted.
http://yro.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=08/04/03/1219200 [slashdot.org]
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Also, another point about this is people have always said that users should understand that their activities on the Internet could be monitored by third parties. This, however, is different (at least to me) in that it is systematic snooping on the part of ISPs.
The situation has somewhat changed in another way, too. It used t
Why not spider the web? (Score:3, Interesting)
People already do (Score:5, Informative)
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
The second amendment gives us all the right to the strongest encryption we can get our hands on.
Re:Why not spider the web? (Score:4, Interesting)
They knew exactly what they were writing. The frontier was subject to constant "terrorist" attacks from indians and french at the time. The British had specifically forbidden the smaller villages from maintaining arms caches to defend against attacks in the middle of the night. Instead they demanded British troops be stationed in people's homes ruled only by the crown and not by Colony or local rules. It was the right of you and your neighbors to defend yourselves without "asking permission" from any government and without reprisal for doing so. Note that Britain as basiclly out lawed self defense even in your own home today. Even if your daughter is being raped, in your home, you can be brought to charges for having any kind of weapon used to defend her if the attackers die.
Parent
Re:So what's the status on IPSec? (Score:4, Informative)
There was a time when encryption-by-default could have become the norm for Internet communications. It was largely passed by because the Clinton administration treated encryption technology as if it were chemical weapons. Even though the math to do it was a genie out of the bottle, they forbade American companies from trafficking in encryption technology if it involved overseas clients. So either it wasn't pursued, or the companies went overseas (e.g. F-Secure) but the end result is that encryption did not become a fundamental part of Internet communications.
Even weirder, one of the few to take a stand against this was John Ashcroft. Though, to his credit, he stood up to illegal wiretapping in the Dubya years as well. I don't agree with him on very much at all, but I have to give him credit for being a rare principled individual on this score.
So, to sum up, had the Clinton admin not squashed crypto so badly, we might not have to worry about mass spying on the public. They'd still be able to get around the encryption when it really mattered; they do black bag jobs and put keyloggers in mafioso computers when they need to do that, and I think that's a good balance of civil liberties and legitimate law enforcement, assuming warrants are involved.
Sadly, America has apparently decided that the First Amendment is tolerable, the Second is awesome, and fuck the rest of them. What an insult to our nation.
My favorite amendment? The Ninth: any rights not explicitly delineated in the Bill of Rights probably exist. Of course, the current Supreme Court (and conservatives in general) shit on that amendment, for some weird reason.
Parent
Encrypt everything. (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Encrypt everything. (Score:5, Insightful)
I agree completely, but keep in mind that even with encryption, ISPs can still collect quite enough information on us to put together a truly impressive profile. Sure, they won't know exactly what you read, but if you visit Erowid, I'd call it a good bet you don't want recommendations on a cheese to go with dinner.
For targetted advertising purposes, the simple "where" counts for 90% of the "what".
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
Re:Encrypt everything. (Score:4, Informative)
Parent
Re:Encrypt everything. (Score:5, Informative)
As far as I know, IIS and Apache don't quite support TLS yet (although it's in-progress) which means every SSL-enabled website would have to be on it's own unique IP/port...making the IP 'crunch' even more of an issue.
Parent
Not necessarily (Score:3, Informative)
With ISPs starting to snoop, suddenly this has real value.
Combine this with 3rd-party SSL-enabled DNS, and you've got some reasonable countermeasures.
Your ISP will know you talked to dns.ssldnsprovider.com over an encrypted channel and then immediately carried on a series of conversations with 1.2.3.4 over port 443, but he won't know which of the thousands o
Re: (Score:3)
Re:Encrypt everything. (Score:5, Interesting)
How does the webserver know what to give you when foo.com and bar.com map to the same IP address, and the browser requests something like index.html that exists on both? This works only because when the browser makes the request it also tells the webserver which domain it was trying to access. The browser sends something like this: Now, this breaks for SSL, because SSL happens before the connection is established, so there's no way to decide which certificate to use based on the domain.
To fix to this is adding the support directly to SSL. rfc4336 contains a mechanism to do this with TLS.
Parent
Re:Encrypt everything. (Score:5, Informative)
Parent
Filesharing Responsibility? (Score:3, Insightful)
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
time for some hactivism (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Btw. is your ISP Knology? (Score:5, Interesting)
7. Go directly to Federal-pound-me-in-the-ass-prison for postal fraud. Do not pass go, do not collect $200.
Seriously, if the USPS, UPS or Fedex started doing this can you imagine the outrage? Yet somehow it's ok to do it with electronic communications? WTF?
Parent
Re:Btw. is your ISP Knology? (Score:5, Insightful)
Fedex and UPS open your packages to look at what you are shipping so they can sell that data to advertisers?
Did you even bother to RTFA? Wait, dumb question around here. This has nothing to do with looking for 'suspicious activity'. The ISPs in question are allowing third-party companies to build profiles of their users by spying on their traffic in order to do targeted advertising.
Parent
Good luck with that (Score:5, Insightful)
Never mind that it's a true violation of privacy.
Never mind that I block cookies pretty well and I run with NoScript most of the time and I don't see very many ads, and besides, half of the time I'm inside my employer's VPN.
But even more than that, I have seven other users in my household, half of them teenagers. If they want to sniff all of my NAT-ed packets coming out, they're going to discover that I'm a geek who has four Facebook sites, likes art and hates it, plays Runescape incessantly (the 10-year-old), likes the Wiggles, and works as a beauty consultant. So go ahead and hand me the ad for the latest XBox game (I hate games). Offer my kids server hardware, and see if you can get my wife to click on fun games to play with the Backyardigans. Oh, wait, you already do. It's called "not targeting advertising", and it's free.
So what we have is a thoroughly broken high-cost borderline-illegal absolutely-unethical service offered to advertisers in a difficult economic period. By people who we all hate a lot, and who will rapidly become targets for everything from blocking to legislative action to you name it.
I knew there would be some kind of career move for spam kings in the future. I just thought it would pay better.
I predict a less than stellar outcome for these idiots, and they deserve every painful moment.
Re:Good luck with that (Score:5, Interesting)
Any data at all on user trends more than their competitors will help advertising companies make money.
Parent
Re:Good luck with that (Score:5, Informative)
They don't have a common-carrier status to lose.
Parent
Re:Good luck with that (Score:5, Insightful)
>going to discover that I'm a geek who has four Facebook sites, likes
> art and hates it, plays....
Silly person, they are much smarter than that. Each of those PCs can be identified, see previous slashdot articles on the subject. Especially since each PC in a network serving a diverse family as you are describing will probably have obvious differences in OS and browser versions. Then there is detailed packet header inspection (DEEP INSPECTION, remember?) to seperate out OS subtle version differences, etc. And each PC/account will offerup different cookies to the same websites like Google.
NAT won't stop them. SSL won't stop them. Laws might. This sort of snooping isn't 'like' listening in on phone conversations. It IS listening in on conversations.
Parent
ssh tunnelling + squid (Score:5, Interesting)
ssh -f -N -L 1234:localhost:1234 -p 5678 my.squid.server.com
Configure firefox to use a proxy to localhost:1234 and all traffic is encrypted to the squid server.
Of course, I could just use Tor, which is great, but can be slow. In fact, you could run a tor server on your colo machine and have all tor traffic bounce off of the server, which would be pretty fast if you leave tor running as a daemon and dedicate a decent amount of bandwidth to the tor network.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
> the hardware) from a company with a decent AUP. I put linux on
> the server and run squid.....
And you are a fool with more money and tech knowledge than you have the brains to use wisely.
Exactly what are you hoping to accomplish by going to all of that bother? Your last mile ISP can't monitor you but the hosting company and THEIR ISP can so you have just shifted the point of attack.
And the government (which is what you are afraid
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
My example is a case where if the AUP of the colo company explicitly states that they do not monitor traffic, and your ISP for the last mile does, you can avoid your ISP's deep packet sniffing.
There should be a law (Score:5, Interesting)
And if I hear one libertarian say we need less laws, I'll puke. It's as if they though they had a magic wand and all the troubles of the world would disappear by removing government. Unfortunately, the world hasn't worked that way since we left the caves 12,000 years ago.
Re:There should be a law (Score:5, Insightful)
The law to protect your right to privacy already exists, it just needs to be enforced. Creating more laws doesn't help with lack of enforcement of what is already there.
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How are they to deliver targeted advertising? (Score:5, Insightful)
If these are the ISPs (as opposed to the visited web sites) doing the spying, then how are the advertising companies involved supposed to deliver the content? Are they going to use the same "deep packet" method to inject the advertising? If the advertising delivery is away from that deep packet inspection, then how do they identify which user was interested in penis enlargement products vs. which user was interested in replica watches? Or are the ISPs going to lock-in the IP address, now?
Regular postal mail... (Score:4, Insightful)
Search for info on heartburn... get some post cards advertising the latest antacid. Search for info about Lasik eye surgery... gee handy flyers about your local providers appear.
You get the idea. If I were selling a service and an ISP offered to sell me names and addresses based on keyword searches, why wouldn't I buy that list?
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Re: (Score:3, Informative)
> the spying, then how are the advertising companies involved supposed
> to deliver the content?
Because the visited web sites already aren't the ones delivering the advertising. You go to CNN.com and view a page. The ads come from an outside site. That site partners with your ISP. They toss a packet with the IP and perhaps other info (like browser info so the ISP can determine which PC behind the home NAT is making the request a
Listening in? Um, yeah. (Score:5, Insightful)
Up to 2 years imprisonment (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Up to 2 years imprisonment (Score:5, Informative)
I've already sent a letter to my service provider (virgin media) informing them I want no part of Phorm and if they implement it (which they are considering) I will be prosecuting them under the Data Protection Act. I suggest all BT, Talk Talk and Virgin Media users do the same.
The Data Protection Act in the UK is the best defense against this sort of thing, it defines how companies my handle personal data, the right a person has to that data and what responsibilities the organisations have with it. The biggest problem with it tends to be phone operators who've never read it trying to tell you the section you read to them is wrong.
I believe someone is trying to prosecute Facebook because they were unable to remove their information from Facebook (when you leave a service you have a right to have all information on a companies database to be deleted) If I were to go into a police station and demand all the CCTV footage they have on me they would have to supply it (my right to see) finally if I don't agree that companies can share my information with 3rd parties then they aren't allowed to share it full stop if they do you can prosecute.
121Media argue phorm doesn't violate the Data Protection Act because you are visiting public websites (it being akin to walking along a public highway and so no right to privacy) Hopefully the Information Commisson won't see it that way and will enforce the view that sending unencrypted http packets through port 80 is the same as making a phone call and so falls under the same protections.
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"Customer revolt" (Score:5, Insightful)
Ever get the feeling the the Internet just isn't worth it anymore?
Enough! (Score:4, Informative)
Encrypt everything! (Score:4, Interesting)
This was their goal, but hostility and forking ensued when most people really wanted to just have an IPsec implementation on Linux. OE is still a good idea, though, and that's what they're focusing on now.
The obvious design win would be if Linksys and Netgear built OE into their consumer grade firewall/routers. Then everyone would have it, not even know it, and when large site operators started deploying it on their network edges, massive amounts of crypto would start traversing the Internet, and no one would be bothered by it.
That's really the key to good system design: add complexity, but don't bother the end user -- it's not his problem.
NebuAd info, and a request for info (Score:4, Interesting)
I just checked NebuAd's Privacy policy [nebuad.com]:
NebuAd products do collect and use the following kinds of anonymous information:
Now that's way out of line for an ISP to collect, let alone send to an ad agency.
We may be able to do something about this.
We run SiteTruth AdRater [sitetruth.com], which rates advertisers. We have a Firefox extension which displays a rating icon for each ad served. When an ad link goes by, and it's not in the browser cache, the extension contacts our server for a rating of the advertiser. So we collect, over time, a list of advertisers for various ad systems. We're not collecting data about users; we're interested in advertiser behavior. (You can read the source code for the plug-in, so there's no mystery about what we're doing.)
We're not currently tracking NebuAd, Front Porch, or Phorm ads; we've been focusing on the bigger players. It looks like we need to be tracking this behavior. If anyone can find ad links from those services, please post the ad link here, or mail it to "info@sitetruth.com". We need some examples so we can modify the plug-in to recognize them.
If we can collect sufficient information about this class of advertisers, we may publish their customer list, which would be useful for boycott purposes. Thanks.
Deep Packet Inspection Not For Ads (Score:5, Interesting)
It was, and is, always about the network profile. If they find out that 10% of the traffic on the network is VoIP traffic, they want to design the network shift this traffic to have lower latency.** If they find out that 50% of the traffic is BitTorrent, they may put rules in place around such services. In my opinion, the service providers that I have dealt with do not have the technology in place to target down to the user. Also, they do not appear to be developing this technology.
**Some can argue that providers are instinctively evil and want to destroy this traffic, but I'm not going to fight this here.
Who wins? (Score:3, Insightful)
Only have more questions (Score:3, Interesting)
It'd be nice at least to know who's actually participating in this so we could know who to avoid.
What's the difference (Score:5, Insightful)
In this case, the data is explicitly mined, by a company interested in building a profile of each user. It doesn't say it is limited to web traffic only, only that "Nor does NebuAd record a user's visits to pornography or gaming sites or a user's interests in sensitive subjects -- such as bankruptcy or a medical condition such as AIDS.", which I doubt both on technical grounds and because it is a market and someone will want to take advantage and "The company said it processes but does not look into packets of information that include e-mail or pictures." which I think is in contradiction with other parts of the article and even if they didn't, it's a matter of time before they do.
Basically, it's the intent that counts. The ISP can intercept everything they want because they're in the middle. When they start doing so for reasons that are not part of maintaining the communications as specified (like forwarding, maybe firewalling and proxying depending on the conditions), alarms should go off.
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Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Available for Pidgin (aka GAIM), Adium X, mICQ, Kopete, Miranda, Trillian and as a proxy for people that use other clients. Works on any IM network.
(I've been using it on GAIM for some time and I recommend it)
Re:So? Use https, ... (Score:4, Insightful)
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Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Doesn't that violate the copyright on the page held by
Re:Slashbot hypocrisy once again (Score:5, Insightful)
No one authorized ISPs to inspect packets for any purpose.
However if they provided their service at the same price google offers gmail in exchange for authorization to inspect packets, I'm sure there would be lots of people willing to take the deal. And I think whoever modded you insightful was on crack.
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