Australian Telco Causes Minor Panic While Preparing Web Filter 105
Twisted64 writes "Australia's largest telco, Telstra, has been frightening users of its mobile data services for the last week. Logging revealed that HTTP requests from a mobile device on Telstra's network were duplicated with a request from another server, located in Chicago. Eyebrows were raised on the Whirlpool forums, with fears that Telstra was giving up Australian browsing data to a U.S. company and therefore the U.S. government. Following a well-worded letter, Telstra revealed today that the reason for this behavior is that the company is preparing an opt-in web filter. Personally, while the idea of my browsing data being logged anywhere does not fill me with joy, the idea of the U.S. government having access to it (randomized or not) is probably going to be enough to make me switch to an inferior carrier once my current plan ends."
spin control (Score:2, Interesting)
What a nicely biased summary.
Why does Telstra need to send all URLs to another company in order to "prepare" a content filter?
Do they expect us to believe that Netsweeper didn't already have a database of URLs?
Double requests (Score:5, Interesting)
These double requests also causes a lot of trouble for some people.
I'm working for a company running a web service for corporations and we have a very high level of logging and surveillance in order to provide a good service. However we get a lot of strange alerts from double requests from different ip numbers. It appears that some content filtering companies like to do the same (Bluecoat I'm looking at you) and they even do requests with cloned cookies (so they act in the same session as the user).
A lot of funky things happens if you assume that a user is only going to access certain (GET) links once but a filtering company is intercepting the request and sometimes manage to make the request faster than the user.
Re:Don't wait for the plan to end (Score:5, Interesting)
how far are we talking? i've had 3 for years, and in many cases i get coverage out at my folks' place where even telstra has trouble.
that said, 3 has shitty coverage IN the city...
Re:Don't wait for the plan to end (Score:2, Interesting)
I was sitting 25km from Winton in central queensland (read 200km from anywhere) and getting faster 3g from Telstra than I get in downtown Brisbane.... Nobody else gives you that coverage.
Re:US Govt.? (Score:5, Interesting)
Give the closeness of the Aussie and American governments, and the long history of governments getting around their "we will not spy on our citizens" decree is by having their allies spy on their citzens instead,I think the more accurate question is:
What makes you think the american government doesn't have access to your data just because it never leaves australia?
Inferior Carrier? (Score:4, Interesting)
Personally, while the idea of my browsing data being logged anywhere does not fill me with joy, the idea of the U.S. government having access to it (randomized or not) is probably going to be enough to make me switch to an inferior carrier once my current plan ends."
I didn't actually know there were inferior carriers. I remember Telstra. We were a loyal customer for years. These were the guys who in I think a world first introduced the concept of a download limit. 3GB. Yes that's no typo. We had 10mbit cable and a 3GB download limit. I remember hitting that download limit on the second day of our billing cycle after which we were capped at 28.8kbps. This is the company which introduced an acceptable use policy without defining what acceptable use was. This was the company which refused to roll out ADSL2 in areas which already had ADSL. This was the company which charged more for wholesale use of it's network than it charged it's retail customers. It was a wise business decision too because once the ACCC put a stop to that practice users left in droves to cheaper better ADSL2 services.
I remember my last few days of Telstra cable fondly. We were paying some $80 per month with a 20GB download limit. When we tried to quit they gave us $300 credit so we jumped on the most expensive plan and then quit a month later anyway. Now I pay $60 per month for completely unlimited internet which is faster than the old cable we were on and we don't pay phone line rental either.
The only time I've seen people recently give Telstra a choice is if a) the company is paying, b) they had absolutely no other choice. Even if I now look at their plans, $70 for 200GB ex line rental for ADSL2 it boggles the mind that someone would pay these people willingly.
Re:Question (Score:4, Interesting)
Yes.
They were a government owned monopoly which got privatised and they are stuck with the worst elements of both, with a few twists from being run by a nuclear scientist with no business experience and a Mexican bandit (chosen by a the most nepotistic board imaginable led by a failed farmer turned union buster and with such gems as a third rate historian that made friends in politics by USSR style revisionism sanitising history to make ultra-conservatives feel better and the wife of a powerful party powerbroker). Among their epic failures are the loss of all backup tapes for three entire government departments by storing them in wheeled trash cans (wheelie bins), firing employees for their behaviour on their own time after a staff Christmas party that had been delayed until March, and making sales staff wear recording devices around their necks. Service quality is such that I waited four weeks to get a failed landline fixed which is located less than 5km from the main telephone exchange in Australia's third largest city, and the tech just turned up unannounced on a Saturday afternoon (they sacked a lot of people so there is little co-ordination and they just dump a list of jobs on overworked contractors).
There are hundreds of stories about them that stretch as far a China (they wasted millions on half-baked financial adventures there most notably buying the "IP" of a ringtone company that had 100% pirated mp3 files), and New Zealand (where they fucked up the carrier and the ISP they bought - two fucking months to change one MX record). So yes, they do whatever they like because they are big enough and check later if necessary to see if it's legal.
The main purpose of Australian's NBN (national broadband network) is to get telecommunications out from under the control of Telstra and to build what Telstra planned in 1996 before they decided only the short term mattered.