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Is Comcast Intercepting Packets?
nihilist_1137 writes: "According this page, comcast is intercepting your packets to gain knowledge of your whereabouts and then reselling it to marketers." According to the linked message, "This allows them to not only log all http requests, but to also log the response. Maybe they want to profile their customer browsing history for
subsidiaries or resale to marketers. Maybe they want to do their part in
The War on Freedom. Maybe they just want passwords to porn sites. Apparently they aren't using it to maximize bandwidth, because it's not configured to serve cached data."
Isn't tapping internet connections the same, legally, as a phone tap? It's nto legal for the phone company to listen in on your conversations to sell to advertisers, it can't possibly be legal to sniff packets to sell to marketers!
Moderation: Put your hand inside the puppet head!
Both Cable Internet Providers and I am sure many other ISP's in Australia use Transparent Proxies.
Much easier to setup on the client side and you catch people who leave out the proxy information.
The fact that the server has other capabilities doesn't mean that they are actually using this stuff. If someone can show me a link to the page where I can buy the marketing data, *then* i will believe you.
This is just speculation.
Go out and get sailing!
My packets are copyrighted, so legally they can't copy and resell them without my written authorization.
No evidence that they're doing anything wrong, just that they are using tools that "allow" them to. Boo hoo, Comcast is using a transparent cache and they could abuse it.
Afraid they might actually do it? Then https and check your certs.
As copyright owner of this comment, I authorize everyone to defeat any technological measure which limits access to it.
I think the fact that this was mailed to bugtraq yet it apparantly got denied is proof of that...
Many ISPs do transparent caching. Transparent caching at ISPs is more than acceptable. It's not acceptable when major backbones do it, as has happened in the past.
The fact that they can log what you do is just a side effect. The same can be done WITHOUT transparent caching. The 'author' says they added hardware just for this. Well of course they did! They're just trying to speed up access without needing as big of a link needed without using transparent caching.
And at any rate, I'm surprised this got posted. It's just some guy posting to two mailing lists, which got denied at that!
Ultimately though, I feel ISPs should provide a means to remove you from having your link transparently cached. If they do that, then you can't blame them for trying to save bandwidth. The results of a transparent cache can be substantial!
Linux: Because a PC is a terrible thing to waste.
James Brents
...what the big deal is. This one's been coming down the road for a long time. I KNOW it's a shame that it's happening. It could be construed as an invasion of privacy, to put it mildly. But for goodness sakes. If you can't stand the heat get out of the kitchen! Use a modem. Get local DSL. You actually can, if you SEARCH for it. Yea, whatever.
The simple truth is that interstellar distances will not fit into the human imagination
- Douglas Adams
I got forwarded this by one of my buddies at work. At this prices its plain sick that they also want to sell your usage statistics to the SPAMERS. On top of that I've been told that they want every computer on there network using proxy clients in order to connect.
I'm glad sprint just hooked up DSL in my area, I'm switching providers.
According to insiders at Comcast there will be three tiers of service. The current service will be called Silver and it will be 1500/128 for $49.95 plus modem rental. Yes that is true, they are planning on a $10 price increase within the next year after the transition is complete and the merger with AT&T Broadband Internet is finalized. Comcast doesn't want to mess with the rates right now until they get regulatory approval for the merger. But the S.O.P. at AT&T and Comcast is a price increase after a merger. Look at what Cable rates did after the Mediaone transition.
Gold service will be 1500/300 and will allow VPN access and something they are calling priority traffic. This is the old Pro service. The cost will be $99.95. If you are a gamer used to the old MediaOne performance, this Gold level should get you back close to the perf you had with the old system. And yes that means you will be paying double for the same service you had last year.
The new low price option is Bronze. Expected to be 128/64 or maybe 256/128 it should be priced at $29.95. This is the one that is most in the air. I haven't seen a bronze config file yet to see what they are planning.
Modem rentals will be $5 and may increase to $7.
First of all, have their customers been notified of this? Are they aware of the monitoring? Has it been explained to the customers in understandable language, not legalese? If the answer is "No" to any of these questions, then I think this company is headed down the short path to being sued.
Likely, they want to generate detailed customer profiles so that they can sell more targeted advertising (after all, highly targeted advertising is what sells for the most money). But even at that, it's an annoying practice that should be explained to the customers.
Even assuming they notified their customers (which I don't believe they did), though, it's going to be a hard sell to convince customers that their passwords (which are often not encrypted) as safe with them. They'd best stop this practice while they're ahead and no one has taken legal action. It reeks of a poorly-thought-out marketing/management decision.
My sigs always suck.
How do we not know they're just implementing a web cache to save money and provide better service? Lots of ISPs do this. Why page to get the pictures from the homepage of cnn.com 458,765 times an hour when once will do?
This allows them to monitor and change (or insert ads into) what you read.
Posh. Fear-mongering. Come back with some evidence -- and I'll be as against it as the next guy. And if they are actually inserting ads, then they'll probably be in court with CNN, Disney, etc, so forth, for modifying and distributing copyrighted material.
Interestingly, regardless of what IP you address the packet to, the Inktomi Traffic-Server reads the Host: field to determine where to send the packet. I sent several packets from my home machine to one of my office machines, inside the packet was "Host: www.comcast.net". Comcast illegally intercepted, misinterpreted and altered this packet, and sent it to www.comcast.com. So, you might say there's a bug in this evil Inktomi Traffic-Server thing.
Oh, shut up. That's how a transparent proxy works. I suppose the Linux facilities for transparent proxing -- available for years now -- are also evil?
Where's my clue-by-four...
Napster-to-go says "Fill and refill your compatible MP3 player", which is a lie. It's not MP3. It's WMA with DRM.
Now wait a second. Before we all flip out and start bashing ComCast, lets realize a couple things.
Number one, this guy just got transitioned. A lot of people all over the country have been going through the same thing, and not everyone is seeing the same thing as him. As 'hostman' from the MESH (Michigan Engineering Software and Hardware http://misc.eecs.umich.edu/) discussion email list wrote:
"This whole thread got me a bit peeved, so I went home and ran a few tests. I was unable to find any evidence of the packet modification described. It is possible the described issue is not an issue here in A^2, as we 'transitioned' from MediaOne's service, not @Home..."
Secondly, your ISP has the right to monitor traffic to ensure quality of service. Just because the caching part of the server is not currently running, it does not mean that they aren't phasing it into the system. At this point it's just speculation. They might even have more rights to monitor what you're doing, depending on your service agreement. Read it.
Lets get some REAL evidence of what's going on other than this hear-say. Someone show us some modified packet headers, and someone else reproduce those results, and MAYBE I'll believe it then.
Of course, ISPs have access to pretty much all network traffic (you think your packets magically transport themselve to and back from slashdot?). And it would not be difficult at all to log everything that passes through the network. (You certainly don't need an Inktomi system, although maybe it helps, I dunno.) Probability is that there's at least some ISPs out there monitoring their customers invasively. Maybe Comcast is in fact doing it. But this article is simply not convincing.
While IANAL, I work in the digital television middleware industry and have been involved in making sure that we do not inadvertantly let our customers run afoul of that precise law. It's not just the law, it's a good idea.
I'm a nature photographer.
I'm sure this is normal industry practice. Here in St. Louis we have to go to odd meausures to dodge Charter Cable's buggy transparent proxy. (It doesn't handle the case where you are deliberately using an authenticated proxy.) Fortunately it only looks at certain ports so you can dodge with proxies on non-standard ports.
Say Charter, if you are reading you could reimburse me for the two hours I spent figurng out this defect in my Charter user's internet service.
Take a look at this thread from the Philadelphia Linux User Group. It sounds like the new software update that Comcast has asked its users to install contains spyware and changes internet settings...
So now they can track you from your own (Windows) machine, and also through their transparent proxy.
I know I'm going off on a tangent here, and it's off-topic, but please bear with me.
The phone company doesn't tap converstations, but they sure as hell have a database of which line called which number, when, and for how long.
Can someone explain why the Good Guys always have to keep the Bad Guy on the line for something like three minutes in order to trace the call, when all they should have to do is call up the Phone Company (on another line) and ask them to punch up the number of the person calling this number right now?
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I'm not a fan of Comcast (or for that matter cable modems in general) BUT I must ask - Where is your proof that they aren't caching any of the pages and only using it to gather marketing data? Once can configure a transparent proxy to completely mask its existance. I do this quite often with customers on their firewalls I don't give a crap about what they are browsing, I just try to get the most/$$ for THEIR bandwidth.
quis custodiet ipsos custodes - Juvenal
Sorry, but the /. community is so f@$%ng paranoid about people reading their packets. I have ComCast. Who cares? Oh wow, they're reading my e-mail. I hope they enjoy it. What a waste of time. If this is how big brother operates, then big brother is an idiot. Okay, so I tag my .sig with things like bombs, nitrogrlycerin, TNT, pipes, Amonia, Nitrate, etc..... Yeah, whatever.'
Like I care.
"The phone company doesn't tap converstations, but they sure as hell have a database of which line called which number, when, and for how long."
I work for a phone company.
No, we sure as hell DON'T have a database. (atleast in Canada). There are only 3 times we keep track.
1. As per customer request (traffic studies, getting prank calls)
2. As per warrant (court order required!)
3. For long distance billing. (we need to know how much to charge you)
local calls are not recorded - we have to add an option in your line programming for that - after meeting one of the above requirements.
WTF? Why is everyone accussing comcast of spying?
First off all your spending habit is normally kept in a database somewhere by your credit card company. How else can they bill you? What's the difference between that and this? Are you going to send your email over the net that's sensitive unencrypted?
Further more as many have pointed out without success this sounds just like a transparent proxy. Which is a perfectly valid network influstructure.
What is it with slashdot and the slashmob?
If Comcast wanted, they wouldn't have to rewrite packets in order to read all your web traffic if they're your ISP. They can just read all of your unencrypted traffic anyway, without modifying it to make you suspicious.
If their proxy isn't standards-compliant, that's somewhat annoying. It's somewhat likely that this actually *improves* anonymity, though, because web sites cannot necessarily track users by IP address. And this doesn't seem to affect SSL-encrypted traffic (which couldn't be proxied without the user agreeing, since SSL resists man-in-the-middle), which is all of the traffic which is at all hidden. This is like looking at people's postcards-- sure, it's not polite, but the things aren't even covered in anything.
I do wonder if this affects their common-carrier status at all, however. If they're doing non-trivial things to the traffic, they could be held liable for pages they pass on to customers.
No, they are just catching them, holding them for a few seconds, and then releasing them to make capped upload completely emulate dial-up.
...But, be on the look out for version 2.0 of this Comcast innovation!
The all new super ultra deluxe Dream [Packet] Catcher. Just like the Native American device only it captures packets and puts the user to sleep waiting for a reply to them.
It's because the actual "bad guy" is using spoofing hardware and software that makes his/her call look like it's comming from somewhere else unless you actually trace it back to the source. The more spoofing programs/hardware they comendere the more hops and therefore traces the good guys need to run to get back to the real number.
It's still in practice but now it's seconds not minutes that it takes to trace a call that's trying not to be traced.
) Human Kind Vs Human Creation
) It'd be interesting to see how many humans would survive to serve us.
If thats what it takes to nab all those sickos that are rolling around in kiddie porn than that is a good thing...I think that if I were trying to run a successful ISP, I would try to identify those users who I could do without. I think in the future -- it will be easier for them to get rid of all those l33t hackers who have 9999 servers running and transfering full length movies 24/7 -- maybe then I good get some decent speed for my kernel downloads. (cable sucks when all of your neighbors decide to "get into this internet thing" ... A coworker of mine just moved to a poor neighborhood and he has about 3 times the downstream as me....(His neighbors are more concerned about eating than P2P :)
(+1 Funny) only if I laugh out loud.
It's a CACHE - how do you expect them to cache frequently accessed Web information without examining GET headers and responses?? Hell, if every ISP used these things, it might eliminate the slashdot effect! But wouldn't want that, would we?
[Insert pithy quote here]
I have noticed this too. I am about ready to drop comcast. Since they switched from @home my downloads as well as uploads have been slowed to a crawl. I can hardly watch 300K video streams without a rebuffer every minute. Uploads seem like I am on a modem sometimes. Why am I paying the same money for less than half service? It just doesn't make sense.
Folks.. it shouldn't even have to be repeated, but it does.
When you send plaintext over the net, like HTTP reuqests..
YOU ARE SENDING PLAIN READABLE TEXT OVER A PUBLIC NETWORK.
Where is your expectation of privacy? That's right.. you don't really have one.
Passwords? HTTPS.. that's what the 'secure'part means you know.
Don't be such a whiner. Its just a hot, furry pussy.
You were mistaken. Which is odd, since memory shouldn't be a problem for you
What if I might not be a subscriber but happen to go through thier product? What if a subtle change in the headers gives the impression that I might be doing something illegal? Now along comes the FBI who has another ISP bugged and asks for details. Since comcast keeps no logs of what it does it doesn't remember or even admit to mistakes. FBI says cool and I go off to jail.
"If you are on fire you can just stop, drop, and roll. If you fall into Lava you are just dead." - my 5yr old daughter
It's a fucking reverse proxy server. I see absolutely no proof on the site whatsoever that this guy's personal info is being stored or aggregated or anything. Where's his proof that Comcast has purchased the "specific equipment" that is used for data aggregation, and where's his proof that they're using it for that purpose?
This is just a stupid fucking email message that, once again, when placed under the magic Slashdot Out-Of-Proportiometer, has ballooned to mega-lotta-banner-ad size.
- A.P.
"Remember when the U.S. had a drug problem, and then we declared a War On Drugs, and now you can't buy drugs anymore?"
$ telnet 1.2.3.4 80
Trying 1.2.3.4...
Connected to 1.2.3.4.
Escape character is '^]'.
get www.yahoo.com
Yahoo! -
501 Method Not Implemented Help Method Not Implemented
get to
Copyright
© 2002 Yahoo! Inc. All rights reserved.
Privacy Policy -
Terms of
Service
Connection closed by foreign host.
$ telnet 1.1.1.1 80
Trying 1.1.1.1...
Connected to 1.1.1.1.
Escape character is '^]'.
nmap ANY valid or invalid host and port 80 will be open. Yes folks, that IS a transparent proxy answering your calls.
In a previous life, I was an experienced admin of Inktomi traffic server. It's simply a proxy cache. Yes, it can do many of the things mentioned.. insert ads? Sure... capture user into private portal hell? Sure. Track usage via logs? Sure. Do most care? Ehh.. not sure about that.
That previous life was working with a large Regional Bell company... the mere mention of selling of consumer info (even just anonymized web logs) caused the blood to run out of their faces. I don't think it'll happen there, but I don't make promises for anyone else. It's quite the panacea of information, even if just used internally.
BTW, Novell's proxy cache is actually faster, easier and quite a bit cheaper. Squid, while free, will likely never reach the same performance levels.
Dump the IRS - http://www.fairtax.org
I've worked at a national ISP that did a trail of this hardware. The goal is to take the heat off upsteam link. It's fairly useful in a small market were your upstream has to cross a LATA incurring long distance charges.
The logs generated for this device is not anonymous. It's pretty much reads like an Apache log. Source and destination IPs for every request. I remeber wanting to get some sample data to see if we needed to take the Cache log into account for looking at out admin server traffic reports. Small town USA pretty much surfs over 50% porn.
At any rate. It's doubtful they use the cache box to collect internet traffic stats. Why? Well, basically, it's a money issue. Once you have the data great...except it's a freak'n huge sh*tload of data. If you want useful reporting you need to keep data for a year. Your're looking putting almost 500K into disk, CPU, and software. It's not worth it because you'd never recoup the money.
This does NOT mean your ISP doesn't sell your data. An ISP can make some serious cash by selling your data. ISP's can and DO enter into agreements with companies that collect data. However, the ISP wash their hands of the actual process. They let a 3rd party drop a Switch or a Bridge into a POP that directs traffic to a machine that will totally transparently collect data and start collecting checks.
Point is, the Cache is exactly what it appears. A Cache. It does collect data, but I've never heard of a National ISP use that data. They let a 3rd party company do all the work and collect the checks.
Personally I approve of this because it will allow for a more efficient operation of many useful web services like content filtering, virus checking and ad stripping. An important part of this work will also be define a standard way for conforming OPES software to only invoke edge services after authorization from end-users and/or content providers.
"It is a greater offense to steal men's labor, than their clothes"
Comcast Cable Communications, Inc. (NETBLK-JUMPSTART-1)
3 Executive Campus, 5th Floor
Cherry Hill, NJ 08002
US
Netname: JUMPSTART-1
Netblock: 68.32.0.0 - 68.63.255.255
Maintainer: CMCS
Coordinator:
Zeibari, Greg (GZ64-ARIN) gzeibari@comcastpc.com
856-661-7929
Domain System inverse mapping provided by:
NS01.JDC01.PA.COMCAST.NET 66.45.25.71
NS02.JDC01.PA.COMCAST.NET 66.45.25.72
ADDRESSES WITHIN THIS BLOCK ARE NON-PORTABLE
"To report network abuse incidents please send an e-mail to
abuse@comcastpc.com. The e-mail should include a description of the incident, the source IP address and any log files, SPAM or any other applicable information. Incidents reported to any other e-mail address will not be investigated."
Record last updated on 15-Jan-2002.
Database last updated on 11-Feb-2002 19:56:34 EDT.
If voting were effective, it would be illegal by now.
Moderators, please mod the parent down! It's obvious that the poster is trying to shine the light of reason on people, and it's hurting their eyes!!
If it weren't for jumping to conclusions, I doubt anyone whould get any excercise at all around here!
This is what Orangatango is all about; run a virtual browser through SSL and all Comcast will ever see of your surfing is www.orangatango.com:443.
--Just the place for a snark!
I think I smell an Uplink player here. In reality, you can't spoof, ANI will show your originating phone number and that number gets bounced around with each successive call. It is true, however, that starting a few conference calls, chaining them together, then calling Sears, explaining that you're new in Automotive and you need the operator, getting a dialtone, and continuing the chain of calls can slow things down a little.
Comcast is engaged in the large-scale activity of making unauthorized derivative works (with that modified content and extra ads) of (copyrighted!) web sites for commercial gain . If a few of us web-smiths nail down the evidence solidly, the court ought to make us rich off the damages! Not to mention the fun we could have following the (M$, BSA, Scientology) precedents with ex parte orders for copyright violation search!
"My opinions are my own, and I've got *lots* of them!"
And what will happen if the request you make (say to a Linux box with some clever scripting) has the request header like a CodeRed infected box might send out? There are a lot of things they could be doing with this. One might be to quench worms like CR. IMHO, that much would be a good thing.
Of course there are many bad things that could potentially be done with such a thing. If it disassociates the HTTP Host: header from the original destination IP address, and tries to lookup that hostname and connect there regardless of what the IP was, that could be bad. What if you are requesting a page from a web site in an alternate DNS realm like the Open Root Server Confederation ... such as http://chrono.faq/ or http://watch.gallery/ or http://baby.mart/ or http://top-stories.news/?
now we need to go OSS in diesel cars
I don't doubt that this could happen, but I would hardly worry about a post on a message board or mailing list. Yes, we need to be vigilant, but let us get some independant verification from a trusted source. Better yet, why doesn't one of you who has Comcast as a service provider write them a letter and ask? CC the FCC and the Better Business Bureau if you feel it necessary.
Something about this just smells like FUD to me.
>If they are forced to defend this sort of behavior they can portray it as simply an extension of logging all email traffic, which most ISP's have been doing for a pretty long time now.
Sorry but what ISP do you know of that logs email? I don't personally know of any and I worked at 4 or 5 ISPs, 2 national ones. I am just curious because its usually far too much trouble, both in terms of hardware/software and manhours required to do anything useful with said backups let alone restoration.
SealBeater
-- Its survival of the fittest...and we got the fucking guns!!!
- we have all kinds of quality problems. There's a shitload of web apps out there that break with transparent caches, one way or the other, and often in subtile ways. There's even an RFC about some of them.
- when metering traffic independently of the cache statistics we found that we actually did not save any bandwidth worth mentioning. The statistics for the caches of course say different, but interface counters don't lie
:-)
- customer satisfaction goes down the drain. The reason is, even if there is no problem with the caches, people blame any problem with internet and web site availability on the caches - and thus on us.
But, no, we have nothing in place to collect and evaluate logs. It's just much too much data right now to handle or even store it professionally. OTOH, given technological advances, this kind of storage and evalutaion probably will be trivial a few years from now. So the tendency is definitely dangerous.f.
I believe, as many other here, that they are doing transparent cache switching, which a lot of people are doing these days. The reason that you can see it, is that they have not configured their proxy and switch the "right" way. A proper cache and switch have functions to do ip spoofing so that it seems that the request is coming from you but it get intercepted by the switch and redirected to the cache. the target will then get your IP but the switch will make sure that the response gets to the cache instead.
So don't be so sure that you can see it if you are behind one. The problem is that you all are talking the application layer here but you will never be able to catch it viewing that.
Since a the switch they will be using can do switching on almost all layers, MAC adr, tcp request right up the top and do switching on urls.
Btw. this is not limited to http. anonymous ftp, and the most common streaming media protocols can be redirected the same way and cached also.
The difference with the streaming protocols is that the host server not always allows it. But if it does then the cache will report back to the streaming server how many clients it has behind it. If it's a live stream, the cache won't cache it but do a spliting of the screen. The host server should be able to view this as they have many connections on their server but low bandwidth usage.
Some of this about is not 100% correct but it would take hours to explain it all. And it's fun to play with.
The "keep them on the line for three minutes so we can trace them" is pure Hollywood - it allows a hack writer or director to artificially increase the tension.
In reality, if the cops are watching a line, they will have the call traced before the first ring of the phone - the only time consuming part is getting the warrent and telling the phone company to be ready.
The only reason to keep the person on the line is so that they can roll a unit to the originating phone and arrest the miscreant there. That unit gets rolled as soon as the cops know this call is the one.
Semi-OT: I've oft wondered if one could use a Nimda infected machine as a relay for browsing or I-Phone to cover one's tracks. You could accumulate a list of these machines just by watching your logs, then when you felt the need you bounce off two or three, perhaps using SSL to hide the contents of the traffic until you got to the last machine....
www.eFax.com are spammers
After they switched the network over I was trying to get my VPN to my place of work going again. With absolutely no success. The wackiest thing was when I'd try to ping my internal network at work, I'd get responses back from comcasts internal network. You can test it on your machine, ping a 10.9.0.0, 10.11.0.0, or a 192.168.0.0 network which aren't used outside and watch errored packets come back from comcast. I've already contacted them and they said if I want this fixed I have to pay the $100+ a month for business grade service. What a load of crap dsl is getting installed soon.
If your not cheating your not trying. If your not trying your not winning and if your not winning why play?
Unfortunately, it could be time to get a secondary service that allows people to send encrypted requests to a central server where the requests are decrypted and sent to the real server and then the responses get returned to the central server and re-encrypted so all comcast sees is you constantly sending and receiving packets from this one central location. You would, of course have to add in delays to this so people wouldn't know which request went where during which 10-15 second block...sucky. :P
Best. Comment. Ever. Enjoy!
So how come he still has a computer?
he got to keep it as part of the divorce....(along with the shirt on his back!)
(+1 Funny) only if I laugh out loud.
I will terminate not only my Comcast@home subscription, but my cable television subscription as well
Unfortunately, Comcast is so big that they most likely won't care that one person drops their services. There are plenty of others, like myself, who would *love* to get Comcast@Home (or whatever they call it now) if Comcast bothered to make it available to me. Unless everyone were to drop their service at once, this would not be an effective means of protest.
and some sites which I visit are, by their nature, *CLASSIFIED* in content
If something is classified, why would be online in any form? Theoretically, every ISP probably is doing the same thing as Comcast here (if the allegations that they are indeed mining their cached content are true), so either way, this "classified" information is going to end up in someone else's hands.
In case of fire, do not use elevator. Use water!
Put this CGI program on a server somewhere (I have it on a server somewhere - but I like having a working, non-slashdotted server ;):
/bin/sh
;) proxy would be a better name. Well maybe not, Lucent Technologies might consider that trademark infringement. ;)
#!
echo Status: 200 OK
echo Content-type: text/plain
echo
env
This CGI program will get you a lot of information about where the server thinks the client is. If you are using a "transparent" (*) proxy, it will have its IP where yours would usually be.
(*) If it was truly transparent, you wouldn't see it. Perhaps a translucent
Just because it CAN be done, doesn't mean it should!
Most of the uses are beneficial, or at least benign-- tracking trends in usage in order to make adjustments to the network configuration, or measuring usage to verify billing. Some uses will piss off some users-- if the ISP measures a sudden surge in Gnutella usage by a small number of subscribers and puts in traffic shaping rules to limit the bandwidth available to those users for Gnutella, a small number of users may be upset, but a large number of Web surfers may be happier.
Yes, it's possible to abuse such data, or even the data collected in a transparent proxy. Do you really think someone cares enough that you personally visit a dozen porn sites a day to make it worth the time and effort to collect and organize the information?
Well, would you apply the same logic to your phone service? If not, WHY not.
Also, having my packets examined is one thing. Having my packets ALTERED is quite another. Yes, it can break stuff (I have another post on this thread that gives an example).
I have a reasonable expectation that things are not changed at the IP level or above.
If I send a postcard, I expect it to not be changed, other than the postage being cancelled to prevent reuse. I sure as heck don't expect them to rewrite parts of it.
Just because it CAN be done, doesn't mean it should!
If you post a link to a site I'm too stupid to be able to resolve, it's terrorism. You should be prosecuted for being such a daft moron, since I can't use my proprietary monopolist software to view information made freely available to anyone with a clue. It's bad, and those people who are providing services to the world for free are bad, and we need a government-funded crusade to stop them right away, ICANN shouldn't have to spend their own money to protect themselves from all this blatant terrorism.
--Captain Swing
This announcement sponsored by Lludites for a Tax Cut, Inc.
If all this should have a reason, we would be the last to know.