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Comcast To Stop Tracking Users' Web Habits
jdavidb writes "According to this article, Comcast will no longer keep track of what its users view online." Good.
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Give a brief summary. Point to the article. Let us make up our own minds.
Personally, I liked Comcast watching my every move. If they didn't, who would?
Good.
sulli
RTFJ.
That just means they are not reporting it to other people. You can be guaranteed the still mornitor it and use it internally.
Bastards!
Mike
Mike @ The Geek Pub. Let's Make Stuff!
It's bout time Comcast gave their users some peace. In fact, no company should ever be allowed to track users. For what we know, a lot of popular ISPs could be doing it right now.
now i don't have to worry about them sending my room mate (whose name is on the account) spam based on my surfing habits.
my pet machine
You can find the article here: http://digitalmass.boston.com/news/2002/02/13/comc ast.html
As if AT&T isn't tracking users too?
christ....... i wish i had the amount of free time you do
Comcast Executive Vice President Dave Watson said Tuesday that the company was recording no more information about its customers than is common in the industry and no more than needed to optimize its network.
"How else are we going to keep our customers if we don't have blackmail material?"
I looked into the abyss, and the abyss looked into me--and we both winked.
From the article:
In response to the AP's coverage, Rep. Ed Markey, an aggressive privacy advocate in Congress, pressed Comcast President Brian Roberts in a letter Wednesday about the recording. Markey said the company's action could be in violation of federal law.
Sounds like they are just pre-empting a move by the FCC instead of acting benevolent.
ASCII tastes bad dude.
Binary it is then.
The Washington Post has this article about how Rep. Ed Markey is looking into Comcast's collection of personal internet usage info. Hey, this guy must read SlashDot!!
Markey, D-Mass., in a letter to Comcast President Brian Roberts, wrote that he was concerned about "the nature and extent of any transgressions of the law that may have resulted in consumer privacy being compromised."
Also, Comcast has a new press release in response to the fracas.
Light cup, beer drink, thin so chain, neck turtle fat, man I won't say it again
What the story said:
Comcast said in a statement that it will stop storing the information "in order to completely reassure our customers that the privacy of their information is secure."
After using the MBA -> English translator on Babelfish, we get:
Oh shoot, you cought us, so we will pretend we care about you. HAHA, we will just find another way to treat y'all like cattle. BTW: Please don't sue me.
Wonder if (still?) they track people's usage of Newsgroups. Because let's face it, alot of warez and pr0n are exchanged that way.
This is like riding down the road with Guido (sorry all italians) who says..."Ya know punk, I'm going to kill you." He pulls out his gun and gets ready to pull the trigger, when Guido sees a cop car pull along side. Guido promptly puts away his gun.
Do you:
A) Say, "Hey Guido is a great guy...see he didn't kill me. He must not be so bad after all.
B) Think Guido is a scumbag. He would have killed me if not for the threat of the cop. I don't think I'll continue to associate with Guido. In fact I think I'll just out of the truck right now...
If you picked A, please drink the Koolaid now.
Comcast and a whole host of other unethical companies don't give a hoot about you. Sure they might not rape you this week, but as soon as they can get away with it, they will.
With our Gvmt from, by and for Big business, these occurances are going to happen more often. And don't expect to see the cop that saved Guido. Gvmt doesn't have the funds to protect the little guy anymore.
Cheers!
This will also save them a lot of time and hassle should subpoenas ever come around asking for specific users' habits. Plus, less overhead and cost in terms of keeping track of this stuff. Not the world's worst decision by any means.
sig--we don't need no goddamn sig
Comcast is just an ISP, and I don't understand why ISPs want to record that kind of information. For god sake, if you are an ISP, concentrate on providing good bandwidth and good customer services. Why stretching thin (like collecting user's surfing behavior) and pissing off your customers on all fronts? ISP can be a profitable business if you do it right, just like any other businesses anyways.
What do these companies hope to gain? All this market research stuff seems pretty worthless to me. These firms may watch where I surf, but the only real thing they want/need to know is where I'll spend my next purchase. I may surf porn all day and then buy music, I don't generally surf/purchase in any sort of direct proportion, and I suspect most people don't. I may do some research before buying a DVD player, but what I may look at and what I buy may or may not come from watching my surfing habits. So they get lots of information but does it really have any worth to a retailer???? Noticing that I frequent /. probably doesn't help sell anything. I am constantly amazed that people expect to make money off the internet, the internet has grown only becasue things are free or maybe cheaper than in the real world, people don't expect to have to pay for info on the web, and many only use the web to get info on store purchases, the prices may not be as good but having the item in my hand rather than waiting for Mr UPS is what matters!
Wow... A new definition of the Slashdot Effect. Post an article, alot of people bitch, and they stop doing it... Hmm.. Kinda fishy.
I am a leaf on the wind. Watch how I soar.
The article mentions that all users are forced to go through proxies. That kind of sucks; just more of these high speed ISPs trying to limit what you do with the Internet. Next thing they'll be charging premiums to play EverQuest or Quake or whatever.
To speed performance, these proxy computers retain copies of the most-popular Web sites that customers visit.
We don't need that. Web surfers already have something like that on a personal, local level. It's called web cache.
This was an largely unnecessary step to "improve performance", and a lousy excuse to collect the data in the first place.
I'm not afraid of falling, it's the sudden stop at the end that frightens me.
Corporate sutpidity amazes me.
In a company that big, certainly someone should have been capable of raising a red flag on this.
And whoever it was that ignored the red flag had to know that people find these things out.
Odds are if ComCast had said, before they did anything, "the information will be stored only temporarily, will be purged automatically every few days and will never be connected to individual subscribers," and had the followed through on that promise, they could have avoided a huge PR hit.
Instead, they went beyond simple caching, and now everyone is asking the same question:
"If you weren't going to tie it back to the users, why were you recording user information in the first place?"
best web host ever
In response to previous claims of Comcast intercepting packets, the company pledged today "to immediately stop recording the Web browsing activities of each of its 1 million high-speed Internet subscribers." This after the Associated Press announced on Tuesday that the company "has started recording the Web browsing activities of each of its 1 million high-speed Internet subscribers without notifying them of the change."
This adds new meaning. There couldn't possibly be ANYONE else who doesn't want their private information shared with everyone.
"And we have seen and do testify that the Father sent the Son to be the Savior of the World"
1 John 4:14
AOL spokesman Nicholas Graham said, "We do not track the personal Web activity of our members for privacy reasons." The truth is, AOL has been doing this for years. I knew a guy on @Home that had his bandwidth cut for running an ftp server because AOL ratted him out. They may not watch everything, but I know they track IP's and ports. And do their proxies still convert all the .jpg images to .art files?
Well, in all fairness, think of something like September 11th.... Everyone and their grandmother wants to go to cnn.com and see what's going on - Comcast is just trying to optimize the bandwidth they use going upstream, and in the process it also ensures that everyone can see the webpage (instead of having the lovely Slashdot effect..)
Still, Comcast's actions are inexcusable, and not really for technical reasons (@Home had caching transparent proxies for years..)
Sig (appended to the end of comments you post, 120 chars)
Big Kudos to the moderator (timothy) who was willing to take a chance on an anonymous bugtraq tip. I just got off the phone with Comcast tech support, and they said, essentially, that if this information had never leaked out, they would still be monitoring my internet usage.
Just looking at the original article right here, I was very suprised by all the "This is not news posts" that got modded +5.
Quite simply, this is news, and this is not a simple proxy server either, according to Comcast tech support. Slashdot took a big risk in posting this story, and I think everyone that hollered about the original story being a bust owes a big apology to timothy.
Anyways,
It's good Comcast has finally seen the light (or have had it thrust in their faces), but I am still looking for a new ISP. I think this image really explains why:
Curious jumps everywhere
High ping times
I'm afraid Comcast just isn't cutting it any more. Since my area is a Comcast monopoly, I tihnk its time that we pressured our public officials to break up this monopoly.
As I told the rep: "I hope you realize that if a competitor, ANY competitor, breaks up your cable monopoly here, you will lose all your market share."
And he said:
"Yeah, I know"
that's not saying they won't participate in this.
So why were they recording it in the first place if they weren't using it?
that they don't want to compete with the vast resources of the gummint.
They're not recording it because it's no longer necessary. Big bro' is taking care of it...
This just In...Enron exec says future looks bright...RayBan stock rises...
Jeez you guys will believe anything...I bet they are still tracking, just saying they arent...unless, they just ran out of tapes to spool the logs off to...
-- www.globaltics.net
Political discussion for a new world
This article comes as good news, but there's something really odd I noticed at a friends house... they use Comcast's cable service, and can not access -any- websites with .pl domains. Anyone know what's up with that?
I am Leviathant and I approve this message.
The real reason is that it takes alot of money in both storage and DBA costs to collect this data. It used to be worth it but with the current state of the economy, this kind of clickstream data is less sought after by advertisers and has pretty much become worthless information.
Sure they want you to think they are just being nice guys, but it is purely an economic decision I assure you.
I Heart Sorting Networks
As someone who stupidly gave out his cell phone as his main contact number with the cable company when I had no other phone I have been unerringly called on it to inform me that:
1)my @home e-mail is going to die (who needs me@home when you got me@slashdot.com)
2)that they were upgrading their network and needed to make sure that DHCP was on
3)and wonder of all wonders that they are better than the Dish Networks (Direct TV) even though they have worse service and cost more.
These calls continue despite all my 8 seperate efforts to change this number to my new house number. I think that Comcast owes me at least a little privacy.
We had to destroy the sig to save the sig.
...by what companies will do in the name of the almighty dollar. What goes through people's heads in these companies when they decide to do things like spy on their users? And how do they think it's going to benefit them?
For the sake of argument, imagine that a company like Comcast decided to start monitoring everything their users did without telling anyone - and that nobody ever discovered what they were doing. They monitored and monitored for years, tracking every move every customer made on the Internet, and nobody ever caught on. Then what? Do they sell this information to market research firms? Do they use it for their own in-house market research? In the end, under the most favorable circumstances, just how much money do they think they could make off a scam like this?
And in the end they have so much more to lose than to gain. Even though they say they are no longer going to monitor their users, I will never become a Comcast customer because of this. They can't be trusted (of course, not many companies can, if any), but even moreso, they were too stupid to realize what the repercussions of monitoring their users might be. This is what utterly amazes me. How many times have companies gotten nailed for spying or other underhanded tactics like selling user information? We hear about new cases all the time. Companies such as MS, Real Networks, etc. (and now even KaZaA) have shipped spyware (and sometimes been sued for massive amounts of money) and gotten nailed. Yet idiot companies like Comcast continue to pull this crap.
I wish I was a better student of human nature. I'm afraid I'll never understand what drives people to such stupidity.
It's the same thing going on everywhere. There isn't much the end user or small businesses can do. You are either a big ass or you are being sat on. The federal govt can't do anything because they are controlled by large corporations. Big deal, a bunch of people spoke up and they said, "Okay, we'll stop." They know its wrong, everyone knows its wrong, but they still get away with it. Why? Because there is no one regulating them. People can't spend all their time accusing large corporations of immoral activities just hoping you catch them now and again. We need an active organization going around checking up on these kinds of activities and actually punishing corporations for their wrong-doing. Now does that seem so difficult? :)
http://www.askthevoid.com
they would quit trying to charge people extra for using VPN prots.
security through obscurity = modding down anti-linux posts so maybe noone will see them
You was looking at me bum, weren't you?
Is there any way a customer could actually find out if they really did?
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
Let's see how many companies want to gather your personal information:
...etc.
Comcast
Doubleclick
Real Networks
TiVo
Slashdot
Sourceforge
Amazon
Microsoft
Hmmm. Seems to me that the market is flooded with companies trying to sell consumer statistics. With all that competition, how do any of them expect to make any money?
Reminds me when banner ads were all the rage. Everyone assumed they would get a good return for their advertising dollar.
Well, this is just great. I have had such horrible customer service issues with Comcast, topped off by their disrespect for my browsing privacy, that I switched my Internet service to the phone company's DSL. Now that they've changed the policy, I am stuck with slower service. Bah.
Although, now that I think about it, they probably would have invaded my privacy some other way. Once a crook, always a crook.
--
I'd like to know what that means. Storing in this case may just mean archiving, or at least long-term storage of the data. The story doesn't say they'll stop tracking the usage, only that they won't store it. Not being overly suspicious, it was just the verbage used seemed kind of broad to me.
Idiot, n. A member of a large and powerful tribe whose influence in human affairs has always been dominant
Hmmm... this may be off-topic, but...
.com job, we were developing software that would, among other things, collect and store demographic info from its users (whatever the users entered in certain demographic fields in the software options/properties, IIRC).
At my first
However, our assertion was that the data we collected could not be used to trace use of the software back to an individual. That is, we were collecting data anonymously for its aggregate value, only.
In order to make this claim, we planned to subject ourselves to an audit of our security by some third-party company who, supposedly, was good and well-known for this kind of audit.
The audit was supposed to verify that the data was stored in such a way as to make it impossible to trace back to the end user, that the security of our data from external attack and also to ensure that our internal policies were adequate (e.g., that only appropriate employees had access to the data and/or the systems that stored that data, that only certain employees had the ability to grant other employees access, that strict policies were in place regarding the change of such priviledges, etc.).
In light of this, I often wonder when companies claim "we're only using personal information for $X" or "we're doing this to ensure the privacy of our customers"
*) do they really need to collect the personal info to do $X?
*) have they gone through an audit to verify that this private info is secure?
*) if not, why not?
Actually, because Me.jaded = True, I think I know the answers to these questions, but it still doesn't stop me from wondering.
Anyway, I'm glad Comcast will stop collecting this info, but it sounds like someone saying "I'm going to stop hitting you now. Aren't I wonderful?"
-- D.
We don't need that. Web surfers already have something like that on a personal, local level. It's called web cache.
One of the benefits of going through a caching proxy is that the cache is centralized, and available to everybody. This can amount to a huge upstream bandwidth savings for an ISP.
If ten customers go directly to CNN.com, the ISP will download CNN.com from its upstream provider ten times--the fact that customer A visits the site doesn't help customer B, since their browser caches are private. For that matter, if customer A switches between Netscape and IE, he will have to download the page again, since each browser maintains its own independent cache.
With ten customers going through a transparent caching proxy, the ISP caches the page once, and serves it from the cache ten times. This is a huge savings on upstream bandwidth, and improves performance for everybody. CNN.com sees less load on their server, visitors load the CNN website faster, and customers visiting MSNBC.com have more upstream bandwidth available.
So beware, slashdot supports terrorism!
Comcast reassured customers Wednesday that the information had been stored only temporarily, was purged automatically every few days and "has never been connected to individual subscribers." But it said it will stop recording the information, anyway.
Funny how it doesn't say anything about not being transferred or duplicated. Of course, "individual subscribers" is not the same thing as "subscriber clusters" or "market groups"... what's the granularity they did use?
He said that while the company was recording details about customer Web browsing, it did not use the information to build profiles of online consumer behavior.
Of course not, there are other companys who do that for you!
"Comcast absolutely does not share personal information about our customers, and we have the utmost respect for our customers' privacy," Watson said.
He doesn't say that they don't sell it, or for that matter, what they do use it for.
Either way, the info they collected before they stopped was very likely sold, and it was worth a lot of money. This would be a handy trick to swap some PR for some quick cash if the need arose.
You think you might have noticed from the original poster's header - but here ya go in case you missed it:
I would love to run some of our interoffice memos through that translator.
I'm sure this kind of monitoring is widespread. For the overly paranoid, you could get an anonymizer secure shell account and establish an encryped tunnel between your machine and the anonymizer servers for browsing and ftp, taking your ISP out of the loop. The anonymizer can also serve as your proxy for http. Pretty good end to end protection. This of course assumes you can trust services like the anonymizer.
For the last several weeks I have been using the speed test on dslreports.com to monitor my cable modem because it had seemed very sluggish. My download speed was not over 400Kbps in the past two weeks.
I just checked my speed, and at 4:00 in the afternoon, I recorded a speed of 963Kbps, which I deem acceptable for this time of day based on past experience.
A sudden 140% increase in speed for no reason at all? I think not!
Sig (appended to the end of comments you post, 120 chars)
If they really wanted to invade your privacy and sell your information to other companies, they'd have done it already without being so open about it. Hell, they control the mail servers and the proxy servers, they already have all your data. I trust them, why doesn't anyone else?
Is your company running tools written by ma
While I'm grateful to the Associated Press for picking up this story and running with it, I find nothing in any of their coverage that credits "J. Edgar Hoover," Bugtraq, SecurityFocus.com or Slashdot. Just "The Associated Press reported Tuesday ..." or "In response to the AP's coverage ..."
As a former journalist, this bothers me. There's nothing wrong with scanning message boards, listservs, etc. for tips, but credit should go where credit is due.
Second, couldn't AOL technically be considered to do the exact same thing? Every web page you access on AOL is not direct but through AOL's proxies. That proxy is a store for pages and, though it's not necessarily tied to individual users, it certainly could be if they so desire. Is this what Comcast was doing? Or something similar?
I mean look at what AOL's proxies do. They:
a) Take a request from a user
b) Go out and gets that information
c) Hold a store of that information (so other users can access it in the future)
all you need is:
d) Store a record of who requested it
And you've got the exact same thing. And Comcast (claimed) that they never tied individual records to a single account... without the technical details on what each of them is doing, that's the same thing to me.
Personally I am ALL FOR caches... Just make them optional so that I can turn it off in the very rare situations that it breaks someting.
There are several protocols that allow the end user to automatically detect the cache servers that they need to use.
I have used and deployed several squid proxy-caches http://www.squid-cache.org/ that I was able to prove reduced the required border bandwidth utilization in organizations by around 20%. Of course this means that the caches and the hiarchy needs to be thought out in advance. Network planning 101...
http://www.ircache.net/ for an existing cache hiarchy that you can freely connect with.
--
Time is on my side
Y'all are all paranoid. Geez, I think ComCast is giving an absolutely legitimate reason for their efforts. First of all, why trace it back to the source? Because you want to know what to cache in what areas. Personally, if that's what they're really doing it for, then good for them. I respect the idea that my ISP is trying to provide the best possible service by reducing bandwidth.
Personally, I think everyone is way too paranoid about this invasion of privacy stuff. I could care less if they know I'm going to whatever sites I go to. If it's going to get them to me faster, cool!
Hell, that's part of the reason I run Squid on my Linux router at home anyway.
My modem will not work if I add it after the second (5-900MHz) splitter on my cable line. My question: Are there special splitters for cable modems, or can I use a signal amplifier to boost the signal past the splitter? Thanks for all your help!!
I know, -1 Offtopic..
maybe they couldn't find a buyer for the data, so they just gave up storing it.
love is just extroverted narcissism
You know... I heard Bob Edwards mention this as one of the 30 second news bits on Morning Edition this morning.
Coincidince? Somehow I think not. It's outlets like that that bring news to the many users of Comcast who DON'T read slashdot and aren't geeks, but occasionally enjoy a little evil goat pr0n on the side. And they vote.
-- IANAEG - I am not an elder god.
BULL SHIT.
It is quite possible for a transparent proxy to log the plaintext of a SSL transmission through an active man-in-the-middle attack. Check out http://http://www.monkey.org/~dugsong/dsniff/ . According to the site, it works by exploiting weak bindings in ad-hoc PKI. I have no idea if this still works on modern browsers, but if it does, then even using SSL will not stop comcast from collecting data.
if we had a Personal Privacy Alliance that could bust in on these companies with federal marshalls at hand while we examine all their machines and linked storage to make sure they're keeping their word? Seems a much better use of resource than the BSA.
Once again, the message from the corporation seems to be,
"It's only a bad idea if the customer find out we're doing it."
How many other companies are screwing the pooch, and are hoping we don't find out so that they'll have to make a big to-do about listening to their customers and ending the suspect business practices?
SlashSigTheorem: Humorous, Political, Critical, Constructive- If you have a
Comcast ISP Users Everywhere:
You may now resume your daily pr0n broadcast.
Thank you
For something to be a racial slur, it kinda needs to have malicious intent. The stereotype is more from days gone by than the present, and is used rather well to get the point across. I tried using anti-canadian symbolism -substituting mounties, beavers, hockey players, decent beer, and french canadians - and it was less funny because the frame of reference wasn't there. Did you cry and rage against the unfairness of it all when thirtysomething ended, too?
Idiot, n. A member of a large and powerful tribe whose influence in human affairs has always been dominant
The founding fathers new a thing or two about tyranny. The constution is a beautiful, though imperfect, thing. If there was no public outcry, we would still suffer from their abuse, and you know they would "push the envelope."
I guess they can claim convicted felon who's served his time status, which puts them above unrepentant felon status, but no where near smart enough to have never done the crime in the first place status. Way to go, Comcast! In all seriousness!
The thing about things we don't know is we often don't know we don't know them.
snip
The 1984 law does allow cable operators to collect private information if it can show it needs the information to operate its service.
/snip
1984, need we say more?
----
All of whose base are belong to the what-now?
Can this be considered a victory for private citizen using the Comcast network?
Apple is like a strange drug that you just cant quite get enough of they shouldnt call it Mac. They should call it crack
By the way, that shell sure could use some help. The authors should consult the source code for Eterm, gnome-terminal and rxvt.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
Instead of digging in the dirt themselves they sell the connection logs to someone else. Carnivore. FBI. CIA. Al Kaida. Echelon. IRS. Who cares, the company is 'clean'...
Use The Source, Luke!
Apparently, comcast is currently blacklisted with spamcop.
details here.
On second glance, it seems they've had a long history of being blacklisted.
Mmmm, -funroll-loops
If monitoring was occurring, they would only need 7 days worth of data to have an information goldmine that is incredibly valuable today, and good for judging user behavior at least for the next year.
68.49.0.66
68.49.0.67
They're tier1 tech support "didn't know anything" about these boxes when I called a couple of times stating that they're there and they're atleast b0rked.
The Philadelphia Inquirer has recently run a couple of stories on this. You can see the first story in which they reported the tracking and the follow-up story which says they will stop (and in which they admitted they were doing tracking).
--
Runnin' around, robbin' banks all whacked on the Scooby Snacks...
Transparent caching proxies aren't.
Mea navis aericumbens anguillis abundat
It's unfortunate...there's a big tradeoff here.
Corporate America is far too socially irresponisible with personal information, so it's good to have this trend protecting consumers.
But at the same time, the vision of acurate product placement based upon a customer's genuine interests will suffer. It means I'll have to watch the same commercials my mother does, even though we have very different interests.
"Next thing they'll be charging premiums to play EverQuest or Quake or whatever."
Oh you haven't heard? In some places they're trying out tiered service.
The successor to the European socialist welfare states and American big government is Big Brother. The only other alternative is personal responsibility, and that won't happen. The most self-centered voters are the ones who think that the government should do everything under the sun, and there are legions of them. Our prison population is already exploding because of the drug war. Soon we'll all be under house-arrest.
GREED!
I remember when all you bandwagon slashdotters started running your mouths saying it was normal for comcast to to run a transparent proxy server for cacheing.. if you had read the email posted, it clearly stated the author said by examining the server, it was clearly NOT a transparent proxy, and I believed him. Now that comcast got the willies by knowing someone called them out, their fixing things before they get ugly. Takes guys like these to find violations like these in the face of your false accusations of his supposedly "inaccurate claims".
Comcast is still intercepting the traffic, they are just removing the source IP from the logs.
This means they still get the request and the response, and what isn't written into the directory named "log" is written into the directory named "cache".
Comcast hasn't really changed anything, they just muttered some platitudes.
If your area had a proxy, it still does. If it didn't, it looks like you're still going to get one.
These are the neighborhoods in my area that are still being intercepted;
cas01.whtmrs01.md.comcast.net
cas02.whtmrs01.md.comcast.net
cas03.whtmrs01.md.comcast.net
cas04.whtmrs01.md.comcast.net
cas01.towson01.md.comcast.net
cas02.towson01.md.comcast.net
cas01.dover01.de.comcast.net
cas02.dover01.de.comcast.net
cas01.tsu01.md.comcast.net
more to come.
@home's death means Cumcast can screw with their customers to no end.
...because the Detroit Free Press did an article today about how Comcast was CONTINUING to do this. Hunh. Glad to hear that they won't be screwing us- not that they don't already with high prices and a rarely working network.
"Anonymous cowards are just K-whores afraid of their accounts being modded down." - Bob the O (me)
Here in San Diego, California, Cox Communications also has created a new network (so I'm lead to believe -- is it really them, or a branded version of someone else's?) following the @Home collapse. I'm curious if anyone has found similar behavior from them (or anyone else for that matter)...
Madness takes its toll. Exact change please.
Once you run Comcast's statement through the bullshit filter, what they said is they are going to stop logging the source IP of requests, and that's all that they have done.
They still get your requests and the corresponding data, they just don't track which machine it came from. In the "log" directory anyway, the "cache" directory is a different story.
There are more proxies now than there were when the story broke, and it looks like comcast intends to continue intercepting our traffic.
This is the equivalent of the phone company getting caught recording all of your calls, and then responding by promising not to record the number of the phone you use as they continue to record your calls.
Here's a current list. Coming soon to a neighborhood near you.
cas01.whtmrs01.md.comcast.net
cas02.whtmrs01.md.comcast.net
cas03.whtmrs01.md.comcast.net
cas04.whtmrs01.md.comcast.net
cas01.towson01.md.comcast.net
cas02.towson01.md.comcast.net
cas01.dover01.de.comcast.net
cas02.dover01.de.comcast.net
cas01.tsu01.md.comcast.net
cas01.dallas01.ga.comcast.net
cas02.dallas01.ga.comcast.net
cas01.mainf01.in.comcast.net
cas02.mainf01.in.comcast.net
cas01.indpnd01.mo.comcast.net
cas02.indpnd01.mo.comcast.net
cas01.ivylnd01.pa.comcast.net
cas02.ivylnd01.pa.comcast.net
Note to moderator: Notice the username (zorch), same as in the email that started this. I'm the guy who originally made this public.
This message was relayed to me via email to be posted here because zorch was unable to post it via his comcast connection.
/. through the comcast proxies. Coincidence?
From: J Edgar Hoover "zorch@totally.righteous.net"
Once you run Comcast's statement through the bullshit filter, what they
said is they are going to stop logging the source IP of requests, and
that's all that they have done.
They still get your requests and the corresponding data, they just don't
track which machine it came from. In the "log" directory anyway, the
"cache" directory is a different story.
There are more proxies now than there were when the story broke, and it
looks like comcast intends to continue intercepting our traffic.
This is the equivalent of the phone company getting caught recording all
of your calls, and then responding by promising not to record the number
of the phone you use as they continue to record your calls.
Here's a current list. Coming soon to a neighborhood near you.
cas01.whtmrs01.md.comcast.net
cas02.whtmrs01.md.comcast.net
cas03.whtmrs01.md.comcast.net
cas04.whtmrs01.md.comcast.net
cas01.towson01.md.comcast.net
cas02.towson01.md.comcast.net
cas01.dover01.de.comcast.net
cas02.dover01.de.comcast.net
cas01.tsu01.md.comcast.net
cas01.dallas01.ga.comcast.net
cas02.dallas01.ga.comcast.net
cas01.mainf01.in.comcast.net
cas02.mainf01.in.comcast.net
cas01.indpnd01.mo.comcast.net
cas02.indpnd01.mo.comcast.net
cas01.ivylnd01.pa.comcast.net
cas02.ivylnd01.pa.comcast.net
P.S., I can't post to
Comcast HSI is (supposed) to be an Internet service provider. So technically, there is a serious expectation that your data within TCP/IP packets are delivered, and received, "as is" according to the addressing and routing information contained in those packets.
In the spying situation apparently, Comcast arranged their network equipment to selectively intercept your packets, record information about them, and modify them before sending your modified stuff to its intended destination. The same was happening to data intended for your reception. This is essentially breaking/damaging the basic communications responsibility of the network, not to mention violations similar to unauthorized wiretapping.
The privacy violation was easily detected according to past reports, mainly because of modification to data in transit. For example, accessing a site that reports your IP address, shows your IP to be something else. Accessing a bogus site address 1.0.0.1 results in a successful network connection that should not have succeeded. Diagnosic sites that capture and report back http headers and data show data transmitted does not match data received. Secure sites that perform "call backs" based on originating IP addresses break permanently.
As for AOL, they are technically not an Internet service provider. They only provide a subset of Internet contents which they have to retrieve first, on the subscriber's behalf. And if I recall (I may be mistaken), AOL doesn't use Internet standard communication protocols between their subscribers and their infrastructure.
search engine >
:)
Google Search: brittany spears nude >
nakedcelebs.org >
nakedcelebs.org/brittany.asp >
email >
Email Contents:
"Hey Timmy! Check it out!!!
nakedcelebs.org/brittany.asp
DUDE!!! SWEEEEEEETTTTT!"
Note to moderator: Troll will be acceptable.
It seems to me that there's another side to this issue. Don't they have a valid reason to monitor traffic? I mean, suppose they cached frequently used information, like some proxy servers do. They would have to monitor the traffic, in some sense, anyway, to know what to cache, and where to cache it. Perhaps the users would be better off with a caching system: more speed for less money.