RoadRunner Co-Opting "Organization" Headers

Dusty Rhodes writes: "AOL-Time Warner cable Internet Provider RoadRunner has begun co-opting the 'Organization' line of Usenet headers, replacing whatever information a user enters with 'Organization: Road Runner - (location).' All RoadRunner customers nationwide, including business customers, have had their organization identity hijacked with no disclosure whatsoever, much less an opt-in or even an opt-out. Nothing in their TOS or AUP. Nada."

Comments

Re:They are your ISP

[waytoomuchcoffee]

They are your ISP and you are using THEIR machines, hence they may do as they wish...an ISP has every right (though perhaps not ehtical) to ... do whatever they want to incoming/outgoing data

Are you serious? Given your logic, you seem to think it's alright to replace every other header as well (including the X-Priority, or even the TO and FROM). Why stop there? Why not change the message body as well?

Re:They are your ISP

[Guppy06]

"They are your ISP and you are using THEIR machines, hence they may do as they wish."

They gave up the right to do whatever they wish with their hardware as soon as they started charging you money to use it. An ISP is bound as much to an agreement as a user (if not more so) because of the exchange of money involved, and they should not be able to unilaterally change the terms of the contract without at least informing the customers.

Could just be a foul-up

[Evil Al]

Not to pour water on a good conspiracy theory, but are people sure this isn't just a misconfigured nnrpd.conf (or equivalent)? It's pretty easy to do; many nntp sites already add an Organization line if there isn't one present -- all it would take is for some admin to foul up a config line.

Not to downplay the significance of companies doing stuff like this, but this may be unintentional. The article doesn't look like it's double-checked the motive.