Slashdot Mirror
ISP Inserting Content Into Users' Webpages
geekmansworld, among other readers, lets us know that the Canadian ISP Rogers is inserting data into the HTTP streams returned by the Web sites requested by its customers. According to a CBC article, Rogers admits to modifying customers' HTTP data, but says they are merely "trying different things" and testing the customer response.
replace "trying different things" with "seeing what we can get away with" and your closer to the truth
If you mod me down, I will become more powerful than you can imagine....
Let's get rational for a second here; the ISP is trying to inform you you're reaching your limit, so you don't overshoot it and start having to pay extra. Lets put arguments about limits aside (after all, you've agreed to a contract involving limits). It's in their interests _not_ to inform you, as you'd have to start paying them extra. But they're trying to find a more pervasive way of letting you know. How else can they do it? Via email? They'd just send it to the email address they provide you with. Who really uses isp-provided email these days? it's all webmail, so they need some window to get through to you, and maybe http is that window.
"I think it would be a good idea" Gandhi, on Western Civilisation
I saw Orange doing this on their wireless network in Lyon about 3 years ago. Have also seen it on various hotel networks.
Still get my personal uplink from a small, privately owned ISP that doesn't have anything like enough on-staff talent to wiggle into every aspect of my traffic. About 1/2 has fast as any given nearby Comcast cable uplink. Costs about $20 more a month too. For all that you can take your trafficshaped, mutiliated $29.95/month interweb pipe and <censored>
If you're going to line up at the troth with the other sheep, lower your expectations.
Lurking at the bottom of the gravity well, getting old
This is not a dupe, it's merely your isp inserting outdated data in to your webpage because Slashdot didn't pay your ISP the brand new anti-crapification fee.
It takes a man to suffer ignorance and smile
Be yourself no matter what they say
In other news, a mad internet subscriber broke into the headquarters of a Canadian ISP called Rogers. Upon entering, he hit shot two techs, broke 3 servers with a sledgehammer and then proceeded to start a fire in the CEO's office. Upon being apprehended by police, he was let go after informing them that he meant no harm and was just trying some different things to see how the company would react.
kdawson... you have to start reading slashdot ... man you are an editor.. atleast add an rss feed and read only story headlines.... it was posted yesterday on slashdot
Saw this story a day or two ago here. I don't think they have any right to be modifying content that does not belong to them. They are modifying content for purposes that the site owner's did not intend and many site owners would consider that misuse of their site content. The fact that they are modifying that content also clearly shows their systems are taking a look at every single web page viewed by a subscriber and the privacy implications are beyond creepy. Seems like protocols like Tor to protect privacy are becoming increasingly justified.
Babies come from people "experimenting" too.
More discussion here.
Bogtha Bogtha Bogtha
Are like the wild west.
I wonder if advertisers will start talking about blacklisting ISPs that modify content? Or maybe try to find some way to charge them extra?
It seems that the customer would be less unhappy about a warning that he is about to reach a bandwidth cap, page modifications and all, than just get a thousand dollar bill out of the blue. There is no set mechanism for the ISP to communicate with the customer over Internet, so creating one might be justifiable in this case. Write again when a (non-free) ISP injects ads or blocks competitor's websites.
You're going to get modded funny and I'm going to groan :/
update: modded funny 1 minute into my 2 minute posting timeout for the GP post! grooan
According to a CBC article, Rogers admits to modifying customers' HTTP data, but says they are merely "trying different things" and testing the customer response.
Oh, well, that's ok then, if you are only trying different...HEY! Wait a minute! You can't do that. Why, I oughta....
Yep. I don't use Rogers and I don't see this article. Er, wait...
Are they doing that with Oven Mitts? No?! Lame....
I got your "customer response" right here.
Seriously, when it becomes acceptable for the phone company to break into my conversation with "Did you know that Geico can save you ton of money on car insurance?" then my ISP can screw around with my Web pages. Otherwise, get your sticky paws OFF me, you damn dirty apes.
The higher the technology, the sharper that two-edged sword.
That is to say, this is a case of your ISP using packet modification to insert code into your HTTP stream, but it doesn't have to be so innocuous. It's quite possible that someone who has hacked into your ISP could do the same thing.. and not just to HTTP streams, but any TCP stream. Downloaded any executables lately? Its quite possible that a hacker could have intercepted any packet that begins with "MZ", has a non-zero value at offset 0x3c which contains a 4 byte offset into the packet that has "PE" at it. There's a windows binary, let's change the bytes at the entrypoint to do something malicious.
SSL is your friend.
If only we could get IPSEC happening.
How we know is more important than what we know.
It seems we just had a story that talked about Rogers.
Will ISP Web Content Filtering Continue To Grow?
(No, this one words it differently. -- Inserted by your friends at the NSA)
...I'm merely trying different things to see what sort of response I would get from people.
I'm sorry, but in the US, the ISP needs to be brought up on Federal Criminal charges of interfering with commerce on a local, state, federal and international level.
I propose turning their company name into a verb, "roger", which means to manipulate internet data without the receiver's permission. Everytime you exclaim, "I've been rogered!" or "They rogered my data!" the Rogers company name will hold on to its well-earned place in history. And yes, "roger" already means something else quite similar. With either definition, something is being inserted where it probably shouldn't go.
.... Then I think I will try a different ISP. After all, what is good for the goose is good for the gander right?
This is my opinion. To make sure you don't steal it, it's covered by the DMCA.
I am a Rogers [V1AGR4] customer, and I [MORTGAGE RATES FALL AGAIN!] think you're all just overreacting [VISTA - THE BEST WINDOWS YET!].
Now let's have no more talk about this bizarre coverup.
So.... why aren't there any high profile lawsuits against Rogers yet?
First they throttle BitTorrent traffic. Then, when BitTorrent users encrypted their connections, all encrypted traffic was throttled, making VPN connections unbearably slow.
The only reason I can think of that they're getting away with this is that...uh...people in Ontario don't telecommute at all?
Why is everybody letting Rogers get away with these shenanigans? Rogers' practises must be costing some business users serious money. I simply don't understand.
This space left intentionally blank.
government honey nets....
Imagine being given wrong directions, misleading or misinforming.
This could be merely the first step in domestic warfare upon civilians. In the case of the US, bitching about China conducting IT warfare against the US... sheesh, the US ADMITTED (IIRC) that it would seek out technical capabilities in this area. Doesn't matter anymore who started it. The whiny bitching in the papers is pathetic. All governments do this, so the US is not the only nor the last target.
But, Rogers is probably just sleuthing along a la AT&T, on the Canadian side of the border.
Could be that real, bona fide Terrorists set up shop in comfy (to them?) Canada and Canada, fearful of becoming a haven for springboard attacks to the good ole U.S. of A, wants to show washington it can get tough with technical prowess.
OTOH, could be the US is encouraging Canada to do this, knowing the fallout will be terrorists might have to clam up and reduce their activity.
As for crackers, they will have to also go further underground, or risk being caught.
So, what we have is stupid criminals and less sophisticated Ts getting caught, marketing teams manipulating consumer privacy information, and government saying it's all for the common good.
Somewhere in there lies the truth, the dark truth, and worse.
Previously: "Linux... Toward the Sunrise..." Now: "Linux... Toward the-- No, now, part of Every Sunrise"
Canadian ISP RogCOCKSUCKERSers
/rhethorical_questions
I'm just trying different things, too... inserting content into the http stream. Oh, does that offend you? Well guess what? YOUR CUSTOMERS DON'T CARE FOR IT EITHER!
Those naughty Canadians.
...to guess that the "customer response" would be overwhelmingly negative.
here in the uk we have the truly contemptible carphone warehouse that plies a similarly intrusive practice
This is a dupe, but it's worth commenting on.
The fundamental problem I see with this is that the ISP is changing the content of webpages to suit their own interests. There are a myriad of problems here, regardless of whether or not the customer accepts it:
In light of the fact that a certain ISP blocked access to union websites, this is an alarming event indeed. Democracy depends on the free flow of information, and I'm thinking that it might be appropriate to make such a practice illegal, if only for the sake of preserving democracy. It will first be used for commercial gain, and later, leveraged as a political tool.
The society for a thought-free internet welcomes you.
They are trying to figure out how to make money because they are selling broadband internet so cheap that the profit margin is thin as ****
I suppose if they have informed the customers that content may/will be modified from the Internet in a sign up agreement than ok, but if they have not, would not this be illegal?
Throwing the legal mumbo jumbo away, why would they want to do this, what is the intent?
Sounds dodgy to me!
Cheers
I just want my ISP to give me access to and from the internet. No inserting content, no filtering ports, no filtering content, no monitoring. Just connect me to the damn network allot me some bandwidth and leave me be! Surely there must be demand for plain and simple, no strings attached internet access.
If you want news from today, you have to come back tomorrow.
What a really stupid thing to do. Never mind that it's unethical, they just lost their common-carrier status. Now the RIAA can sue them for contributory infringement ;-)
At least, that's my understanding of it - ISPs and postal services are legally "common carriers", i.e. they just deliver stuff; they aren't responsible for any legal ramifications of what they deliver. Eg the post service isn't liable if someone mails a forged cheque. BUT...if they demonstrate that they control, inspect, and modify what they are delivering, they might just be liable when someone uses their network to commit fraud.
Begin groaning in three, two, one...
See this old Slashdot article on how servers can detect such modifications when they happen by using a bit of Javascript as an integrity checker.
(Disclaimer, I'm one of the authors of the work)
Test your net with Netalyzr
They want their geocities ads back.
The effect? I'll tell you what the effect is, it's pissing me off!
What do you mean they cut the power? How can they cut the power, man? They're animals!
Lawyer: We were merely "trying different things" and testing the customer response.
Judge: Touche...
And I wonder how many times they're going to insert this story into Slashdot.
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
Web sites need to enable HTTPS properly over their entire site. Then your ISP can do nothing more than just prevent the secure connection from being established. And if they do that, they break all kinds of stuff like shopping checkout and access to bank accounts.
Right now, Slashdot's own HTTPS URL just redirects to the HTTP URL. This needs to be changed to just leave things in the HTTPS mode. Eventually this should be changed so that HTTP redirects to HTTPS. Google does the same boneheaded redirection.
now we need to go OSS in diesel cars
As much as I don't like Canada, the totally awesome Rogers ISP is not doing something wrong here. Thats all I have to say. PS, buy a Playstation 3 at 20% off by mentioning the code ROGERS ISP ROCKS at your local S-mart
God spoke to me.
Supreme court ruled that broadband ISPs are "Information Services" and can selectively block traffic as they please. However, wouldn't altering the contents of data flowing over their networks, or forging RST packets ala Comcast leave rogers/comcast liable for committing fraud?
that this isp is not very concerned with privacy of its clients.
Say you have a friend over or someone you don't know using your open wireless, now all of the sudden there is this message they see giving them information about you.
I honestly cannot believe they haven't considered this possibility. If they haven I highly recommend that if you are a customer you need to change isps right away.
This also should show that ISPs can indeed spy on you and your web surfing and sell that information about you or leak it out or have it stolen, etc...
I found out that bellsouth/at&t can even see my passwords that should by default have been encrypted to where they cannot see it.
at any rate, all of this rises the question of how much traffic would you really get if all this ability to manipulate, censor, inject, extract, etc... your web site data?
Important Information about your Rogers Yahoo! Hi-Speed Internet account!
Our records show that you\'ve reached at least 75% of the 75 gigabytes (GB) per month limit provided with your Rogers Yahoo! Hi-Speed Extreme service.
Additional usage above this limit is charged at $1.50 per GB, to a maximum of $50.00 per month.
To learn how to monitor and manage your online usage visit www.rogers.com
You can upgrade to another level of service which provides higher usage limits and speeds by visiting rogers.com.
Click here to acknowledge receipt of this message.
lick here if you don\'t want to receive this message in the future.
i wouldn't put it past them to do that.
upon the advice of my lawyer, i have no sig at this time
I know everybody's getting mad about how Roger's dare modify their sacred html :) But lets face it, the Google homepage is a fantastic place to put such notices. It wouldn't be a terrible idea for Google to create Google ISP, an API that allows ISP's to communicate with their customer's more effectively about the current status of their internet accounts. Maybe making it a plugin to iGoogle would make it less offensive to people.
I thought Rogers didn't have a limit? Maybe they could just send you an email rather than hijacking your data.
Not at all, Rogers is showcasing the RIAA approved Newspeak compliant Web 3.0.
If the Interweb detects that you are doing anything that contravenes rules in their massive filtering database that pulls rule feeds from all the *AAs, your content is progressively re-written as your packet traverses the rule set. Your elected officials can use "Putin" statements to apply regexes to any controversial issues where you may be in danger of being mis-informed.
By 2010, all Interweb traffic will be filtered by these rulesets so all content looks like a cross between MySpace and I Can Have Cheeseburger.
"Everything is adjustable, provided you have the right tools"
I wonder how they're styling that fancy little box up there. As a web developer, I worry they might introduce an element with the same ID as something I'm trying to access with Javascript, or maybe they're introducing CSS classes into the page.
Of course, I also wonder if I could add #rogersbox { display: none; } to my own CSS.
I suppose it's only a matter of time before my Internet browsing is viewed through a ad littered Rogers web-portal. I can't say I'm impressed. If this "feature" is rolled out in Q2 as planned, I will very quickly be canceling all of my Rogers services.
A lot of people are complaining that it's misuse of a service that they're paying for. Aside from the ethical question of editing someone else's incoming data, how many people would be ok with ISP inserted adds it if it meant FREE high speed internet? What if it went even further and ISPs competed to PAY you to use their service and view their adds? This goes back to the 'free pc' days when companies would give you a free PC with adds always displayed around the edge of the monitor. Providing hardware is a little too easy to hack, inserting into html is much more reliable. I don't personally agree with any of it, but it might be the way things are heading.
Ideally, I suppose, there would be a network of trust, using encryption and signature algorithms to guaranee delivery, and users would simply boycott ISPs who did subversive shit.
Realistically, ad insertion will become completely commonplace, only nominally regulated, and internally endorsed by various US governmental functions.
Bastards. I hope they get the crap sued out of them by ALL the owners of the web pages they're (in essence) altering the content of.
After the Comcast bittorrent interference, the Electronic Freedom Foundation released a tool called pcapdiff. The idea is you capture what your ISP sends you for a given website using wireshark/tcpdump and compare it to what your friend gets for the same site. Pcapdiff diffs the two pcap files and reports discrepencies.
On Fedora you can do "yum install pcapdiff".
It's an early release, but there's bound to be a lot more uses for pcapdiff ahead...
Even better, the CBC article concludes with a reference to the Telecommunications Act, which states that "a Canadian carrier shall not control the content or influence the meaning or purpose of telecommunications carried by it for the public."
Rogers has a long history of playing as dirty as it can get away with. If the old pattern repeats as before, Canadian regulators will respond and Rogers will be forced to back down, leaving everyone -- regulators, investors, competitors, consumers -- slightly more pissed off with it than before.
Parity: What to do when the weekend comes.
I for one, wel[Click here for low cost meds]come our conte[Is your member too small? Click here]nt injecting overlords!
Seems to me they're just opening the market for secure proxy server services. https to your proxy, and out from there.
The problem with quotes on the internet, is that nobody bothers to check their veracity. -- Abraham Lincoln
1) For many years Canadian Cable companies were picking up American TV stations, without payment or permission (stolen content), and inserted their own commercials. This did tick off the Americans. It was a big money maker for Rogers.
2) Ever watch a televised American or other sporting event on Canadian television? Global TV inserts/superimposes local ads over stadium banners and big tv displays. It really takes away from the feeling of being there; there is no Canadian Tire in Miami people!
Rogers has poor record when it comes to ethics (I did do 3rd party work for them and I had to repair significant damage their butcher crews did to my driveway), they will do anything for the almighty dollar if they can get away with it. Is there some sort of law for intercepting Internet communications in Canada? Maybe there should be. Whats next? Rogers opens your email and inserts advertisements? Wispering of subliminal messages over their VOIP service?
Note to Rogers: don't alter the content of the web page that I am broadcasting on the Internet. I do not want to be associated with you in anyway; don't pervert my broadcast!
CC
PS: just in case you had not guessed it yet; Rogers communications does not gotten a red cent from me for 5 years and won't for at least another 5. If they keep it up they never will.
Looks like it should. We probably also need a new standard for lightly encrypted pages. Light enough to not put undue strain on the server but heavy enough to make it impractical to modify pages on the fly.
ISPs commit copyright violation by delivering unauthorized derivative works.
This story was posted yesterday as "Will ISP Web Content Filtering Continue To Grow?", so this one is redundant and should be removed. It's also a misleading tempest in a teapot. Rogers Cable isn't changing the content of the page; it's inserting a notice above it. A useful and informative one. It should be praised for coming up with an unobtrusive yet reliable way of communicating with users. I'd sure rather get a banner on a page than find my service cut off due to a check that got lost in the mail!
No mechanism for an ISP (read: network provider) to communicate with its clients? There is one. Windows Messenger.. the service, not the program. Admittedly, its only for one operating system, but the idea is to provide an alert that the network admin can send when certain conditions (like bandwidth limits) are reached.
If my ISP (TPG Internet) did this, I would drop them so fast even if it meant paying more to get the same service with someone else. But my ISP (unlike Rogers) doesn't do this kind of crap.
...is the "Yahoo" ad placed at the top Since when does Yahoo get a free presence on Google pages? I wonder if Google will go after Rogers for doing this.
My mom always said, "Jim, you're 1 in a million." Given the current population, there are 7000 of me. God help us all!
How would you like it if your cellular carrier did things this way?
"Hi Bob! Hi, Christine! It's me, Sameer, with AT&T. I hate to drop in like this, but Bob's about to run out of minutes for this month. So you two love birds had better wrap it up, or Bob'll be paying our standard $0.45-per-minute rate!"
The US free market: two halves of a government-granted duopoly are free to set the market price.
For those outside of Rogers' service area, who have not had the pleasure of experiencing their so-called Customer Service directly, you can do so vicariously at http://www.ihaterogers.ca/.
If you're computer savvy and have a gateway computer or a UNIX-based OS on your router, you could run a proxy like Privoxy and filter this stuff out.
What the fuck? Won't this disrupt the functionality of existing sites? What if an application needs to parse the data returned, such as a REST-based Flash app? Trying different things my ass.
I Dont put adverts on my site because I dont want them on my site I like the fact that my users dont have to see ads when they visit.
So the customer pays for their connection/bandwith the website owner pays for their server/bandwith and the isp makes money of the site owners content without consent.
Is this legal? sounds like a grey area to me.
What if my users/customers pay me for premium access that has "No ads" what then do I look like to the user when ads are displayed after I tell them ads wont be displayed?
Isnt this deframation?
~Dan
An SQL query goes to a bar, walks up to a table and asks, "Mind if I join you?"
Rogers are clearly not inserting content into users' web pages, as the title claims. They are inserting content into pages viewed by users.
So I have little faith in the claim that they are "intercepting http." What is more likely is that the default proxy server they provide is inserting the content. While it may make little difference to the average user, as the "normal" setup uses the proxy, it seems to me that there's a huge difference between supplying a proxy and intercepting and manipulating http traffic; that is, hijacking TCP port 80. The proxy I can easily avoid by using a direct connection to the internet; TCP hijacking, I can't.
stay the fuck off my http stream. Injecting something else is Illegal in the U.S. It's a violation of the computer fraud and abuse act.
They're using their grammar skills there.
...and punch them in the face...
Or maybe better, try a different ISP.
Read up on it here: http://www.wireshark.org/docs/wsug_html_chunked/ChAdvChecksums.html
"The little cable company that could." They practically invented negative billing, starting their reign of aggravating barely-legal business practice as far back as the early 80's with the stupid bundling of the new pay-channels. They successfully lobbied to crack open the Bell monopoly so that they could compete on the phone market. Everybody believed their bullshit campaign and as a result, everybody pays many times more for phone service which has fallen from one which was affordable and which worked hard-core in favor of the consumer, (if Bell tried to screw you around, a quick call to the CRTC, and they'd be nodding yes-sir to you. Monopolies are great in this way because the public can very easily punish them through government pressure to do the right thing if they start getting greedy and evil), --phone service through bell and all the competitors has since devolved into a system which is now expensive, punitive, crappy and generally mean-spirited, (all contrary to the whole 'competition breeds excellence' meme which should be obvious for the falsehood that it is to anybody with a brain but which somehow remains an elusive truth; I blame the same American ideological propaganda which has landed us in Iraq and which is responsible for rolling black-outs and for people whose lives suck because they can't afford medical insurance. Thanks, guys! Keep on championing the lie while you take it in the rear.) (Ahem. Did I say all of that out loud? DO pardon me.)
Anyway. . .
Rogers argued that it had the right to use Bell's cable system because it had been built in part with public money, and then they turned around and refused to share its own cable system because they claim to have made it with private money. --All claims which are so riddled with lawyer-logic as to make anybody aware of the situation hopping mad, especially when one considers the huge tax-breaks and government hand-outs Rogers managed to weasel away with; they use the publicly-funded telephone pole system, on public land, to hang its infrastructure, over-charge for their rotten service, don't share and don't pay their taxes. Nice job! --The whole thing reeks, but they got away with it because the public was asleep and easily fooled by promises that, "With competition, your phone bills will go down!" Stupid, stupid Torontonians! Even as a teenager I could see the way the wind was blowing, and yet today few even grasp that they've been screwed. Sigh.
Rogers is one of those companies which has been sneaky and crafty and generally foul from the get-go. This latest move is entire par for their course. I don't own a television and I don't use a cell phone partly because of players like Rogers. Anybody ignorant enough to sign up with Rogers deserves exactly what they get.
-FL
Because I recently started using uTorrent instead of just the straight-up bt client.
Now I notice that I see a dramatic drop in my connection speed (speedtest.net) when it's running. Without uTorrent (or any other BT client) my connection speed drops from 6000k down/500 up to more like 900k down and 300k up.
I have yet to get a straight answer out of tech support.
The plural form of "anecdote" is "anecdotes", not "evidence".
...if only they had a little bit more class with how they modified the HTTP data.
... your jar is probably a little too big. And you're a vicious bastard -- do you have any idea how hard I'm looking to find one for retail price right now, to say nothing of two?
Help poke pirates in the eyepatch, arr.
Oh good... I hate it when I visit a website that doesn't have banner ads and popups. Maybe this ISP will fix that, after all it's what the customers what!
The argument is that competition is a good thing because it breeds excellence. My knee-jerk reaction is that, Passion breeds excellence, whereas Competition breeds fear.
--And that Fear can certainly be a great motivator if you happen to be Darth Vader. (yadda yadda yadda)
But of course, that's only half the story; it's a little more complicated than that. . .
Companies like Google and Mozilla didn't come from a desire to grab everybody's money. They came from a desire to do something cool because that was the exciting thing to do. And they did so in the competitive spirit; the question being asked was, "Can we do something better than the last thing which was done?" --There is competition against existing standards. Healthy competition arguably led to NASA putting men on the Moon. That's human drive at its most positive, and it's exciting. It's passion. Competing against the blank page to create something, or competing against others to see who can make the coolest advances; it's a form of measurement.
But competition, like most ideas, also has a dark side; the dark side of competition is greed and the desire to make others fail. --The seductive belief is that it is cheaper to make your competitor fail than it is to achieve great heights yourself. --Or to ride roughshod over people's perceptions to the point where they simply accept poor standards and high prices as normal. Greed-based competition is hopelessly linked to all other greed-based behaviors which ultimately to slavery and total control over the entire world, to make everything serve your ends to feed your greed. --To get as much as you possibly can for as little effort as possible. This is the end goal of greed, and it is a highly destructive competition against everything which isn't you. Make it pay. Make it bleed. Only give something back until you don't have to. In the dark-side mind, this is 'Winning'.
A healthy competition is a completely different thing; it should see tennis players shaking hands at the end of a match. --Or the seasoned figure skater rushing to help the two younger ones who collided on the ice during training.
There rarely seems to be any attempt to distinguish between the two approaches in the business world, and therein lies the problem. As they say, the Devil lies in the details. --It usually does when it comes to culture-shaping concepts. So when politicians sell off public properties because they support 'competition' I think it's a good idea to ask, "Yeah, but what kind of competition? Is it serving them or us?
I should mention that I do draw a distinction between those two groups. Humans v.s. Psychopaths.
-FL
If the big wigs can make a buck off of something, even if it causes an inconvenience to their customers, they're going to do it.
RIP Internet Tubularski (????-2007)
They've been inserting ads in Google and Yahoo search pages for years. Yes, I mean their own ads. At the My Opera forums we've had users telling us about it for 3-4 years now.
Babies aren't a problem with the hole that Rogers is "experimenting" with.
O2 in Germany has been doing this for UMTS connections for a long time. They've figured that stripping whitespace and artificially compressing images before transmission will save bandwidth.
Unfortunately, their white-space stripper breaks XML-wellformedness, which makes me unable to view any of my own sites with Firefox (unless I disable application/xhtml+xml as an Accepted content type).
Most of the mobile (phone) ISPs do this routinely in the UK - they proxy HTTP connections, compress images and insert Javascript into the web pages which detect some key combination to restore the original page contents. You could perhaps understand this for GPRS, but the same applies to 3G and HSDPA: the ISP's caching proxy diligently compresses a bunch of JPEGs and modifies your web pages just so you can have a worse user experience on your 3.6MBit/sec connection...
The only case I could find with a quick Google search in Canada was Society of Composers, Authors and Music Publishers of Canada v. Canadian Assn. of Internet Providers, [2004] 2 S.C.R. 427, 2004 SCC 45 .
Glancing over the case briefly, the Supreme Court of Canada reached a conclusion that ISPs act merely as a "conduit" (which is the word specifically used in the decision), and should therefore not be liable for anything that happens over their networks (unless the content is hosted on their networks, and they explicitly reject to do anything about the contested content). They can only act as a "conduit" and enjoy a "don't shoot the messenger" protection if the "participation is content neutral", meaning it doesn't do anything with the content other than communicating it. ISPs can only claim exemption from liability if they act merely as conduits. The moment they tamper with the content, they stop being a "conduit". Once they have some control over the content, it COULD be argued that whenever copyright infringement occurs over their networks, they should be able to stop it.
Which is what makes this move by Rogers TOTALLY bizarre. Since Rogers is now modifying the content of web sites, they can no longer, it can be implied from this case, claim exemption from liability of copyright infringement. I don't think they consulted with their legal department before rolling these "features" out. The CRIA should jump on this opportunity to quickly sue Rogers and cite this case.
Damn man.
Your sig is disturbing and so wrong on so many levels, it makes the holy matrimony of goatseman and tubgirlgirl look sacred.
Bot Assisted Blogging
http://www.perftech.com/Press/PT_position.html
So you're saying that this Google search results page is copyright infringement?
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=672990256941061139&q=site%3Amyspace.com
Stupid kneejerk slashbot paranoia.
They've made a derivative work of what Google sent (with their agreements, they can do this and, as shown with directories, databases and maps, the collection of facts can be copyrighted separately from the facts themselves).
This is copyright infringement.
And this could see the corporation spending time behind bars.
In case you are not Canadian and therefore you have no idea, !@#$%^&* Rogers is one of the worst ISPs in Canada. I used to use them for about a year until I can't stand them anymore (many reasons such as outage, service, congestion etc.).
Like TV. First the logo, barely noticeable as in dim and small (still annoying when you see it), now very noticeable and often with all sorts of ads of shows you just gotta watch.
This is what happens when there's little choice in providers. Can we all agree Rogers is inherently evil? Between traffic monitoring and now this!?
Let's get rational for a second here; the ISP is trying to inform you you're reaching your limit, so you don't overshoot it and start having to pay extra.
This I don't object to. What I object to is that they are doing it without the permission of the user. In fact some companies already do this by putting the content within an inner frame, to indicate they are surfing an external site - annoying as heck, but they do it, and no it does not make it any more right. Alternative options would be:
- A widget that the user can put on their desktop (think Yahoo Widgets or Dashboard)
- A pop-up indicator - using something like Growl on the Mac
- An e-mail
- A Firefox or IE add-on
Whichever way the user should decide how they want to get notified when they exceed their limit.
Jumpstart the tartan drive.
1. Make a page with google ads, overture (yahoo) ads, and who knows what
-make the page for topics that have the highest paying keywords
2. BUY ads from google. A lot of it, and other sources (sources with invoice. not link farms and spam).
Target the audience of this ISP's
3. set up proper monitoring : awstats and multiple counters.
4. Wait and see.
5. Look at your losses from google, compare clicks from given ISP.
6. Sue ISP for damages to your business and stealing your revenue
These things just make me mad. What the hell do you think they are doing inserting content into someone's pages?
If you RTFA, you will see the notice they're sticking up there is that the user is approaching his monthly bandwidth limit and if he reaches it he will be billed additionally.
Phone companies have already done this for years with long distance calls from payphones. "".
ISP will lose its "fair trade" carrier immunity if its becomes responsible for any content. This could include sexual or ecopnomic crimes, which are big InterNet issues of police lists.
What Rogers is attempting with web traffic is standard procedure with their television traffic. They pick up US network feeds, strip out the commercials, substitute their own commercials for a fee, and forward the new stream to Canadian consumers. This is all normal and sanctioned by the CRTC, Canada's broadcast police, and Canadian Law. Go figure.
So they must think, "Why not do the same with Web traffic?"
Network neutrality does not mean that a provider can't "frame" pages (as do many providers -- especially those like Juno which provide inexpensive or free service) or send them informative messages via their browser.
Let's step back and take a dispassionate look at what Rogers is really doing here. They need to get a message to a customer. Like any experienced ISP, they know that there's a good chance that e-mail won't be read in a timely way, if at all. (We, as an ISP, find that our customers constantly change their addresses -- often after revealing them online and exposing them to spammers -- without any notice, and often let the mailboxes that we give them fill up, unread, until they exceed their quotas and no more can be received.) The Windows Message Service once worked to send users messages, but only ran on Windows and is now routinely blocked because it's become an avenue for pop-up spam. Snail mail? Expensive and slow... and the whole point of the Internet is to do things faster and more efficiently than that. Display a different page than the user requested? Perhaps, but that certainly comes much closer to "hijacking" than what Rogers is doing. Display a message in the user's browser window (where we know he or she is looking) along with the Web page, and let the user "dismiss" it as soon as it's noticed? Excellent idea. A wonderful, simple, unobtrusive, and (IMHO) elegant solution to the problem.
Now comes Lauren Weinstein -- known for drawing attention to himself by sensationalizing tempests in a teapot -- who has never run an ISP but seems to like to dictate what they do. Lauren claims that the sky will fall if ISPs use this nearly ideal way of communicating with their customers.
Contrary to the claims of Mr. Weinstein's "network neutrality squad" (who have expanded the definition of "network neutrality" to mean "ISPs not doing any thing which we, as unappointed regulators, do not approve"), this means of communication does not violate copyrights. Why? First of all, the message from the ISP appears entirely above, and separate from, the content of the page in the browser window. It's not much different that displaying it in a different pane (which, by the way, the browser might also be able to do -- but this is better because it's less obtrusive and unlikely to fail for the lack of Javascript or distort the page below). The display can't be considered a derivative work, because no human is adding his own creative expression to someone else's creation. A machine -- which can't create copyrighted works or derivative ones -- is simply putting a message above the page in the same browser window.
It isn't defacement, because the original page appears exactly as it was intended -- just farther down in the window. And it isn't "hijacking," because the user is still getting the page he or she requested.
What's more, there's no way that it can be said to be "non-neutral." The proxy which inserts the message into the window doesn't know or care what content lies below. The screen capture in Weinstein's blog showed Google, but it just as easily could have been Yahoo!, or Myspace, or Slashdot.
In short, to complain that this practice is somehow injurious to the author of the original page is akin to an author complaining that his book has been injured by being displayed in a store window along with another book by someone he didn't like. Sorry, sir, but the merchant is allowed to do that unless he's signed a contract with you that forces him not to.
Nor is what Rogers is doing a violation of an ISP's "common carrier" obligations (even if they were considered to be common carriers, which under US law, at any rate, they are not). Common carriers have been injecting notices in
I wish I had mod points left and hadn't posted in this thread (erm no matter) because your post is humorous and insightful.
What is to stop ISPs charging an anti-crapification fee to websites? A big ISP would likely be able to extort the fee out of a number of large companies (microsoft/msn, google, etc) and leave the rest of the smaller sites with their data defaced en-route to their customer.
I drink to make other people interesting!
In both the UK and Netherlands at least, if you browse the web using a Vodafone 3G data card or an O2 GPRS connection, the images will be changed to lower-resolution copies (at the original URL!), the full-resolution images will be in a different place, and your web page will have inserted a whole load of JavaScript code that in principle allows you to get from the corrupted -- sorry: optimized -- version to the original. Assuming JavaScript works on your browser and with your settings, and assuming that the hot-keys they are using have not been used for something else on the web page you are browsing.
Of course the JavaScript code could also sniff out all your credit card numbers and send them to the company, but I had a look and this version does not appear to do that....
Hi!
I am going to call and give them my feedback.
I am an angry Canadian! Rar!
"Eh Rogers eh? You hosers hosed my internet connection eh? You guys are real sucks. Puke-breaths. Take off! Gimmie a toasted back bacon, hold the toast."
Wow, you sir are a genius and I can't belive nobody has thought of that threat before. Hm.
The tampering itself can introduce all kinds of problems -- especially since no ISP can possibly account for every variety of HTML sources on the Internet. Different browsers are finicky about how they respond to HTML, so you could wind up breaking some browsers on some content depending on how the injection is done.
And, of course, I want to know that the data I received is as it really is and was intended from the source. Do they also do "man in the middle attacks" with the https: protocol? This would be especially *bad*.
If I knew my ISP was dickering around with my streams, I'd set up a proxy/tunnel to bypass it. And I would also hope my ISP would be conscientious enough to inform me in LARGE FRIENDLY LETTERS that he's tampering with my incoming data!!
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