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ISP Inserting Content Into Users' Webpages

Posted by kdawson on from the not-neutrality dept.

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.

7 of 396 comments (clear)

  1. Re:What's the problem? by patternmatch · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.

    Or maybe, just maybe, they could ask you for your regular email when you sign up. This is not rocket science. There is no excuse for an ISP to be arbitrarily modifying the content of a subscriber's traffic.

  2. Re:What's the problem? by timmarhy · · Score: 4, Insightful
    the problem is going to be that modifying the http stream will break web applications and some secure sessions. it'll become even more of a problem as time progresses.

    imho they are creating a solution to a problem that doesn't exist. there's 1000's of widgets out there they could tune to give you an almost real time view of your quota, building their own an interfering with your http traffic is not a good solution.

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  3. Hey Rogers! by ScrewMaster · · Score: 4, Insightful

    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.

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  4. Re:What's the problem? by weorthe · · Score: 5, Insightful

    that software is very evil

    Yes. Imagine a world in which China/Bush's America/Hillary's America no longer censors the web but subtly modifies it instead. Maybe with the cooperation of Yahoo et al. All power inevitably becomes abused. What good is freedom of expression if you can't be sure your expression is your own?

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  5. Getting away with murder by javacowboy · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.

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  6. Okay, I know... by gillbates · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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:

    1. Copyright law: technically, the modified web page is a derived work. The ISP can now be held liable for copyright infringement if, say, Google, or the New York Times objects. The potential revenues sinkhole from copyright litigators is far greater than what any ISP could bear.
    2. There are ethical problems with an ISP artificially inflating the size of webpages, especially if they charge for the bandwidth.
    3. This smacks of 1984-esque censorship. Once it becomes commonplace for an ISP to change a web page, how long before government uses this for nefarious purposes.
    4. Consider how the above may be abused: a political rival logs onto Google, and the ISP replaces the normal content with child porn. Enter the police and 10 to 20 years in prison...
    5. If I can't trust my ISP to deliver an unmodified webpage, the only alternative is to use https for everything. While I'm personally favorable to such a thing, I realize it will disenfranchize a lot of part time and small time web operators who don't have the sophistication to setup an https server properly. Thus, one of the great egalitarian aspects of the web dies.

    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.

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  7. Re:What's the problem? by jerw134 · · Score: 4, Insightful

    The ISP is clearly partnered with Yahoo, just like AT&T is in the US. So the service is called Rogers Yahoo High Speed Internet. It's not an ad, it's their logo.