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Study Confirms ISPs Meddle With Web Traffic
Last July, a research team from the University of Washington released an online tool to analyze whether web pages were being altered during the transit from web server to user. On Wednesday, the team released a paper at the Usenix conference analyzing the data collected from the tool. The found, unsurprisingly, that ISPs were indeed injecting ads into web pages viewed by a small number of users. The paper is available at the Usenix site. From PCWorld:
"To get their data, the team wrote software that would test whether or not someone visiting a test page on the University of Washington's Web site was viewing HTML that had been altered in transit. In 16 instances ads were injected into the Web page by the visitor's Internet Service provider. The service providers named by the researchers are generally small ISPs such as RedMoon, Mesa Networks and MetroFi, but the paper also named one of the largest ISPs in the U.S., XO Communications, as an ad injector."
Yes, lose the cold war, get angry about it but not have the economy to do anything, break out ad-injection to ramp up some revenue and then take over the world!
Moved to http://soylentnews.org/. You are invited to join us too!
I am wondering whether altering web pages by inserting ads changes the ISP status of common carrier (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Common_carrier) thereby exposing it to liability for crimes and/or infringement perpetrated by its customers. Any takers?
by selectively modifying html pages, are the ISPs at risk of losing common carrier status and more importantly, is this any form of copyright violation? Are the owners of websites that have ads placed entitled to compensation?
When all else fails, try.
Rogers has been doing this for a while, which goes along very well with their expensive and not-really-high-speed service.
Someone actually had the balls to NAME these ISPs, instead of referring to generic "providers". Of course it sucks to be you if you live in an area where they have exclusive coverage - but it's good to know who thinks they have the right to tamper with packets going between you and the destination of your choice.
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
a: XO's spokesperson has publically stated (see the PCWorld article) that it was probably a reseller, not XO itself.
b: Most modifications, at least from the client viewpoint (and excluding the exploitable vulnerabilities which were discovered) are benign. 70% of the modifications were client-side proxies, such as personal firewalls, popup blockers, and add-removers.
Of the remaining, most other modifications where things like enterprise firewall services (which modify/insert Javascript checking code) and compression transformations (removing whitespace and/or routines for displaying downgraded images to save bandwidth).
Test your net with Netalyzr
Because of this issue and some related problems I've often wondered about extensions to HTTP to support cryptographically signed pages.
HTTPS is great, but involves a significant CPU cost per page and isn't friendly to web caches.
Signed pages, if static, could be signed once and stored. They'd also be cacheable with all the normal rules.
The main issue is key management. How do you get the signing key? Well, I'm pretty sure the HTTPS certificate key could be used to sign a page, though there might be risks to the integrity of the key. A better way would be to use a single HTTPS request to grab a signing key from the remote site.
Signatures could be just another HTTP header, so browsers without support would never even notice. An alternative would be a HTML comment after the close body tag. The HTTP header, though, would work for related resources like images as well, and for that reason would probably be much better.
Unfortunately, it's all useless because an ISP could trivially strip signatures from HTTP headers or pages if they wanted to mess with the page.
If this sort of thing keeps on happening sites will just have to start offering HTTPS for all communication. The dodgy ISPs will have lower cache hit rates and higher demand for external bandwidth, but they will have done it to themselves.
If only browsers would FINALLY include support for HTTP+TLS and for TLS upgrades, encryption could even be done transparently to the user.
All I see is "Local ISPs cure cancer. All hail SBC!"
"Have you ever thought about just turning off the TV, sitting down with your kids, and hitting them?"
as long as the ISP is paying me to download their ads. If I'm on the connection for 5 hours per week average, and using an average of 22kbps for that 5 hours, and it costs me about 11 dollars per week for service.
22 x (5x60x60=18000) = 396000 kb
if they force me to download one 75kB ad per page, say once per min. that would be (5x60x75x8=180000 bits or 180kb)
180 kb / 396000 kb = 0.0454545% OR $0.50 per week.
That would mean lowering my bill by an estimated average of $2.00 per month.
For that to happen requires three things:
1 - Agreement that they are using MY bandwidth
2 - That this bandwidth has some value as shown
3 - That they should pay me for it.
Once we start bartering for the actual value of my time to look at their ads... well, my time is expensive, especially when you are using MY bandwidth.
So, if you want to force me to look at your ads I will damned well expect a service fee of $5/month total cost for my internet connection.
Guess that will never happen so the other option is NO MORE FUCKING ADS, thank you very much.
NOW we know why some ISP's are claiming that some people use too much bandwidth? Perhaps this whole who uses what bandwidth should be reviewed with some transparency for the public.
That's just poor business. WTF ever happened to 'service is king' in American business? If you provide a damned good service people will be willing to pay damned good money. ?????
Support NYCountryLawyer RIAA vs People
tell us something we don't know http://tech.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=08/04/07/1457218 http://yro.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=08/03/29/2217231 http://tech.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=08/03/27/149253 http://yro.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=08/03/25/035200
Orbis terrarum est non altus satis
When will this zombie...er, urban legend die (at least in the US?)
... and that was a ruling by the US Supreme Court.
... so DSLs don't escape either.
Cable Internet Service Not Common Carrier
Corollary:
FCC Reclassifies DSL, Drops Common Carrier Rules
I'm not rooting for this, but we need to try harder for an actual solution rather than seek the unicorn of a "solution" that didn't/no longer exists.
It would be nice if this was curtailed early with true penalties. Any intermediary data transport should not be allowed to alter information. Block maybe, but never alter.
I never even thought to check for this stuff. I wonder how many other schemes are doing this. Say swapping out Amazon associate numbers, or Google Adsense numbers?? unless your are the sender and the recipient, and check this, how would you know?
How is this different than if FedEx started opening packages and inserting advertising fliers? Or swapping out the high end item you purchased for a replica made in Indonesia?
Please!
My sites charges for advertising -- it is NOT free. If an ISP inserts ads into my pages, then I expect to be properly compensated for them.
If an ISP starts inserting ads of my competitors on any of my web sites, that would be totally unacceptable behavior.
Does this occur when a client's ISP passes traffic from my host to the customer's client? If so, I don't know how I could monitor that or even detect it unless the client user notified me.
I'd like to hear more on this subject.
Banjo - The more I know about Windoze, the more I love *nix
Firefox + AdBlock = Win
All the huge communications/entertainment corporations and every government in the world have been trying for years to get control of the internet and make money off it/control it. It looks like the big push is on. The ISP's want to start throttling bandwidth and content, then raking in the cash from both ends. Governments have finally figured out that they can get what they want by bribery instead of just the threat of legislation, and so has the entertainment industry. They're all on the same page now, and all of us are squarely in their gun-sights.
It's time for those of us who value what we have here to wake up and start fighting back. The pressure is bound to get intense, and it's going to come from a lot of places. There's too much money to be made and too much power to be had in controlling the flow of information to a huge portion of the world's population.
I don't know whether the solution is technological, legal, some combination, or something completely different (like massive displays of civil disobedience, for example). But I'm utterly confident that if people don't start fighting back, we can all kiss access to unfiltered information goodbye.
And that will be a very, very dangerous thing.
I've calculated my velocity with such exquisite precision that I have no idea where I am.
We often complain about the efforts made by China and others in blocking Internet content. But how does this compare to modifying the content? With blocking you know it is blocked, but with modified content, can you tell? The ISP might say that it just puts ads on the pages, but would you trust it? Having a secret ISP framework for modifying content is a disaster waiting to happen. Personally, I think the web should go https.
I demand the Cone of Silence!
Why can't we just convict the CEOs of child endagerment and send them to jail?
For instance someone delibrately hacks ISP pass-thru server, inserts child pr0n into it; streams it to the user; who when arrested by FBI proves in court it was the ISP who changed the pages; and gets the CEO to serve time with bubba!
Yes it does require coordinated well directed effort, but then many would like to play the false flag operations especially if its for a good cause.
I say we do it.
Make a couple of ISP's pay, in jail time, especially the middle-ones, and suddenly you would see the larger fish playing nice and net neutral and crap.
After all that's what the Bush government does, right? It fights dirty, floats Swift Boat ads, leaks out CIA agent names, tortures, use FOX news as mouthpiece, etc.
Play the same game they play.
I guess if ParMaster or the old-age hackers were still alive, they would rise to this challenge.
"Doing what i can, with what i have." ~ Burt Gummer
The ISP's surely have lobbyists...perhaps it's time website owners band together and hire their own lobbyists. I own a medium sized site, I'd get on board assuming we could all agree on things.
The reason they're so against it is because they're already VIOLATING it! If net neutrality laws/policies came to be the ISPs would have to change the way they conduct business now.
The toolkit requires you to run CGI scripts on your server to collect results, but we also have a web tripwire service that is easier to use (available on the same page above). Just add one line of JavaScript to your page, and our server will handle the integrity check and collect the results. We can then provide you with reports of the changes, much like Google Analytics.
We hope that by spreading web tripwires to other pages, we can at least deter ISPs from making further changes to web pages in-flight.
Is injecting data into someone else's bitstream legal? IANAL, but I suspect this practice could very well run afoul of computer trespass and other anti-hacking laws.
To make laws that man cannot, and will not obey, serves to bring all law into contempt.
--E.C. Stanton
If you aren't encrypted, it could occur at any hop along the way. The good news is end to end encryption solves all sorts of problems :-)
The first hit is a thread on a BBS complaining about the web forum inserting _popupControl.
How many other problems caused by injection are being blamed on the wrong parties?
Gah. Two wrongs don't make a right.
And using the law as just some excuse to jail someone you don't like, even via some convoluted fallacy, is not how the rule of the law was supposed to work. And not just from a moral right vs wrong point of view, but it also takes away quite a bit out of the deterrence factor of the law and police. After all, if you know that (A) whether you get convicted or not depends more on whims, friends, or being in the wrong time at the wrong place, and (B) whatever you did, chances are decent they'll find a scapegoat to make an example of, instead of finding you, just says you have more chances to get away with something genuinely criminal.
We tried using spectacular shows of making an example of some bystander, to scare the criminals. Heck, half of the medieval justice worked like that, and the communist block kept at it until the bitter end. It doesn't really work well.
And in this case it would also create the precedent that _any_ content you serve can get you in PMITA state prison. There's nothing to say that only ISP's inserted ads can be demonized and victimized in your setup. Any site, regardless of whether it's serving ads, or is a free forum like Slashdot, or sells stuff on the internet, or is some company's web presence on the net, etc, could be hacked to serve malware, adware, spam, phishing, redirects to other sites, etc. Some of which, yes, porn or to porn.
So what do you propose? That if your company's site can be hacked like that, the CEO goes to jail? Well then how about we take that to the logical end then and give some responsibility in it to the guys who programmed those vulnerabilities too? Or to the admins who didn't secure the servers right? To the security teams who didn't find some glaring vulnerabilities? To the PHB's and developers who had an "auugh, those security guys are just bullies, blowing stuff out of proportion to make me look bad!" attitude and pulled all sorts of strings to get the severity rating lowered? To the beancounters who got a bonus for slashing the budget for security? To the controlling guy who insisted on hiring only the cheapest burger-flippers who had a crash-course in Java, as a cost saving measure? To the level 1 support monkeys who advised someone to disable his firewall and/or disable his virus scanner, just to install a stupid game or access some vuln-laden site? To the idiot who wrote that canned list of answers? Etc.
I mean, if it counts as "endangering the children" if you have some vulnerability that _could_ be used against children, then, seriously, there are a _lot_ of people who had a hand in creating that vulnerability, not just the CEO. That's a lot of jails we'll need.
You'll also notice that it just doesn't say "stop tampering with the sites". It just says that if you can be hacked, you can go to jail. So if you're sure enough of your code and your admins to be on the internet at all, then you're sure enough to mangle the web pages too. E.g., if you're sure enough that your ad server is secure enough to use it on your web site, then you're sure enough to use it in other people's pages too. After all, if it were hacked to serve kiddie porn, it would serve it on your own site too.
No. If it has to be stopped, it has to be a clear law and applied uniformly. The idea isn't even new. Any country has laws against tampering with snail mail. Make it illegal to mess with someone's electronics communications, and apply it impartially and uniformly.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
It's a goddamn study so you know it is fucking true !!
....politicians lie to get elected.
Great study, kudos etc, but one small heads up:
On visiting vancouver.cs.washington.edu (which you are encouraging people to digg and blog) I'm told that I have taken part in an experiment, many thanks, fait accompli - I'm not told (or at least, can't discover without extensive reading) what data has been gathered, whether it will be anaonymous, whether I can opt to withdraw etc.
Do you see where I'm going here...?
I really don't think the UW guys are going to be abusing this data, and they're doing it to protect us - I'm not feeling particularly violated and, hell, I love the smell of irony in the morning - but what is sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander/if you're standing on the moral high ground it helps to be wearing appropriate footwear/people who throw stones shouldn't build glass houses (er, that's enough aphorisms...) - this sort of thing could be picked up by the bad guys to smear the research.
The page really should link to a front page explaining what they're doing with a large, friendly "yes - I want to participate" button.
(Speaking as someone who's just had to submit a long, silly ethical clearance form for a completely innocuous research project, presumably on the grounds that anybody planning to seriously abuse their experimental subjects would be honest enough to point this out on the form...)
In a survey of 100 programmers, 111111 thought that duck-typing was a good idea.
The content on your machine is not altered in any way. Once you pass it off, you really have no say in what's done with it.
How is this any different in principle from the ad stripping software we've always had?
I think this is the same thing as if a paper boy were to take out ads, and or add ads to your paper on delivery. I don't think the newspaper would be very happy with this result. I don't see how this is any diffrent, and I don't think it should be tolarated as such.
Memory is deceptive because it is colored by today's events. - Albert Einstein
Why on Earth are we allowing anybody to read this traffic?
All new programs really need point to point encryption built in by default. As in, I want to design a new {whatever}: In programming I first decide how to secure the connection and encrypt the data. Second, I decide what I'm going to transfer, then the interface.
Post cards eventually led to folded paper with a wax seal to the letter inside a sealed envelope. Where is the same standard of privacy in Internet Clients that I expect when I mail something as simple as a greeting card?
Once Point to Point Encryption becomes the standard in all package design if the government wants to intercept and read my communications they'll have to do what the law says they have to do... Get a warrant. The same goes for my ISP or anyone else for that matter.
There's a reason all Internet use should be considered public. We're all shouting at the top of our lungs. Right now all they have to do is stand close enough to eavesdrop on a public communication that's out in the open.
Most of us on SlashDot are in the industry designing these Clients. Rather than complain, when you write your next Client why not design it securely?
-[d]-
Names are powerful.
If an ISP modifies a web page, they are tampering. Putting their own ads there is impersonation
If an ISP puts your IP at the top of a RST they generated, they are packet forging.
If an ISP examines the data portion of a packet they are reading your content.
If they change the header (other than decrementing TTL or doing NAT) they are packet tampering.
And if they say it's to enhance user experience they are lying
This is not my sandwich.
Actually, that would probably borrow some time for you, but still be the long and embarassing road back to square one.
Duverger's law basically says that no matter from where you start, a simple plurality voting system devolves into a two-party system, given enough time.
So pretty much unless you change the voting system, you'll be back to two parties in no time. You could outlaw both existing parties, do what you will to media, etc, eventually two parties would again consolidate to the point of "yeah, but if you vote for the third guy, you're throwing your vote away."
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
This violates two laws. First the ECPA. In order to modify a web page you have to intercept it. Ok, maybe the ISP can get out of this by getting you to wave this as part of your term of service agreement. Further, even if you could catch them in the act and get the government to prosecute, the fines would go to the government. There is no Gold here.
Second, it violate the copyright act! The right to create derived works is one of the exclusive rights of copyright holders!
Dude, 99, i was visiting sites that were full ads from the ISP hosting your website, what would be different now, that they do this dynamically on the way to the end point user, instead of static inline in your code???
This violates two laws. First the ECPA. In order to modify a web page you have to intercept it. Ok, maybe the ISP can get out of this by getting you to wave this as part of your term of service agreement. Further, even if you could catch them in the act and get the government to prosecute, the fines would go to the government. There is no Gold here.
Second, it violate the copyright act! The
right to create derived works
is one of the exclusive rights of copyright holders! Secondly, the right to create derived works is separate from the right to copy. So even though it could be argued that the author has waved the right to copy by putting the page on the web (you have to copy to display the page, and that is the purpose of the web), this does not waive the exclusive right to create derived works. I am sure that all the proffessionally created web pages have not waved their derived works rights. If this were the case, you would see non fair use knock offs of professional web pages on the web all the time and you don't. Thirdly, the right to create derived works belongs to the WEB page creator, not to the viewer. The web page creator is not a party to the terms of service agreement, so the terms of service agreement can not wave this exclusive right! Fourthly, the copyright act has
civil penalties. They range from $750 to $30,000. OK, if the judge goes for the low end this could be chicken feed. But not if you have a lot of counts!. $750 times 10,000 counts is a lot of money. In addition the amount can go up to $150,000 if the infringement is willfull which this kind clearly is. In addition you get
attorneys fees. Just to be on the safe side our troll could warn the ISP. They will probably stupidly ignore it, or they would not have setup this scheme in the first place. They probably think they are protected by the terms of service agreement. They are not.
Ok, lets set up the troll. We need to find or create a web page with a lot of traffic and it would be helpfull if the author were sympathetic to the rights of computer users. Groklaw comes to mind, but I can not remember seeing any advertising there. Can anyone think of some good candidates?
Ordinarily, I am against trolls but this is an opportunity for the Good guys to profit from one! As well as reform some bad ISP behavior!
I honestly don't know how easy this would be to implement, but how about we start using a new meta tag on our web sites that contains a (dynamically generated) hash of the HTTP content for each page being sent (probably easier said than done). The client browser would then check against the hash with the content it received and notify the user in some fashion if the two hashes differ.
I know this would increase the resources needed for each and every page sent/received, but maybe (client side anyway) you could create a white list of sites that you want to verify that you are indeed viewing the unadulterated page (I.e., bank webpages, etc.).
SD
*Copyright violation is illegal without this step, but you can sue for a whole lot more money if it's registered.
(The "ol" tag seems to be broken. Please imagine the numbers.)
"When you have eliminated the unacceptable, whatever is left, however improbable, must be the truthiness" - Holmes
When will this zombie...er, urban legend die (at least in the US?)
... and that was a ruling by the US Supreme Court. ... so DSLs don't escape either.
Cable Internet Service Not Common Carrier
Corollary:
FCC Reclassifies DSL, Drops Common Carrier Rules
IMHO the Slashdot titles are mistaken. The decision doesn't say they're not a common carrier. It just clarifies what type of common carrier they are.
So they don't have to provide wholesale access to their lines? Fine. Do/can they refuse to give their competitors a retail subscription? (Say: Covad opens an office somewhere they don't have their own net deployed and orders cable internet for it from Comcast. Does Comcast refuse to install it?) If not, they're still a common carrier.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
"An XO spokesman said that the company does not engage in this practice and that any ad-injection linked to its network is probably being done by a "downstream" service provider that is purchasing network capacity from XO." ...I know people at XO and they say this isn't their policy.
There was a presentation at the last Open Web Application Security Project (OWASP) Conference about vulnerabilities introduced by including third party content on bank, investment, and other sites.
The presentation can be found here:
http://www.owasp.org/images/6/6d/OWASP-WASCAppSec2007SanJose_Dangers_of3rdPartyContent.ppt
This type of behaviour by these ISPs would make it very difficult to protect sensitive customer data. I am suprised nothing has been done to prevent these practices.
While only a few ISP's are dumb enough to actually inject ads into HTML, there are actually a large number that will replace existing ads.
In fact, I work for an ISP and we recently began replacing existing banner-style ads (the ones that download from known ad servers) by poisoning our own DNS to a 3rd party company (which we host an internal server for) that then sends a different content stream. The html on the page is not modified at all, we basically hijack the connection of the pre-existing banner ad.
Not that it's any better, but that's not my department anyhow.