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."

Comments

Call it "Tampering"

[theonetruekeebler]

We need to stop referring to these shenanigans with neutral or pragmatic names. We call these actions "modification" or "altering" or "injection" and it riles us, but you can bet your bottom dollar that the ISPs and Comcasts of the world are sitting around coming up with terms like "shaping" and "adapting" and "presentation opportunity."

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