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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!
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
Actually, I'm a very realistic European. The electoral system in most of continental Europe didn't degenerate into the two-party fuckup of the USA, and still makes politicians work for their votes. Elections are as good as never won by any one party, but by an uneasy coalition of conflicting interests, most of which are just itching for an excuse or opportunity to shaft each other. You may think that party X won the elections, but literally it tends to be more of a case of party X has a 26% of the votes, party Y has 19% and they coopted party Z too which has 6% of the votes, to get a coalition that has 51%. But those alliances can vanish overnight, and coalitions can form the other way around overnight. Party X can go from being the leader of the winning coalition, to being the largest party of the opposition, as another 51% coalition formed without them. Jerrymandering also doesn't work in this kind of an electoral system. Now I'm not saying that the politicians here are honest or altruistic. They're... politicians, same as everywhere else. But they're not in a position to just be overtly corrupt and overtly in the pocket of some corporation or cartel. They'll get their bribes in a lot more secrecy, and be a lot more subtle about trying to favour their "benefactors". What I'm saying is that, essentially, politicians have to be populist, with all the good and the bad that that involves. Overtly favouring corporate lobbies over the interests of the voters, tends to be a suicidal move. On the contrary, they'll fall over themselves to tell you what they'll do to make corporations respect your privacy, treat you right, etc. Antitrust is actually applied, and with a big mallet at that. Etc. Essentially the funny part is that it's a system that works _because_ half the politicians are self-centered sociopaths. It just gives them the motivation to keep each other in check. But anyway, there's nothing idealistic about believing in the rule of the law. Again, here it tends to actually work that way. Now I wouldn't know if the system in the USA is as bad as you paint it, and I'll refrain from commenting on that. But _if_ it's that bad, why don't you change the way your government works? If so many people are disillusioned with the results of the current system, by all means, change it. Make a party whose sole platform is to change the electoral system. Convince enough people to vote for it. That's it. It _has_ happened before. The original Republican system was created pretty much around the sole issue of slavery, and had no trouble flipping the bird to the existing two parties and getting a majority in the congress. Exactly what's keeping you from pulling that stunt again? _If_ the system drifted so much and so obviously from representing the people, surely enough of those people could be persuaded to vote to change it to something more palatable.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
Oh.. you are an European? I envy you guys. Your ISPs have Net Neutrality enforced on them by law (finland), and in germany the cops cannot insert spyware into PCs, in France you are forced to allow others to compete else the state beats your head with a mallet, in Norway i can get a bankcruptcy declaration against a large corporate if it fails to pay me even EUR 1,00 that it owes to me.
And your medical insurance schemes make it possible for me to pay $39 for an x-ray in paris compared to $300 in US.
Possibly US could be there IF both parties are dissolved and all their leaders prohibited for life from politics, and laws are passed preventing corporate ownership of news media, and NO consolidation/monopoly media.
But then...am dreaming.
"Doing what i can, with what i have." ~ Burt Gummer