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The Five Levels of ISP Evil
schwit1 writes "Recently a number of ISPs have been caught improperly redirecting end-user traffic in order to generate affiliate payments, using a system from Paxfire. A class action lawsuit has been filed against Paxfire and one of the ISPs. This is a serious allegation, but it's the tip of the iceberg. I'm not sure if everyone understands the levels of sneakiness that service providers can engage in."
How about, instead of something nebulous like points, we describe an ISP's level of evil by the number of years in prison an individual hacker would get if they got caught doing the things these corporations do to traffic passing through systems they control.
If so, where do I sign on to the lawsuit for fraud?
Too late. The "Open Government" Obama administration has already granted them immunity, including retroactive immunity, for any illegal spying. The one big thing I was hoping for from Obama was to roll back some of the grosser programs put in place in violation of 1st and 4th amendments by the Bush administration. Instead his administration has taken them WAY farther. It's getting to the point of approaching gross violations of the Constitution by Lincoln during the American Civil War. But at least Lincoln had the excuse of a civil war to contend with. Obama and the morons in Congress are doing primarily to line there pockets with money from corporate interest.
Who is John Galt?
The motivation for all 5 is money. That's not what makes it evil. What makes them evil is that they are interfering with the way the internet works. If it were a phone call, they would have been jailed. But for some reason, traffic on the internet is not yet considered private use of a communications network the way the phone network is.
It's not just that it shows ads, it breaks lots of internet services.
People seem to forget that the web isn't just HTTP, and there are quite a few other things that do DNS lookups. And weird stuff happens when a name that doesn't exist resolves, and the connection is directed to an ad server.