Slashdot Mirror
Some Hotspot Operators Secretly Intercept, Insert Ads In Web Pages
An anonymous reader writes with this excerpt from the NYT's "Bits" column: "Justin Watt, a Web engineer, was browsing the Web in his room at the Courtyard Marriott in Midtown Manhattan this week when he saw something strange. On his personal blog, a mysterious gap was appearing at the top of the page. After some sleuthing, Mr. Watt, who has a background in developing Web advertising tools, realized that the quirk was not confined to his site. The hotel's Internet service was secretly injecting lines of code into every page he visited, code that could allow it to insert ads into any Web page without the knowledge of the site visitor or the page's creator."
I don't think this is news. (Yes, I must be new here.....)
Care to tell me which ISP carries out such a man-in-the-middle attack on a secure web site so I can permanently blacklist them and any entity even remotely connected to them?
IANAL, and I don't play one on TV, but it seems pretty clearly a violation of a web site's copyright to do this. A web page
is a visual work, and at least for any country that is party to the Bern Convention (this includes the US and most or all of Europe),
a page is copyright even if it doesn't say so. So for the hotel or ISP to modify the page, especially when it is being paid to do so,
seems a clear violation. Some web site should make a big stink (lawsuit!) about this and put an end to the practice. I think it wouldn't
be a difficult case to win, particularly with all the other copyright enforcement actions going on (MPAA, etc.).
I wonder if a similar case can be made for organizations like health clubs that show TV programs at the wrong aspect ratio, making
people look as if they're 20% fatter (wider) than they actually are...
So set up an encrypted tunnel to your home machine and set it up so you can browse the web through the tunnel as if you were at home. Slower perhaps, but worth it. If they are injecting stuff, then what else are they doing? Looking at your traffic?
It isn't so much scraping as it is simply taking somebody's website content and copying it for their own profit.
Plain and simple copyright violation where the website owner is the victim.
Slashdot social media options: AIM, ICQ, Yahoo, Jabber and Mobile Text. Why no MySpace?
Hmmmm, no... intercepting and changing internet packages is evil.
Slashdot social media options: AIM, ICQ, Yahoo, Jabber and Mobile Text. Why no MySpace?
Stop thinking like an engineer, and lower yourself to the thoughts of a typical computer user.
"A weird box just popped up! IT says something about certificates and signing, whatever that means. If I click 'accept' I'll get to see the website, so I'll do that."
if you're connecting to an unsecured network, I doubt security is much of a priority.
Congratulations, you are an idiot!
The whole point of encryption is that it allows secure communications over insecure network.
Contrary to the popular belief, there indeed is no God.
You say that big-city hotels have higher costs, and that they charge more for wifi because of those higher costs (maybe not of bandwidth, but other stuff). You then criticize the GP for expecting prices to be higher based on costs? Hmm. . .