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Australian Telco Causes Minor Panic While Preparing Web Filter

Posted by Soulskill on from the don't-scare-the-wallabies dept.

Twisted64 writes "Australia's largest telco, Telstra, has been frightening users of its mobile data services for the last week. Logging revealed that HTTP requests from a mobile device on Telstra's network were duplicated with a request from another server, located in Chicago. Eyebrows were raised on the Whirlpool forums, with fears that Telstra was giving up Australian browsing data to a U.S. company and therefore the U.S. government. Following a well-worded letter, Telstra revealed today that the reason for this behavior is that the company is preparing an opt-in web filter. Personally, while the idea of my browsing data being logged anywhere does not fill me with joy, the idea of the U.S. government having access to it (randomized or not) is probably going to be enough to make me switch to an inferior carrier once my current plan ends."

3 of 105 comments (clear)

  1. Double requests by kaunio · · Score: 5, Interesting

    These double requests also causes a lot of trouble for some people.

    I'm working for a company running a web service for corporations and we have a very high level of logging and surveillance in order to provide a good service. However we get a lot of strange alerts from double requests from different ip numbers. It appears that some content filtering companies like to do the same (Bluecoat I'm looking at you) and they even do requests with cloned cookies (so they act in the same session as the user).

    A lot of funky things happens if you assume that a user is only going to access certain (GET) links once but a filtering company is intercepting the request and sometimes manage to make the request faster than the user.

  2. Re:Don't wait for the plan to end by mug+funky · · Score: 4, Interesting

    how far are we talking? i've had 3 for years, and in many cases i get coverage out at my folks' place where even telstra has trouble.

    that said, 3 has shitty coverage IN the city...

  3. Re:US Govt.? by xQx · · Score: 4, Interesting

    What leap of logic could possibly lead people to believe that just because the server is in the US that the US Feds have access to it, or even care?

    Give the closeness of the Aussie and American governments, and the long history of governments getting around their "we will not spy on our citizens" decree is by having their allies spy on their citzens instead,I think the more accurate question is:

    What makes you think the american government doesn't have access to your data just because it never leaves australia?