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Cox Comm. Injects Code Into Web Traffic To Announce Email Outage

An anonymous reader writes "Cox Communications appears to be injecting JavaScript and HTML into subscribers' traffic, as part of their effort to announce an email service outage. Pictures showing the popup."

10 of 271 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Is this News? by Pedrito · · Score: 5, Insightful

    No, not like this. At least I've never seen it before. This is intrusive. I've had it show up in my browser at least 3 times in the past couple of hours and it's about a service I don't even use. I don't care if their e-mail is out. I don't use their e-mail. I don't want this stuff and there ought to be a simple way to opt out.

  2. Re:Is this News? by sabri · · Score: 5, Insightful

    No, not like this. At least I've never seen it before. This is intrusive. I've had it show up in my browser at least 3 times in the past couple of hours and it's about a service I don't even use. I don't care if their e-mail is out. I don't use their e-mail. I don't want this stuff and there ought to be a simple way to opt out.

    There is, it is called: Vote With Your Money...

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  3. Re:Is this News? by mwvdlee · · Score: 4, Insightful

    there ought to be a simple way to opt in.

    FTFY

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  4. Re:Is this News? by guttentag · · Score: 5, Insightful

    It's the modern equivalent of the phone company playing a recorded message while you are talking to someone on the phone. Or the post office opening your mail and gluing a message to the contents, ransom-note-style, about your mail carrier being out sick. It wouldn't happen. But cox wants to condition people to think of the web like cable TV, where thy can cover part of the picture with service announcements. The FCC needs to weigh in on this and stop it.

  5. Raise your hand.. by claar · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Yep, I received this too, right on Netflix. Um, thanks, Cox, but even if I used your email service, I'd really rather watch my movie..

    Keep your hands off my traffic, please. Is it too much to ask for you to simply carry my bits back and forth for the agreed-upon amount?

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  6. Re:Is this News? by sjames · · Score: 5, Insightful

    That and they need someone to deliver the last leg on unprofitable routs. More privatized profits and socialized losses.

  7. Bad practice.. by Nezic · · Score: 5, Insightful

    So now internet companies are essentially trying to train users to trust whatever information shows up on a web page that claims to be from 'known' sources?

    After all the problems that spoof emails cause for people who don't know better, you'd think an internet provider *would* know better.

  8. Re:Is this News? by paiute · · Score: 4, Insightful

    http://www.esquire.com/blogs/politics/post-office-default-11215023

    "In other words, we can no longer have nice things from what is still, in theory, our government, because we have placed what is still, in theory, our government into the hands of vandals and madmen, so the solution is to hand everything over to a private sector that repeatedly has shown that, in the pursuit of an extra nickel in profits, it would sell your grandmother to the Somali pirates and drill an oil-well in Lincoln's nose on Mount Rushmore."

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  9. Causing web outage to announce email outage? by billstewart · · Score: 4, Insightful

    I'm sorry, but if you're injecting Javascript and other text into my web sessions, that's a Web Outage (and a serious security threat.) If you're doing it to announce that your email service is down, that's probably annoying to customers who do use your email service, and much more annoying to customers who don't.

    (Unlike many people here, I actually do use my ISP's email service, because it includes a shell account where I'm running procmail, in addition to the spam filtering they do, so email that gets forwarded by my primary email address does go through there. But otherwise I'd be running the filters somewhere else. And it still doesn't justify breaking my http sessions.)

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  10. Re:Is this News? by martin-boundary · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Wrong. Injecting HTML code into an HTTP stream breaks the end-to-end principle. With HTML5 being as complex as it already is and web apps doing all sorts of Weird JavaScript Shit(TM), there is no way anyone can guarantee that adding HTML snippets _anywhere_ won't break a user's session. This isn't fixable on the user end, this is buggy behaviour in the network.