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Developer Draws Legal Threat For Exposing Indian Telco's Net Neutrality Violation
knightsirius writes: Indian broadband and cellular operator Airtel was discovered to be injecting third-party JavaScript files into web pages delivered over their wireless networks. A developer was viewing the source of his own blog and noticed the additional script when viewed on a Airtel connection. He traced the file back to Flash Networks, an Israel-based company, which specializes in "network monetization" and posted the source on GitHub. Since then, he has received a cease-and-desist from Flash Networks and the code on GitHub has been removed following a DMCA takedown notice.
Readers may remember Airtel from its previous dubious record with network neutrality.
Readers may remember Airtel from its previous dubious record with network neutrality.
When they embed it in your blog ... fuck 'em.
They modified his blog with code, which means it's now his code.
Or are we pretending that when corporations do shit like this it's OK?
I read this as "assholes embed code in pages, and then whine when that code gets made public to point out that it's happening".
No sympathy. Not even a little.
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
Technically they made a change to his copyrighted code and since he was paying them for the service the copyright should belong to him.
Not only that, but they made an unauthorized change to his code that displayed ads. If anyone else were to do this, it would be called "hacking his website" and the group responsible would (theoretically) be brought to justice. However, since it is an ISP, they get to call it "monetizing their service" (or some other weasel words) and the companies responsible for the ads get to sue for copyright infringement. Imagine if a group of hackers sued for copyright infringement because the code used in their hack was publicized. They would be laughed out of court.
My sci-fi novel, Ghost Thief, is now available from Amazon.com.
Ummm ... tell me, what is the stereotype here?
"company+monitization" ... be that American, Israeli, British or Russian ... companies are pretty much there for one thing.
Are you somehow suggesting that the true fact that Flash Networks is an Israeli company makes this is a stereotype?
In which case, you're an idiot and don't understand the meaning of the word stereotype.
Nobody is saying "yarg, teh evil Jews did it" -- they're saying a corporation, who happens to be Israeli, did this in India.
What kind of whiny bullshit is it when pointing out an actual fact that it's an Israeli company is "stereotyping"? One with deluded idiots.
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
If anyone else were to do this, it would be called "hacking his website" and the group responsible would (theoretically) be brought to justice. However, since it is an ISP, they get to call it "monetizing their service"
Even worse, this is a 3G network, so they're not just monetising, they're artificially inflating their customers' usage by forcing them to down content they didn't request on a service that is typically directly billed by utilisation.
Right then, all of you that attack people using adblock as "stealing" content.
This is why we do it.
I'm a good cook. I'm a fantastic eater. - Steven Brust
This isn't net neutrality. They aren't performing any packet shaping or anything like a "Fast Lane".
Altering the content is the very core of net neutrality violations. One could, debatably, argue that packet shaping and quality of service is part of what an ISP needs to do to maintain a good flowing network. But there is no excuse whatsoever for altering content, and it is far more dangerous. It is bad if getting to a competitors web site is slow. It is frightening if the competitors web site has different content on it.