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Posted by Monty Solomon on June 7, 2008, 11:11 am
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Leaked Report:
ISP Secretly Added Spy Code To Web Sessions, Crashing Browsers
By Ryan Singel June 05, 2008 | 5:43:36 PmCategories: Network Neutrality
An internal British Telecom report on a secret trial of an ISP
eavesdropping and advertising technology found that the system
crashed some unsuspecting users' browsers, and a small percentage of
the 18,000 broadband customers under surveillance believed they'd
been infected with adware.
The January 2007 report (.pdf) -- published Thursday by the whistle
blowing site Wikileaks -- demonstrates the hazards broadband
customers face when an ISP tampers with raw internet traffic for its
own profit. The leak comes just weeks after U.S. broadband provider
Charter Communications told users it would be testing a technology
similar to what's described in the BT document.
The report documents BT's partnership with U.K. ad company Phorm,
which specializes in building profiles of ISP customers, then serving
targeted ads on webpages the user visits.
>From late September to early October 2006, British Telecom secretly
partnered with Phorm to let the company monitor and track 18,000 of
the BT's customers. Phorm installed boxes on BT's network that
redirected web requests through their proxy server.
Those boxes inserted JavaScript code into every web page downloaded
by the users. That script then reported back to Phorm the contents of
the web page, which Phorm used to create ad profiles of a user.
Additionally, Phorm purchased advertising space on prominent web
sites, showing a default ad for a charity. But when a user who had
previously looked at car sites visited one of those pages, he instead
got an advertisement for car insurance.
The users were not informed they were being made guinea pigs for a
new revenue system for BT and had no way to opt out of the system,
according to the report. The JavaScript caused flickering problems
for some users as the script reported back information about the
content of the web page to a Phorm server. The script also crashed
browsers that loaded a website that relied excessively on anchor
tags. Additionally, the rogue JavaScript showed up unexpectedly in
user's posts to some web forums.
...
http://blog.wired.com/27bstroke6/2008/06/isp-spying-made.html
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Posted by harold@hallikainen.com on June 9, 2008, 6:35 am
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> http://blog.wired.com/27bstroke6/2008/06/isp-spying-made.html
That is VERY interesting! Didn't someone already get in trouble for
adware that replaced ads on web pages with their own? Wouldn't
modification of a web page an ANY way (including the insertion of
javascript) be a copyright violation?
One thing here in the US that I've never understood is that the FCC
considers ISPs to be "information services" instead of "communications
services." I want my ISP to be a communications service that just
connects me to the desired IP addresses and moves bits. It should not
modify the content in ANY way. It may offer DNS and mail services, but
even that is not necessary (especially mail, since there are so many
alternatives now).
Is there anything I can do on my webserver to detect ad replacement
techniques like this?
I wonder if BT has inserted javascript in any of my web pages. Maybe I
could sue them for copyright infringement...
Harold
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