Posted on 05/13/2008 1:51:24 PM PDT by DesScorp
Charter Communications is sending letters to its customers informing them of an "enhanced online experience" that involves Charter monitoring its users' searches and the websites they visit, and inserting targeted third-party ads based on their web activity. Charter, which serves nearly six million customers, is requiring users who want to keep their activity private to submit their personal information to Charter via an unencrypted form and download a privacy cookie that must be downloaded again each time a user clears his web cache or uses a different browser... Deep packet inspection allows an ISP to monitor not only its users searches and visited websites, but also the type of activity (e.g., email or peer-to-peer), which could be used for traffic shaping and threatens net neutrality.
(Excerpt) Read more at consumerist.com ...
I use a program called KeyScrambler.
The ‘home use’ version is free. It encrypts most entries the user types onto web pages. That might mess up the ISP’s attempt to determine a user’s interests.
==
I hope some 12 year old geek will come out with a program to circumvent the ISP’s ad-ware.
==
If the Web page receives the key presses correctly and isn’t using encryption, it is all going over the Web in the clear regardless of what your program does.
I can’t think of a better way for Charter to drive off their customer base.
True.
I turned off messenger in Windows just for a similar reason. Spammers found it a convenient way to sent pop-up ads.
==
Depending on the form/format Charter uses, there may already be programs (and Firefox extensions) that would block it. I use one called Mike’s Ad-blocking Hosts file (free for home use). I have used it several years. It doesn’t cut out 100% of the ads, but it does cut a substantial number of them out.
http://everythingisnt.com/hosts.html
True.
I turned off messenger in Windows just for a similar reason. Spammers found it a convenient way to sent pop-up ads.
==
Depending on the form/format Charter uses, there may already be programs (and Firefox extensions) that would block it. I use one called Mike’s Ad-blocking Hosts file (free for home use). I have used it several years. It doesn’t cut out 100% of the ads, but it does cut a substantial number of them out.
http://everythingisnt.com/hosts.html
I just tried the opt out thing and the site said the spy service wasn’t being used in this area yet.
So looks like I’m going to have to keep checking back should they decide to drop this and stop being ass*oles.
According to a posting in the comments section of that article:
“The feature will be activated automatically for Charter HSI customers beginning in June 2008 in the following four Charter markets:
• Newtown, Connecticut
• Fort Worth, Texas
• San Luis Obispo, California
• Oxford, Massachusetts”
Aha, I didn’t see that.
It should be some time before the blighters get around to this neck of the woods.
Maybe I’ll move over to DSL or something by then.
Good luck!
I’m on with a local ISP less than 3 miles up the road. No, they don’t have 24-hour customer service. But they live under threat of my walking into the office and looking them in the eyes if I’m provoked. They leave me alone, no ads or junkmail, and I leave them alone. It’s a system I’ve enjoyed for 7 years.
I envy your situation.
Here, to get service I have to literally spend an hour talking to the computer answering machine at their office going through the self help system with it’s perky recorded voice, then the flesh and blood idiot at customer service walks me through the exact same thing I just spent the last hour going over with the answering machine.
I’d love to get face to face with some of these kids and explain that I’m neither clueless or brain dead and if they will just listen without diving into the idiot assist flowchart I can tell them what’s wrong 9 times out of 10.
Oh well, nothing worth having comes without making you want to take hostages...
The University of Washington is running a test there where they dynamically check for such injections, tracking them for their own research, and reporting directly to you, on the above page, any such injections that were made on that page.
Detecting In-Flight Page Changes with Web Tripwires
Charles Reis, Steven D. Gribble, Tadayoshi Kohno, University of Washington (UW).
Nicholas C. Weaver, International Computer Science Institute (ICSI).
February 29, 2008.[ Overview | Detecting Changes | Measurement Study | Web Tripwire Toolkit | NSDI 2008 Paper ] Overview
Our research group was surprised to hear that some ISPs have started "injecting advertisements into web pages requested by their end users," according to a recent Slashdot article. As a result, we set out to measure how often web pages are changed after leaving the server and before arriving in the user's browser.With our measurement tool, we found that approximately 1% of 50,000 visitors received pages that had been changed "in-flight." Most of these changes were caused by software that users installed on their computer (such as personal firewalls or ad blockers), but many were caused by agents in the network, such as ISPs and enterprise firewalls. Worse, we found that many of the products that users installed introduced bugs or security vulnerabilities into the web pages they requested.
To address this problem, publishers could choose to serve their pages over HTTPS rather than HTTP, using encryption to preserve page integrity. However, this is an expensive solution in many respects, so we offer an alternative integrity check. We propose that publishers deploy web tripwires to detect changes to their web pages. A web tripwire is JavaScript code that can detect textual changes to an HTTP web page, with the ability to report any changes to the user and to the publisher.
“Oh well, nothing worth having comes without making you want to take hostages...”
LOL, I can’t argue with that!
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.