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Infighting At ISPs Over Using NebuAD

Mel

0
http://www.dslreports.com/shownews/Infighting-At-ISPs-Over-Using-NebuAD-94835

Internal debates over whether to use NebuAD deep packet inspection hardware seems to be even more intense. One ISP employee tells me there's been internal infighting for most of this year over whether to launch NebuAD. An employee for a second ISP that's preparing a launch tells me that everyone at his CO thinks the idea is terrible, have said as much at meetings and directly to marketing, but have been ignored.

One employee tells me their employer stands to make at least $2.50 per month per user. For a small or debt-laden company (like say Charter) the offer is hard to ignore, even if they may be violating privacy laws and annoying customers.

I was amused to hear the employee is going to ensure they aren't tracked.
"We have two upstream links to the Internet and the NebuAd spybox will only be hooked up to one of them, so I know at least for my home connection I'll be setting a static route to use the non-poisoned link," they say. "I don't want to go anywhere near it." How's that for a candid vote of confidence?.
 
I imagine it's much the same story with Phorm, NebuAd etc. at almost any of the ISPs involved, Mel. ISP technical staff aren't usually avaricious scum, even if their bosses are - we just don't get to hear from them very often on matters of policy because they don't want to lose their jobs.
 
It's good that internal debates like this are being had and shows that on some level the concerns are being acted upon. However, I fear some bigger ISPs may decide that any lost custom would not outway the additional ad revenue gained and thus vote in favour of adopting Phorm etc.
 
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I imagine it's much the same story with Phorm, NebuAd etc. at almost any of the ISPs involved, Mel. ISP technical staff aren't usually avaricious scum, even if their bosses are - we just don't get to hear from them very often on matters of policy because they don't want to lose their jobs.

I'm sure it is, the leaks to the press by a number of BT's employees clearly demonstrate that.

$2.50 doesn't seem a great return for breaching your customer's trust, if the management of these ISPs had any sence at-all they'd at least offer their customers the option of paying a little extra for a private internet connection.
 
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However, I fear some bigger ISPs may decide that any lost custom would not outway the additional ad revenue gained and thus vote in favour of adopting Phorm etc.

I fear you may be right, but if UK ISPs do have to get informed consent from their customers and aren't allowed to get away with hiding what they are up to in the T&C's, it may not be too popular. I hope phorm's idea of selling it as primarily anti-phishing protection also falls foul of the new Unfair Trading Regulations, then they may struggle to get many to opt-in.

I've been working on my own anti-phorm firefox plug-in just in case - mine adds fake phorm UID cookies to http requests to avoid redirects and also tampers with some of the other headers, although I wouldn't be happy to stay with an ISP that feeds any of my traffic through one of these webspy devices.
 
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Latest BT bloomer is if a BT customer visits bt.com then visits other bt.com websites like webwise.bt.co which is hosted in america on planets the cookie placed by BT.com is given to all websites ending in bt.com. This cookie gives off details of account and identifiable information.

So technically they are giving phorm all they need to know about the customner already.
 
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I noticed my own BT login Cookie being sent to webwise.bt.com (in an Ethereal packet log) when I first visited the site, but it didn't occur to me at the time that a BT sub-domain might be under phorm's control.
 
People who had filled in the contact us page on that website had to give telephone number BT account number real names and replies came from www3.phorm.com or 121media.com

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