Hi Elijah, Back in the day, the Telco's feared to interpret, intercept or transform traffic, because they enjoyed protection from liability as 'common carriers'. IIRC that was a legal doctrine that evolved to protect stage coach delivery of goods in chests. They didn't know what was in the chest, so they couldn't be held liable when customers used them to ship contraband. Apparently something in the wacky '80s (Tim Worth's breakup of AT&T?) unchained the communications companies. I would've thought ISP's would want safe harbor from all the Bad Things they transmit.
Furrfu, -- Charles Polisher On Tue, Aug 20, 2013 at 10:18:50AM -0500, Elijah Wright wrote: > Hi there - general call for recommendations and discussion. > > A local telephone co-op (Twin Lakes Telephone, here in TN) has begun > silently intercepting and editing amazon requests, so that they get > the affiliate/referral traffic. > > [It's pretty clear from the session traces I've seen - there's a proxy > injecting redirects upstream of customers.] > > A query to the co-op by a buddy resulted in a claim that they are > doing this "to pass savings on to their members" - which led to quite > a bit of laughter in my local social circle. > > I find this pretty unethical; my peers seem to agree. A couple of the > guys are actively calling board members this morning to 'discuss' it > with them; folks are also reporting the interception to Amazon > directly. > > [It's not just amazon, apparently - we're hearing that other services > are also being intercepted and MITM'ed under the same 'program'.] > > Thoughts, suggestions, et cetera? If I knew who the network manager > was over there, I'd probably drive over and throttle him or her..... > just for being ridiculous. > > Oh, and interestingly - this "service" seems to come and go, being > primarily enabled on weekend evenings. :) > > best, > > --e _______________________________________________ Discuss mailing list [email protected] https://lists.lopsa.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/discuss This list provided by the League of Professional System Administrators http://lopsa.org/
