[Infowarrior] - Major ISP to Intercept and Modify Web Pages

[Richard Forno]

December 08, 2007
Google Hijacked -- Major ISP to Intercept and Modify Web Pages

Greetings. Please observe closely the image to your left, showing the home
page for Google Canada (click the image for a full-sized, full-resolution
version).

Does anything seem a bit odd about the normally clean and pristine Google
front door? What the blazes is all that ISP-related verbiage taking up the
top third of the page? Why would Google ever give an ISP permission to muddy
up Google's public face that way?

Well, as you've probably already guessed, Google didn't give this ISP any
such permission. The ISP simply decided to modify Google on their own,
demonstrating a real world example of ISPs Spying On and Modifying Web
Traffic that I was discussing yesterday.

Just brought to my attention today by a concerned reader who chose Google
for his example, what you're looking at is reportedly an ongoing test by
Rogers in Canada, scheduled for deployment to Rogers Internet customers next
quarter.

In case you're curious, "ISNS" on the test Google interception page
apparently stands for Internet Subscriber Notification System. For the
morbidly curious, here's the javascript and associated code that enables
this procedure, which can presumably be applied to any http: (unencrypted)
traffic.

< - BIG SNIP - >

http://lauren.vortex.com/archive/000337.html