Stories
Slash Boxes
Comments

SoylentNews is people

posted by cmn32480 on Wednesday November 25 2015, @02:35AM   Printer-friendly
from the anybody-surprised? dept.

From ZDnet:

If Comcast thinks you're downloading copyrighted material, you can be sure it'll let you know. But how it does it has raised questions over user privacy. The cable and media giant has been accused of tapping into unencrypted browser sessions and displaying warnings that accuse the user of infringing copyrighted material -- such as sharing movies or downloading from a file-sharing site.

Jarred Sumner, a San Francisco, Calif.-based developer who published the alert banner's code on his GitHub page, told ZDNet in an email that this could cause major privacy problems. Sumner explained that Comcast injects the code into a user's browser as they are browsing the web, performing a so-called "man-in-the-middle" attack. (Comcast has been known to alert users when they have surpassed their data caps.) This means Comcast intercepts the traffic between a user's computer and their servers, instead of installing software on the user's computer.

A Comcast spokesperson said in an email on Monday that this is "not new," adding that engineers "transparently posted an Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) white paper about it" as early as 2011, which can be found here.


Original Submission

 
This discussion has been archived. No new comments can be posted.
Display Options Threshold/Breakthrough Mark All as Read Mark All as Unread
The Fine Print: The following comments are owned by whoever posted them. We are not responsible for them in any way.
  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday November 25 2015, @08:17PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday November 25 2015, @08:17PM (#268123)

    Just from hanging out at geek sites, it's very clear that geeks are unwilling to self-police or cooperate with existing laws against piracy. Instead, they keep claiming (shouting, really) that piracy laws are obsolete and/or corrupt, but that IMMIGRATION laws need to be rigorously enforced, and H1-B regulations need to be overhauled to admit orders of magnitude fewer immigrants.

    If you're a Congressman, an FCC bureaucrat, or a telco executive, you're going to look at that and say hookay guys. Whatever. You're not serious about solving the problem so we're going to solve it without your help.

    Geek here. Never pirated anything in my life. And do believe that people have a right to be paid for their creativity, and don't like copyright violators. But I like even less all the "solutions" provided which end up porking me up the ass in restricting me in how I will use the property I've purchased when I never have pirated anything. And if they think they can stop or even truly slow the rate at which such things occur it goes to prove that the congressmen, telco executives, and bureaucrats are the obsolete ones who don't understand enough to tell me what their solutions are.

    Nice strawman with the H1-B, by the way.

    Now fuck off and die, mmmkay shill?