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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.


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  • (Score: 3, Insightful) by darkfeline on Wednesday November 25 2015, @11:23PM

    by darkfeline (1030) on Wednesday November 25 2015, @11:23PM (#268176) Homepage

    >Well here's a business opportunity for you to start your own ISP and provide some competition.

    Why don't you try to do it first and tell us how it goes?

    Spoilers: you need, as a bare minimum, a significant amount of capital to invest to even start an ISP, which maybe only the top 1-5% would be able to afford paying out of pocket.

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