ISP spying
- Thread starter drak3
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Associate
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Do you mean leaving a hole in the supplied router firewall that they use to snoop around your LAN or keeping an eye on what sites you frequent ?
Permabanned
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You getting at Phorm ?
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If you guys don't do something about it right now then everyone in the country will be spied on. Deep packet inspection will look at nearly EVERYTHING you do.
If you are not upto date with phorm try these sites:
http://www.inphormationdesk.org/
http://www.badphorm.co.uk
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2008/04/24/home_office_phorm_fipr_bt/
If you are concerned about this:
1. Contact your ISP and state that you do not want and that you will switch ISP (and possibly phone / tv subs)
2. DO change your ISP
3. Send an email to your MP
4. Sign the petition here:
http://petitions.pm.gov.uk/ispphorm/
This is serious stuff. The ISPs and phorm are relying on customer apathy. Don't wait until it is too late when the equipment is switched on and starts watching nearly everything you read, and nearly everything you write. Do something about it today.
If you are not upto date with phorm try these sites:
http://www.inphormationdesk.org/
http://www.badphorm.co.uk
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2008/04/24/home_office_phorm_fipr_bt/
If you are concerned about this:
1. Contact your ISP and state that you do not want and that you will switch ISP (and possibly phone / tv subs)
2. DO change your ISP
3. Send an email to your MP
4. Sign the petition here:
http://petitions.pm.gov.uk/ispphorm/
This is serious stuff. The ISPs and phorm are relying on customer apathy. Don't wait until it is too late when the equipment is switched on and starts watching nearly everything you read, and nearly everything you write. Do something about it today.
Tools I could use to encrypt everything. Still, the goverment can force me to hand out the decryption keys (by law) but still this is extreme.
No contact, but I prefer to use my connection in privacy. You never know.
Man of Honour
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Well it's nothing to do with phorm but we can and do monitor customer traffic, we take 5 minute captures of traffic (on DSL pipes) at regular intervals. It tells us all sorts of useful stuff like most common protocols, most common destinations etc...
We capture headers only generally (nothing to do with privacy but 5 minutes of traffic on a couple of 155mbit pipes is substantial data volumes before long). If we chose to we could read any unencrypted email people send (though we could do that on our mail relays too). Our legal guys advise us that our terms allow this so I suspect most ISPs are the same.
Encryption makes it harder in some ways but we still know endpoints and data volumes, it's dumb people think that ssl on their downloads is so secure, we might not know what you're downloading but it's obvious you are.
We capture headers only generally (nothing to do with privacy but 5 minutes of traffic on a couple of 155mbit pipes is substantial data volumes before long). If we chose to we could read any unencrypted email people send (though we could do that on our mail relays too). Our legal guys advise us that our terms allow this so I suspect most ISPs are the same.
Encryption makes it harder in some ways but we still know endpoints and data volumes, it's dumb people think that ssl on their downloads is so secure, we might not know what you're downloading but it's obvious you are.
Man of Honour
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You dont know exactly what were downloading you can take a guess at what is it from where it came from though
Quite, besides I don't care hugely what you're downloading, we're not the copyright police, my interest is usage patterns. If 20% of our traffic is going to BBC for iplayer then maybe we'll upgrade our peering with them...
I think the main reason people use SSL is for that very reason. If you can not tell what they are downloading then they can not either be sued by copyright companies or expelled from their ISP for copyright infringment.
So i don't think its dumb for people who want to secure their conenction in order to prevent this.
Man of Honour
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Well maybe, thing is, we don't need to prove you're doing something illegal to chuck you off. We've never done it but we could if we fancied.
One customer managed to get my attention my downloading twice as much as anybody else in a week, I had a chat with their IT manager, they were a business who had a legit explanation which matched our traffic profiling and I'm fine with that.
If it had been a home user who said 'mind your own business' then it would have gone further. It was an huge traffic volume though, equivalent to 6.8Mmps 24/7 for a week...
EDIT: I'd also add, no, if you're going to break the law then I guess it's not so dumb to try and hide it.
Soldato
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Lawsuits come from P2P and using encryption doesn't make the slightest bit of difference to that.
I must admit i was reading ona dslguide last week and soem guy has claiemd to of downloaded 1.4 terrabytes on BE last month and I just thought to myself fs. If people didnt download crazy amounts there probably wouldnt be any caps
There wouldn't be caps if ISP's invested in decent networks and used more realistic pricing instead of undercutting everybody. I transfer 8-12TB a month from a £17.50 dedicated server, I'm free to do that because my provider has invested in a great network with plenty of capacity. You can of course look to countries with fast connections, that's not just national infrastructure - they can use lots of international bandwidth.
Your provider though is almost certainly relying on data center bandwidth costs, which are considerably cheaper than getting the data out to the end customer (via local connections, and pieces of string), and even then will be playing pretty much the same numbers game the ISP's are - hoping that for every customer paying £17.50 a month to transfer 8-12tb of data there will be 20-30 or more who might only be transferring a couple of hundred gig or less.
If ISP's were realistic about billing customers, they would bill per GB with a small allowance included with the connection cost - but that would be much harder to explain to customers than the current setup (given how many people are not at all technically minded and just want a connection).
If ISP's were realistic about billing customers, they would bill per GB with a small allowance included with the connection cost - but that would be much harder to explain to customers than the current setup (given how many people are not at all technically minded and just want a connection).
Soldato
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Oh I know this, got to pay for your backhaul from exchanges, a national network, more support staff and many other overheads across the board. It's why I give the example of other countries, in some you will find Govt. subsidised national fibre networks and free peering that bring costs down but international traffic still costs and the UK is rather far behind. Overselling is a part of any opteration like this, there is no internet service that isn't oversold in one form of another. However, that's an aside from cutting prices to unrealistic levels and not investing so you have to cap and 'manage' users. I use Be*, I use much more than I pay for yet still recently cut my bill in half.
Verizon in the US is a rather good example, it costs them over $1500 to connect each customer to their fast and unrestricted FIOS network and they still consider this a worthwhile investment.
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The industry shouldn't be government subsidised in any way and there is essentially free peering in the UK (linx - there's a few grand connection fee a year but it's small change for an ISP).
The fact is if consumer ISPs invested in robust networks and enough capacity to allow everyone to download hundreds of gigabyte then it'd cost £50 a month or more and everyone would complain about that instead.
I completely agree with Werewolf, the model to go for is per gigabyte charging with a small allowance (25GB or so maybe) but it won't happen anytime soon I don't think.
On an aside, it isn't bandwidth which forces ISPs to shape ADSL or the cost of a national network (it isn't required, BT will offload the central pipes anywhere so you need not have a network beyond a single datacenter if you don't want to.) It's the cost of those central pipes, £25k a month for a 34Mbit central (the entry product), if you want unlimited uncontended bandwidth you do the maths. We're fortunate to be a business ISP so we can subsidise ADSL from other parts of the business but consumer ISPs aren't so lucky...
Agreed, and the sooner we get to that model the better.
Your terms are one thing, but what about the law? Genuine question, I'm curious! Wouldn't that be classed as interception under RIPA, i.e. a criminal offence? What about related legislation like the Wireless Telegraphy Act or the Computer Misuse Act? Surely intercepting communications between parties without a court order, whether they're sent plain text or not, is unlawful?
All this fuss with Phorm, and the ICO is still twitchy even though they've said the data collected is anonymous... I wonder what the reaction would be if they started reading emails?!
EDIT - Forgot to add, I'm with UK Online and they (Easynet/Sky/UK Online) have a massive fibre backhaul, plenty enough bandwidth for everyone. I download at 2.2MB/sec and transfer (up/down) well over 500GB a month. They said that's fine and they don't cap/throttle. Out of interest what ISP do you work for?