[NANOG] Charter Communications going to sniff traffic for advertising?

Wed May 14 22:19:34 UTC 2008

Something Jon Devree and I were thinking about: How would they handle
cookies the size of 1 MB or larger?  Scary as it sounds, looks like a simple
DOS attack waiting to happen :\

JOhn Menerick

On Wed, May 14, 2008 at 2:19 PM, Jake Matthews <jmatthews at cia.com> wrote:

> Majdi S. Abbas wrote:
> > On Wed, May 14, 2008 at 04:31:57PM -0400, Jake Matthews wrote:
> >
> >> Apparently Charter is going to packetsniff its users and use that for
> >> commercial purposes.
> >>
> >
> >       I think you'd find they'd run pretty far afoul of 18 USC 2511
> > for that, without prior consent (18 USC 2511 2) (c)).
> >
> >       I looked at that page, and as far as I can tell, they are just
> > referring to web ads, likely placed on their consumer portal site.
> >
> >       Where do you get the notion that they are intercepting traffic?
> > Everything I see refers to a third party ad network, with no subscriber
> > data provided by charter.  i.e. a typical advertisers tracking
> > cookie.
> >
> >       Using another cookie to opt out of the first cookie isn't
> > unusual, since it's the same mechanism that would be involved in the
> > first place.
> >
> >       In any case, trying to correlate captured traffic to a
> > cookie that would only be exposed in web traffic and to the site that
> > set it, would not be reliably possible.
> >
> >       --msa
> >
> >
>
> http://www.dslreports.com/forum/r20461817-HSI-Charter-to-monitor-surfing-insert-its-own-targeted-ads
>
> Apparently, not just their portal.
>
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