Some ISPs are fiddling with your pages

GRADUATE STUDENTS at the University of Washington have found that some Internet Service Providers (ISPs) are meddling with the contents of web pages in transit to their subscribers.

Their paper (pdf), which is to be delivered Wednesday at the Usenix Symposium on Networked Systems Design and Implementation in San Francisco, outlines that about one per cent of the web pages that the researchers tested had been altered during transmission.

The authors document some alarming practices by some ISPs. They examined the data flowing to about 50,000 computers and found that certain ISPs were injecting adverts into web pages transmitted on their networks. They also founs that some web browsing and ad-blocking software was altering pages and creating security vulnerabilities at the same time.

Co-author and PhD student Charles Reis said, "The Web is a lot more wild than we originally expected." µ

L'Inq
PC World