ISPs Alter Web Traffic, says Study

By theWHIR.com , April 18, 2008
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April 18, 2008 -- (WEB HOST INDUSTRY REVIEW) -- A research team from the University of Washington released a paper on Wednesday which reveals that Web pages are being altered by Internet service providers during the transit from Web server to user.

The study found one percent of Web pages that are being delivered via the Internet are altered during the process, and sometimes in a negative way.

The paper, which was authored by University of Washington PhD student, Charles Reis, and a researcher at the International Computer Science Institute, was delivered Wednesday at the Usenix (usenix.org) Symposium on Networked Systems Design and Implementation in San Francisco, California.

To collect the data, the team programmed software that assessed whether or not someone visiting a test page on the university's website was viewing HTML that had been changed in transit. Sixteen cases revealed that ads were injected into the Web page by the user's Internet Service provider.

Though the paper mostly named smaller ISPs like RedMoon, Mesa Networks and MetroFi as being among the perpetrators, XO Communications, one of the largest US ISPs, was also discovered to inject ads.

The paper is available at the Usenix site here.