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My ISP is the largest in the country and known as SLT (Sri Lanka Telecom).
Through a single router/ADSL Modem, we have a small home network.
Lately, I see a message appearing from my ISP asking me if I want extended bandwidth and I just close it without responding. There's no pattern that I can figure out here that causes the message to appear.
But the most weird thing is that this is NOT a pop-up window. It seems like a DIV on my browser. There's nothing on my computer that could allow a third person to access my resources (at least I like to think so). My OS is Ubuntu 12.04 and the browser is FireFox.
Here's a typical example (most frequently experienced)...
Steps:
- Open new tab on FireFox (FF).
- type the URL stackoverflow.com
- On top of the site, I see a DIV (not pop up window) that contains my ISP's message.
- The URL shows stackoverflow.com
- I close the message (using the x button that is part of the DIV)
- A brief message appears but it's too fast to read, and then the actual SO page comes up.
I'm starting to get suspicious and worried. This seems to happen on all computers on the network.
Thus my question:
Is this normal with the new technology or is this something to be worried about? I think this is like an opportunity for the ISP to do some free, non-solicited ads. But it could be more than that if they can control what appears on my page in place of the real thing. Is there something I can do?
The worst thing is that the question they ask can affect how I get billed. So if one of my kids respond to it, this can be a problem for me.
Thanks for your inputs!
1I think ServerFault is not the right place for this question, but as a very short answer: yes, your ISP can see/influence/modify everything you do over the connection you rent from them, unless the content is sufficiently encrypted or otherwise protected. In certain countries this 'ad injection' is considered illegal. – Sander Steffann – 2013-08-25T13:36:48.740
some consider this illegal? Huh, I feel invaded! And thanks for your input. Do you think there's something I can do to stop this sort of 'injection'? Setting up my own firewall wouldn't seem to be effective since this is from the ISP – itsols – 2013-08-25T13:41:04.710
itsols: I fully understand your feelings. I am lucky to live in a country (The Netherlands) where we have net neutrality laws which prohibit the blocking of Internet services, usage of deep packet inspection to track customer behaviour and otherwise filtering or manipulating network traffic. (wording comes from Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Net_neutrality)
– Sander Steffann – 2013-08-25T13:43:30.0971I would check if this happens on HTTPS sites as well, just out of curiocity – Journeyman Geek – 2013-08-25T14:47:04.760