More technobabble

There has been a lot of discussion in the online community about traffic shaping. The idea is that the companies (mostly the telecommunications giants) who provide the backbone of the internet (the big pipes if you will) in North America and elsewhere are or have plans to filter how long it takes internet traffic to get to its destination based on what kind of traffic it is. This would help guarantee quality of delivery for... you know... big media/industry content, while throttling undesirable yet wasteful traffic like peer-to-peer and non big media/industry content. This is basically a car-pool lane for select content providers and it is being fought by the net neutrality camp. I am very much aligned with the net neutrality position. The internet may have morphed from an institutionalized research network to a commercial network, but I don't believe its users would condone trends like traffic shaping if they knew what its ramifications were. It's the Cable TV-izing of the internet and it sets a precedent of restricting access to those with more money (both provider and user).

Another trend that has begun is the practise of inspecting your browsing habits courtesy of your internet service provider (ISP), where they or an agent they've made agreements with (such as Phorm) perform what's called deep packet inspection to see exactly what you're surfing (anonymously of course) so that advertisers may deliver custom tailored ads to your browser. This is really not much different than what spyware does, except that spyware does the inspecting right on your PC and reports to the mother ship, while this new trend watches your surfing further down the pipe, where you can't interfere. Another approach that has been around for a while uses cookies to track your surfing - there's a decent article about the whole business here. While I personally don't have an issue with this new approach - content has to be funded somehow and advertising is (so far) the most palatable way to do it, lots of folks do have a problem with it from a privacy point of view. Don't even get me started on that topic.

So I find it a little bit funny that we already have a new tool designed to defy the Phorms of the world by generating fake web traffic from your computer. This would supposedly confound the analysis by tainting your web traffic with random web surfing that would be indistinguishable from your own mouse clicks.

My point? Every technology measure can be defeated by another technology.