ISPs

ISPs, Advocates, and Framing at the 2011 Telecom Summit

/ Christopher Parsons

3183290111_989c5b1bec_bEach year Canada’s leaders in telecommunications gather at the Canadian Telecommunications Summit to talk about ongoing policy issues, articulate their concerns about Canada’s status in the world of telecommunications, and share lessons and experiences with one another. This years Summit was no exception. While some commentators have accused this year’s event of just rehashing previous years’ content – it is true that each Summit does see similar topics on the conference agenda, with common positions taken each year – there are some interesting points that emerged this year.

Specifically, discussions about the valuation of telecom services regularly arose, discussions of supply and demand in the Canadian ISP space, as well as some interesting tidbits about the CRTC. For many people in the industry what I’ll be talking about isn’t exactly new; those not inside the industry’s fold, however, may find elements of this interesting. After outlining some of the discussions that took place I will point to something that was particularly striking throughout the Summit events I attended: Open Media loomed like a spectre throughout, shaping many of the discussions and talking points despite not having a single formal representative in attendance.

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Deep Packet Inspection and Consumer Transparency

/ Christopher Parsons

Image by David Clow

Rogers Communications modified their packet inspection systems last year, and ever since customers have experienced degraded download speeds. It’s not that random users happen to be complaining about an (effectively) non-problem: Rogers’ own outreach staff has confirmed that the modifications took place and that these changes have negatively impacted peer to peer (P2P) and non-P2P applications alike. Since then, a Rogers Communications senior-vice president, Ken Englehart, has suggested that any problems customers have run into are resultant of P2P applications themselves; no mention is made of whether or how Rogers’ throttling systems have affected non-P2P traffic.

In this brief post, I want to quickly refresh readers on the changes that Rogers Communications made to their systems last year, and also note some of the problems that have subsequently arisen. Following this, I take up what Mr. Englehart recently stated in the media about Rogers’ throttling mechanisms. I conclude by noting that Rogers is likely in compliance with the CRTC’s transparency requirements (or at least soon will be), but that such requirements are ill suited to inform the typical consumer.

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Is Iran Now Actually Using Deep Packet Inspection?

/ Christopher Parsons / 4 Comments


Photo by Hamed Saber

I’ve previously written about whether the Iranian government uses deep packet inspection systems to monitor and mediate data content. As a refresher, the spectre of DPI was initially raised by the Wall Street Journal in a seriously flawed article several years ago. In addition to critiquing that article, last year I spent a while pulling together various data sources to outline the nature of the Iranian network infrastructure and likely modes of detecting dissident traffic.

Since January 2010, the Iranian government  may have significantly modified their network monitoring infrastructure. In short, the government seems to have moved from somewhat ham-fisted filtering systems (e.g. all encrypted traffic is throttled/blocked) to a granular system (where only certain applications’ encrypted traffic is blocked). In this post I’ll outline my past analyses of the Iranian Internet infrastructure and look at the new data on granular targeting of encrypted application traffic. I’ll conclude by raising some questions that need to be answered about the new surveillance system, and note potential dangers facing Iranian dissidents if DPI has actually been deployed.

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Agenda Denial and UK Privacy Advocacy

/ Christopher Parsons / 5 Comments

stopFunding, technical and political savvy, human resources, and time. These are just a few of the challenges standing before privacy advocates who want to make their case to the public, legislators, and regulators. When looking at the landscape there are regularly cases where advocates are more successful than expected or markedly less than anticipated; that advocates stopped BT from permanently deploying Phorm’s Webwise advertising system was impressive, whereas the failures to limit transfers of European airline passenger data to the US were somewhat surprising.[1] While there are regular analyses of how privacy advocates might get the issue of the day onto governmental agendas there is seemingly less time spent on how opponents resist advocates’ efforts. This post constitutes an early attempt to work through some of the politics of agenda-setting related to deep packet inspection and privacy for my dissertation project. Comments are welcome.

To be more specific, in this post I want to think about how items are kept off the agenda. Why are they kept off, who engages in the opposition(s), and what are some of the tactics employed? In responding to these questions I will significantly rely on theory from R. W. Cobb’s and M. H. Ross’ Cultural Strategies of Agenda Denial, linked with work by other prominent scholars and advocates. My goal is to evaluate whether the strategies that Cobb and Ross write about apply to the issues championed by privacy advocates in the UK who oppose the deployment of the Webwise advertising system. I won’t be working through the technical or political backstory of Phorm in this post and will be assuming that readers have at least a moderate familiarity with the backstory of Phorm – if you’re unfamiliar with it, I’d suggest a quick detour to the wikipedia page devoted to the company.

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Distinguishing Between Mobile Congestions

/ Christopher Parsons

by Simon TunbridgeThere is an ongoing push to ‘better’ monetize the mobile marketplace. In this near-future market, wireless providers use DPI and other Quality of Service equipment to charge subscribers for each and every action they take online. The past few weeks have seen Sandvine and other vendors talk about this potential, and Rogers has begun testing the market to determine if mobile customers will pay for data prioritization. The prioritization of data is classified as a network neutrality issue proper, and one that demands careful consideration and examination.

In this post, I’m not talking about network neutrality. Instead, I’m going to talk about what supposedly drives prioritization schemes in Canada’s wireless marketplace: congestion. Consider this a repartee to the oft-touted position that ‘wireless is different’: ISPs assert that wireless is different than wireline for their own regulatory ends, but blur distinctions between the two when pitching ‘congestion management’ schemes to customers. In this post I suggest that the congestion faced by AT&T and other wireless providers has far less to do with data congestion than with signal congestion, and that carriers have to own responsibility for the latter.

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Update: Feeva, Advertising, and Privacy

/ Christopher Parsons / 5 Comments

MusicBrainzServersWhen you spend a lot of time working in the areas of copyright, traffic sniffing and analysis, and the Internet’s surveillance infrastructure more generally, there is a tendency to expect bad things on a daily basis. This expectation is built up from years of horrors, and I’m rarely disappointed in my day-to-day research. Thus, when Wired reported that a company called Feeva was injecting locational information into packet headers the actions didn’t come across as surprising; privacy infringements as reported in the Wired piece are depressingly common. In response I wrote a brief post decrying the modification of packet-headers for geolocational purposes and was quoted by Jon Newton on P2Pnet on my reactions to what I understood at the time was going on.

After the post, and quotations turned up on P2Pnet, folks at Feeva quickly got ahold of me. I’ve since had a few conversations with them. It turns out that (a) there were factual inaccuracies in the Wired article; (b) Feeva isn’t the privacy-devastating monster that they came off as in the Wired article. Given my increased familiarity with the technology I wanted to better outline what their technology does and alter my earlier post’s conclusion: Feeva is employing a surprising privacy-protective advertising system. As it stands, their system is a whole lot better at limiting infringements on individuals’ privacy for advertising-related purposes than any other scalable model that I’m presently aware of.

Before I get into the post proper, however, I do want to note that I am somewhat limited in the totality of what I can speak about. I’ve spoken with both Feeva’s Chief Technology Officer, Miten Sampat, and Chief Privacy Officer, Dr. Don Lloyd Cook, and they’ve been incredibly generous in sharing both their time and corporate information. The two have been incredibly forthcoming with the technical details of the system employed and (unsurprisingly) some of this information is protected. As such, I can’t get into super-specifics (i.e. X technology uses Y protocol and Z hardware) but, while some abstractions are required, I think that I’ve managed to get across key elements of the system they’ve put in place.

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