Thursday, November 11, 2004

Shaw is censoring Internet feeds and lying about it

Shaw is censoring Internet feeds and lying about it:
When customers of Canada's Shaw Cable high-speed Internet service noticed that their filesharing activity had slowed down dramatically, they didn't know what to make of it. Calling the ISP didn't help: Shaw's tech support people swore that they were delivering all the packets they received from their customers, just as you'd expect. After all, who'd want an ISP that picked and chose which of your communications got through -- imagine if the phone company or the post office just silently threw away some of your messages based on secret criteria!

So the Shaw customers went to DSL Reports, a community site for posting about DSL and other high-speed providers, and they found that they were not alone and not imagining things. Lots of Shaw customers were getting really crummy performance out of their Internet connections.

Then someone claiming to be a Shaw insider posted an explanation: Shaw had secretly installed a packet-filter on its network that was using hidden rules to silently discard some of its customers' packets. And they'd instructed their tech people to lie about it when customers called in and asked.

It might have been a fake, but not long after, DSL Reports got a letter from Shaw's lawyers telling them that this was confidential info from a Shaw employee and that they'd be sued if they didn't take it offline, so it looks like its true (says DSL Reports, "Needless to say, we've never bent over for an ISP upset at bad publicity, or forked over anyones identity, and we're not about to start.")

Here's the facts, then:
Shaw is indiscriminately censoring its customers' Internet feeds. It's not blocking infringing files (hell, Shaw can't even know for certain what files are and aren't infringing for each customer), it's blocking protocols, applications used to transmit and receive tens, hundreds of millions of public-domain, copylefted and non-copyrightable works.
Shaw is lying about censoring its customers' Internet feeds.
Shaw is threatening to sue people who tell the world about its lies.
Are you a Shaw customer? Do you still want to be, in light of the above? Link

0 Comments:

Post a Comment

Subscribe to Post Comments [Atom]

<< Home