[Clueless anti-s]ecurity quote of the week [LWN.net]

[Clueless anti-s]ecurity quote of the week

Posted May 8, 2015 7:39 UTC (Fri) by dlang (guest, #313)
In reply to: [Clueless anti-s]ecurity quote of the week by kleptog
Parent article: Security quote of the week

> For that to happen it would have to be illegal for ISPs to modify traffic as it passes through them, and this is by no means a certainty. Undoubtedly some countries have dealt with this, but by means a majority.

Well, in the US (where I believe that most of the bad ISPs that are being described are owned) the recent classification of them as a 'common carrier' (like they were except for about the last decade) could sure be used as justification for going after them.

Even though IANAL, another thing that jumps out at me is that a content provider could go after them under several possible approaches

1. trademark violations (making it look like the trademark endorses the changes)

2. defamation or similar (for hurting their reputation)

or my favorite (given the actions of the owners of many of these ISPs

3. copyright violation for producing a derivative work of the page. Implicit permission to copy the page as-is is obviously granted, but permission to make a modified version of the page????

I'm sure a team of good lawyers could come up with other grounds without much work.

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[Clueless anti-s]ecurity quote of the week

Posted May 8, 2015 14:18 UTC (Fri) by cesarb (subscriber, #6266) [Link] (1 responses)

> Even though IANAL, another thing that jumps out at me is that a content provider could go after them under several possible approaches [...]

None of them apply to the "tracking cookies" example.

> 3. copyright violation for producing a derivative work of the page. Implicit permission to copy the page as-is is obviously granted, but permission to make a modified version of the page????

That would also apply against page modifiers like ad blockers, user stylesheets/scripts, or mobile browsers which automatically reflow/resize the page elements to better fit the small screen.

[Clueless anti-s]ecurity quote of the week

Posted May 8, 2015 17:57 UTC (Fri) by mathstuf (subscriber, #69389) [Link]

> That would also apply against page modifiers like ad blockers, user stylesheets/scripts

I'm pretty sure it is a violation to redistribute the derivative work, not to make it in the first place (barring silly EULA terms).