Mobile Carriers using Deep Packet Inspection to insert 'unique identifiers' into web requests

Had a quick scan of the speedify blog as mentioned in the post ‘Using Maidsafe as a VPN’ and found out about another insidious practice :

Unfortunately, it turns out Verizon Wireless isn’t the only carrier trading its users’ privacy for extra profit. It turns out that AT&T Wireless is up to the same nonsense. If you’re an AT&T Wireless customer, you can see for yourself by pointing your browser to this page and looking at your HTTP headers: request.urih.com

Not sure if this works for other carriers around the world

How Verizon’s Advertising Header Works

Apparently you can use a local Squid to get around this:

Tell squid to deny these headers. T-Mobile uses MSISDN, Verizon uses X-UIDH, and AT&T uses x-up-subno.

header_access MSISDN deny all
header_access X-UIDH deny all
header_access x-up-subno deny all

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Is there just NO end to this stuff?

Ah, But that’s why we’re here, isn’t it? :wink:

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Why? these guys are loving it: The network of global corporate control (PDF)

It sounds paradoxical, but today it appears that we understand more about the universe than our society. We have created systems that have outgrown our capacity to genuinely understand and control them as evinced by the ongoing financial crisis. Recent advancements in the study of complex systems are able to offer new insights into the workings of many real-world systems.

It’s interesting to note point 1 in this talk:

Complexity is the result of simple rules of interaction (David Irvines approach to SAFE I believe)

I think this was exposed a couple of weeks ago, Verizon refused to comment, but quietly stopped doing it - is my impression from twitter commentary.

Related: I just saw a post from a friend who had a car accident, phoned 999, then was cold called within 10s by an ambulance chaser. Corporate greed has no limits, no ethics.

BTW good article in The Gaurdian (series this week) on corporate power: Taming corporate power: the key political issue of our age

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