I’m sat in the Internet cafe in Stockholm Arlanda airport burning my last few Krona coins. Fighting with a Swedish keyboard brings back fond memories of being a code monkey in a Norwegian bank a decade ago. Anyhow, in my hotel and here I’ve noticed that the both seem to be using some kind of transparent proxy. If a web page doesn’t load right, and a duff version is cached, you need to shift-refresh to force the ‘no cache’ option on.
How come we managed to create a legal and social expectation for the PSTN that your personal communications wouldn’t be intercepted or modified, but that on the Internet anything goes (and we certainly aren’t going to declare it to you in advance).
This isn’t the same as companies like Akamai doing network caching, because that was with the consent of one of the parties; in effect the IP address of Yahoo, say, is just a logical identifier and not a physical endpoint. Akamai are just an agent of Yahoo.
But I am accessing my self-hosted webmail service. I don’t consent to having my HTTP traffic pried into.
It’s a simple consumer protection issue.
And another thing: you put your coins into the vending machine and get your login coupon. Then you sit down, login, and have to agree to the terms of service. If you don’t agree, there’s no way to get your money back. Sounds like an invalid contract to me.
We get to inspect the ingredients before we buy a can of beans, but telecom gets away with outrageous anti-consumer nonsense. Time for reform.
PS - This is a great airport, though. No annoying PA system, plenty of space, short-ish walks, high ceilings with lots of light, easy public transport connections, clear info displays, short queues, comfy seating. Scandinavia at its best.
Posted by Martin Geddes at 01:57 PMTrackBack URL for this entry:
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Ha! I've been asking myself the same question! Two things come to mind: it's a perverse consequence of the end-to-end principle; and the crypto train wreck. The perversity of that combination! One is the attempt to pretend you can ignore middlemen and the other is the middlemen defending their turf.
Posted by: at May 21, 2006 12:12 AMFortunately there is a simple solution to this affliction: always encrypt and tunnel all your trafic to a trusted host. OpenVPN makes this fairly easy and not too cost prohibitive. It is alltogether another question why one must go to such lenghts to protect our basic consumer rights ...
It's all a game of thrust and parry between gatekeeper and edge innovator. To misquote Newton: "For every gatekeeper action, there is an equal and opposite edge reaction". Here is hoping innovation at the edge keeps the bits flowing.
- Zed
The network may be yours, but the packets are mine.
Posted by: at May 21, 2006 08:04 AMyou had to put tokens into a physical machine to get a paper coupon that you then entered into a web browser to get access? That's pretty wierd right there.
Posted by: at May 22, 2006 08:57 PM