[bluecar1]

Originally Posted by Ignitionnet

I thought this was all about privacy?

nope, it is about a webmasters rights over their own content and how it is accessed

Given the costs of this exercise to content providers are virtually zero and the actual process isn't really much different to web caching from the content provider point of view, caching sites and serving them up locally is also a commercial gain to the ISPs through savings on transit and peering, and indeed is the ISP actually delivering the content in full ensuring zero ad revenue for the content provider are we getting to plain old greed now?

wrong again, it is not the same as caching, caching data by the ISP is done on the fly while the data is in transit to the user and is allowed so that the carrier can reduce bandwidth and provide a better level of service (less latency for faster page delivery only, this is exactly why it is done by many firewalls / proxy servers in companies as well as scanning for viruses on the way through)

this stalking system replays the content from a different source, it is the ISP who is making this second request(using the url scraped from the users communication with the website) not the ISP customer

as to the costs, depending on the package a websites is on with its hosting provider, a number os packages have bandwidth limits or costs, whilst these may not be large to some people to smaller niche sites they could make the difference between profit and loss

Or are we just getting onto that someone had the idea that this was a way to stick it to 'the man'?

nope, nothing personal just appears to be webmasters trying to uphold their rights under T's and C's , copyright etc

So, yeah, I'd welcome some explanation why caching entire sites and in turn serving them up from caches is quite acceptable and drew no complaints while establishing a database, with no need to actually hold the content post-analysis, is so reprehensible that it demands what I can only consider juvenile action like this? We can have nice circular arguments about legality, etc, but my opinion is that the action is juvenility dressed up in a bit of contract law.

as i have said caching is not an issue (so long as the relevant "no cache" tags etc are honoured)

but this system IS NOT caching pages, it works by stripping urls form a communications stream, which are then passed to another server and then the URL's are replayed to the website by the talk talk equipment to enable them to scan the pages

whilst talk talk will be offering this as a "free" service to its customers it will be used as an "added feature" or "incentive for customers" and so may be seen to provide indirect revenue by the fact of more customers, businesses like talk talk will not put this sort of system in place just for its customers without seeing a clear cost benefit at the end of the day

EDIT: Another thought as I was loading the dishwasher. A few browsers, most notable Internet Explorer 8, contain anti-malware features which presumably must necessitate the analysis and referencing of websites in a database. Then there are all the externals guards which use a combination of analysis and a database. You guys have started billing Microsoft, Symantec et al too for their use of your 'content' for commercial purposes, right?

these systems respect robot.txt entries, and use freely available lists, websites can block the ip ranges scanning them easilly as they are well know ranges, so why does talk talk need to build its own database? unless it will scan sites for more than just malware?

a patent from huawei that seems to fit the system in use seems to suggest the sytem can "categorise" pages it does not say what for though, i will leave other to speculate on that one