Global Warning

Almost none believed Noah back in biblical times. Nor does everyone today believe we face the end of the natural world as we’ve known it. Globe and Mail reader Patrick Rioux, for instance, believes he knows better:

The sooner some western government stops kneeling to the environmentalist thugs, the better. With a backbone and a reason-based case, the whole green swindle would be exposed and derailed.

When challenged by Paul Thompson –- “I'll probably regret asking this Mr. Rioux, but please enlighten us as to the nature of this 'green swindle'” -– Rioux replied:

Paul: The nature of the green swindle is to attribute all and any natural events (selectively chosen) to human causes, and use that as justification to regulate any (selectively chosen) human activity. The thinning Arctic ice, for example is breathlessly reported, while the thickening Antarctic ice passes without mention. Thinning Arctic ice=rising temperatures=more CO2=human activity; therefore expand state powers and use legislative gun to corral evil humans towards environmentally correct behaviour, and stifle any who dare disagree.

What? Antarctic ice thickening? West Antarctic ice thickening? East Antarctica puts on weight? Snowballs ringing hell’s bell. What’ll it be next? How polar bears are thriving?

No doubt there’s plenty green swindling going on. But. However. Despite all the swindling, low character humans of every colouration –- including “green” –- we nevertheless do face the end of the natural world as we’ve known it. We really do.

What makes me so sure? How do I, personally, know this? Near indisputably, as a matter of fact. By rather painful physical evidence.

Used to go month-long canoe tripping some 30 years back. Always got seriously sunburned first few days out. And words fail describing how it felt when mosquitoes stuck their itty-bitty bitey faces in my sunburn. The unrelievably screaming itchy heat of it.

Went canoeing for three days two decades later. Maybe 10 years ago. Didn’t get the sunburn I’d expected and felt entitled to. Entitled to by virtue having been legitimately evolved here. Right here on Earth. Nope. What I got was these suppurating blisters. These oozing blisters which, on bursting, leaked an orange-juicy liquid mixture halfway between interstitial fluid and blood.

It was like having membership among the naturally evolved revoked. Like turning Morlock absent any time machine. Like getting cast among un-dead creatures cowering from natural sunlight in some cheap horror flick. Even the mosquitoes thought so. Rejected having anything to do with what was leaking from me. Avoided all spots I’d cracked open like the pustulent plague.

Those 20 years intervening to de-nature bare flesh do not, by any stretching conceivable, qualify as evolutionary time. So don’t go trying and telling me, Mr. Rioux, that human intervention hasn’t been causing the end of the natural world as we’ve known it. Don’t even try. You know better. Everyone been around 20 years knows better. How even sunlight isn't what it used to be.

That’s why, when an acquaintance urged me to sign onto an emergency petition trying to save the crucial climate change talks in Bali by telling the US, Canada and Japan to stop blocking the agreement, I replied:

I'll do better than that and write a quick article on it this morning. Including the link. Thanks for spamming me about (just) this :-)

Thought I’d better find out some little bits before getting down to writing this article, though. Which is why I didn’t manage writing -– as promised -– yesterday. Got confused to distraction by commentary at the Globe’s headlining how “Rich, poor countries at odds over Bali climate deal”.

Never mind “green swindling”. That herring’s green and red all over. It was other comments fully halting my tracks.

For one instance, Matt Mann wrote:

… The Government of Canada has it right! For the sake of our children we do not sign a road map that takes us 45 years down the road without 3 of the biggest polluters having agreed to any binding targets…

For another, Mike McFae wrote,

… [I]t makes no sense to piss on a forest fire by espousing that little countries like Canada ( forget that per capita scam ) sacrifice our workers and industry and let the real polluters off the hook. I've been in Chinese cities for weeks on end without being able to see the sun despite the fact there were no clouds in the sky. That's the real world and it has to be dealt with…

And David Gibson wrote:

… [W]e are peeing into the wind as long as we accept that the big dogs can do what they want without control. It is arguable, perhaps, that there should be DIFFERENT limits for developing countries for a while, but to have fixed limits for us and not for them, it won't happen and won't work. BTW, Chinese pollution clouds the size of BC are frequently detected and tested by scientists in North America. Canada's position is lose/lose: either agree to hobble ourselves competitively against our main trading partner and give the half-dozen biggest polluters a get-out-of-jail-free card, or be an international villain by holding out for those big dogs to agree to play ball. IMO, if the big dogs don't play, it won't matter WHAT we do. IMO, the domestic 'environmentalists' people who are calling for Canada to sign, are socialists first, environmentalists second. The planet can't tell Chinese smog from Rochester smog.

So. As with Noah and that ridiculous ark of his. The heat may be on. The sky may be falling. The oceans may come flooding. Regardless. Us humans will keep disputing “targets” and clashing cultures like there’s no tomorrow. Exactly like there’s no tomorrow.

Must repeat. Nothing remotely “green” gets inspired by our petty politics. There shall be no rescue by governments. No rescue by regulation, legislation or completely inadequate accords like from Kyoto or Bali. Regardless how warped, our governments can reflect nothing but our selves –- our terminally sightless convenient self-involvements. We’ll get nothing better from governance than we deserve. Nor can we expect corporate bailouts. Corporations can do nothing economic but cater our consumptions. Nothing but supply our demand for more stuffing. It is by our internal and eternal bickering that many of us starve while the whole earth is made waste. It is by our internal and eternal self-involved bickering we are each, every and single one of us implicated. By our hysterical, stuffing-induced collective seizure. That’s why there can be no hope for greener pastures which does not arise from personal and cultural grass-roots. From first and foremost principles.

It is not as if, but for greenhouse gases or nuclear catastrophe, everything would be all right. It’s not like that at all. We don’t need greenhouse gases. We don’t require nuclear catastrophe. We don’t depend on all our mercurial contaminants to utterly waste the natural. We’ve been overkilling and extincting in spectacular style ever since swinging that damned club of Moon-Watcher’s. Nuclear catastrophe? All we need is sticks and stones. Literally. Where are the Sabretooth Cats? The American lions? The Short-faced bears, standing near twice tall as Grizzlies? Where are the tremendous Longhorned bison and the Mastodon those fabulous carnivores hunted? Where the magnificent vegetation which this continent’s tremendous herbivores browsed?

Where indeed. Absolutely nowhere. Extinct. We require no nuclear catastrophes. We did just great genociding with sticks and stones ten thousand years back. What’s absurd is how now “nature lovers” discover Chernobyl. How, after the worst nuclear catastrophe, nature came back to blooming life. Not because the catastrophe failed devastating. Just because the catastrophe proved sufficiently devastating to frighten away most human intrusion. Just because absenting ordinary humanity everyday for a couple decades restored the natural like nothing else ever could. That’s how implicated each, every and single one of us are.

This is not, by any means, to say we ought internationally give up on targets and protocols. By no means. But far more important than committing to targets is for governments and corporations to commit to actions -- and to take the actions committed to. And most important by far is this: we absolutely must stop waiting on governments and corporations. We must each of us commit and begin to act right now. For only when we cease voting and demanding ever greater spoilage will governments and corporations commit accordingly.

We can’t rely on following leadership games any more. Time’s come for personal commitment. For us each, personally, to re-start negotiating with the natural. Everywhere the natural so eagerly greets us half-way. Especially in our cities. For only by doing so can we get some better sense not just how and what in the natural world we devastate –- but how and where in the natural world we may better stand. Only by doing so, by personally blazing the precedence, will our political and corporate worlds follow. We must prove ourselves and to the world that humans are people too. Each of us. Personally. Time’s come for personal commitment -– to do or die.

[Peter Fruchter teaches in the Division of Humanities at York University.]

[Polar bear image by Alex Quistberg and used via Creative Commons license.]

In Jesus' Name

1. Naming in Vain

Our Jesus was begot of Ookpik and Sable. And though not their only begotten son, we believed him their most miraculous.

When Jesus vanished one whole year we thought him dead. Not so, according to the veterinary phoned us from afar. Not yet. Despite his spine getting mostly severed by the car that hit him. He might survive another week, said the vet. Maybe two.

Seven years later, Jesus suffered fatal Feline Leukemia. But it was when his pain got too much for me that I killed him. I killed and then wrote “a Wake” for him. Inspired by him. By the elemental, pure as flame truth of him.

We were laughing when we named you Jesus.
We were fierce and free,
and you were such grace made flesh that forever was moments in your gaze.

I remember the world bending
to your silent incantations
-- how could it be your fumbling feet --
and your vanishings..
in fairness, perhaps, to spheres undignified by you.

I remember how you burst back from corners of an eye,
on the breath between a blink,
saying, "Hold me now. I love you -- I am fierce."

How long before your undeniable heart was beating through us too,
drumming our abstracted silences a vapouring beneath the thunder?

How long until the clan of us
was shouting "Jeeeesus!" in the rain and chirping at bushes?

I remember your foregoings,
the conclusive entrances of your returns
-- sunshine bottled silence corked with night --
rain, snow, earth, the very seasons glittering your midnight arctic cloak, singing,
"I have grappled unknowns by the throat. Dry me. Feed me. I have returned."

And when you did not return..
the silent night of muffled questions in the dead of winter for a year..
your prisming light receding, candling on waves of time, drifting from our shore...

But you remembered us.
When we found you broken on that metal slab,
spine crushed,
beset by soot-sayers
-- "Walk? Well, he might live," --
you smiled, you smiled at us
dear heart and sang again,
"An unknown has grappled me too well. Take me away from all this now. We are returned."

And so we were.
And it was spring for seven years;
a leaping spring,
a spring of leapings,
and oh, but how you lived.
How you walked, prowled, roamed, just as you loved,
on every side of wild.

You taught us a feral love,
and every week another lyric for the singing of it.

But now we called you Kitten
because one resurrection was enough.

Seven years of spring...

When spring was ended
-- and summer too --
when another prophecy of doom ushered the winter of our hearts..
it was by my words, by my side, in my arms that you died.

How your last sigh makes me wonder where lost to eyes the spirit flies.

Did I hold you well enough
my love?
Will you wait for me,
my love?
Oh, wake my heart.
Oh, wake again.

No regrets having named him Jesus. Not one apology. It was meet, it was right and he’ll never be outside my heart. That recent fiasco over the Muhammad teddy bear made me wonder, though. Made me wonder something completely different from where lost to eyes the spirit flies. Like, how glaringly cultures keep clashing.

Our Jesus had itching feet. Went regularly missing days on end long before going missing one whole year. And we’d go out searching him. Regularly. Rain, snow, sleet, whatever. Worried out of our skulls. Shouting “Jeeeee-sus!” over top our lungs like revivalist circus freaks. Chirping, making come-hither sounds at each every bush and hedge. Which there were plenty up at University City.

What did passers-by think? How did neighbours react our roaming hollering for “Jeeeee-sus!” at all random hours? That we must have been fully certified as freaks, no doubt. But so what of it? We could hardly have cared less to save our souls. Each time after finding our Jesus, feeling all giddy and born again by our relief, we’d giggle about it something fierce.

We took having no care what everyone thought entirely and carelessly for granted. Reading about the Muhammad teddy bear -– how likely it might have led to public lashings, imprisonment and (or) even to death -– etchingly underscored the isolation of our carelessness in both time and space. We’d not have been calling for our Jesus that way in European middle ages. Nor in the Salem, Massachusetts of 1692. Nor would we have named him Muhammad –- never mind gone out hollering his name in vain at all random hours -– anywhere and everywhere fundamentalism rules to present days.

Intent has no bearing where fundamentalist ideology keeps ruling religiously. Fully admitted: I was laughing when I named him Jesus. Thank god for mercifully permitting my existing in 21st century Toronto, Canada. In times and spaces where taking naming in vain has finally become the laughing matter it ought always have been. Sure I was laughing. Doesn’t mean I was just joking. I meant it as an admirer of most everything the historical person Jesus stood and died for. Because our Jesus so clearly, obviously and undeniably not only was a person -– but, as a person, was the very best anyone could have aspired to become. I meant to un-ask whether animals are people -– and to begin asking whether humans might ever become people too. Not necessarily pure as flames and driven snow like our Jesus was. Nor wholly innocent of any original sinning. Just whether humans might start aspiring to even some personal decency. Some dignified personhood. Preferably prior totally consuming and (or) catastrophically annihilating what remains of (not only) our natural world.

Intent has no bearing where and when fundamentalist ideology rules religiously. Where and when naming in vain constitutes fundamental sinning. Where and when not totally submitting isn’t just criminal but damned and diabolical. Where and when questioning means not to ask but to challenge god’s truth as immutably given by whatever avatars or prophets.

We’ve been taking our way of life carelessly for granted. All of us. As if our cultural principle of tolerance were somehow normal. As if the foundation our principled tolerance provides for Canadian pluralism, democracy and Toronto multiculture were somehow universal. As if.

Better start appreciating not only the meaning, significance, source and origin of our principled tolerance but, perhaps more urgently, how religiously intolerance rules human cultures to this day and age. Otherwise we doom ourselves to repeating fatal errors while, as Al Gore reminds, time fleets ever faster from natural space. However much the rage a few millennia back, it’s just not such a great time for clashing cultures any more. Better stop taking -– even and especially our own –- cultural principles for granted.

2. Sticks and Stones

Ideological divisions merely over naming in vain expose gaps across cultures. Potentially deadly gaps plummeting precipitously down to our most fundamental cultural principles. Gaps perhaps too culturally incommensurable for understanding ever to bridge.

Here’s one recent –- glaring –- example. On November 23rd, the Toronto Star blared how, Prodded by Canada, nations punish Pakistan:

Canada joined other Commonwealth countries yesterday in deciding to suspend Pakistan’s membership to punish President Pervez Musharraf for invoking emergency rule and jailing thousands who opposed him.

Moreover. Also on November 23rd, the Law Society of Upper Canada sent me e-mail containing the following text:

In response to the situation in Pakistan, the Law Society of Upper Canada and the Ontario Bar Association invite you to attend a Gathering… Lawyers and legal associations around the world are united in expressing their support for their colleagues in Pakistan, and calling for the restoration of the rule of law in that country. The blatant violations of human rights and the attacks on the rule of law in a democratic society are unacceptable.

Yeah. Right. “Democratic society.” Has considering our NATO culpability in destabilizing Pakistan even occurred to anyone? I ask this despite greatest admiration for Benazir Bhutto and for the accomplishments of Canadian NATO troops. Despite lacking sympathy for “President” Musharraf. Despite all my sneering those cheering terrorism, those accusing our troops of murdering innocents and those claiming to “support our troops” by struggling to have the Canadian military disbanded. I have to ask this both despite and due to my life-long proponence of democracy. Has it even occurred to anyone how culpable we are in Pakistan?

We’ve been railing at the Bushes for the better part of a decade. Rightly so. For only the ridiculous ideological mingling of might making right with sole super-powering and the American Way could so ignorantly have emerged with the notion of imposing democracy at gunpoint. When democracy used to mean not imposing at gunpoint. Back when America used to be the bastion of democracy, anyhow. Thus has the cultural meaning of democracy been eroded beyond recognition and tarnished beyond repair. And in Middle Eastern cultures where democracy had never acquired non-laughable cultural meaning, the power vacuum of ignorant intervention has resulted in -– how many? –- millions of casualties.

We’ve been right to rail at the Bushes. Due to that administration’s unbelievable ignorance, Middle-Eastern fundamentalist ideology has been re-enforced and multiplied –- i.e., (not only) in neighbouring Iran. It’s high past time to realize how equally ignorant we’ve been in our naive efforts to “win hearts and minds”. Because, due to our ignorance, fundamentalist ideology has been re-enforced (not only) in neighbouring Pakistan.

There’s no more likelihood of altering cultural principles, ideals and ideologies by military force or economic aid than there is of forcing or purchasing understanding.

We’d have to prove our gods stronger. And we’d better pray it never comes to that. Since the last time any democratically elected administration successfully appealed to stronger gods it was by invoking the nuclear destroyer of worlds against the divinity of Japan’s emperor.

If interfere we must where fundamentalist ideologies rule -– let’s at least cease being so naïve about it. Let’s not be playing with nuclear fire. As in Pakistan albeit, allegedly, not yet in Iran. Let’s just stop believing anything we’d recognize as “democratic” can subsist where god’s truth is manifest to present days.

[Peter Fruchter teaches in the Division of Humanities at York University.]

Techne-City III: What it’s Like to be a Seagull

The green rush is on. Latest instance: Monday’s Globe and Mail reported how Jack Layton rushes to greener political pastures.

Great idea. No doubt politically inspired. Since “Australia's 'climate-change' election inspires Layton to emulate green platform”. And since, as the article alerts,

Mr. Layton will argue that many of his own environmental ideas are now in the international mainstream… Mr. Layton's wave of international name-dropping is designed to win over Canadian voters who normally turn up their noses at the NDP.

Some Globe commentators, though, seemed dubious whether to appreciate Jack’s aspirations. However politically inspired. For instance, dallas mcquarrie wrote:

For some time it's been quite clear that the 'environmental' party in Canada is the Green Party. Layton and the NDP's belated embrace of environmentalism is more a product of the fact they are losing supporters to the Green Party than any 'conversion' experience. It's easy for the NDP to jump on the environmental bandwagon now that environmentalism is 'cool,' but Jack Layton is only following in Elizabeth May's footsteps. Unlike the NDP, the Green Party was environmentalist before it became popular. Now that the Green Party has caught up to the NDP in the polls, Jack Layton's hoisting of the environmental banner is a desperate political gambit from a leader reacting to events rather than shaping them.

Vickky Angstrom disagreed completely:

Dallas: The NDP has always had environmental protections as part of its platform. Jack Layton has put forward green policies from his early days in city politics. I am very uncomfortable with the greens, who are another right wing party apart from their environmental platform -- the last thing we need.

Increasingly, the debating ceased pretending anything green. Ceased pretending anything but political ideology. James Pearson wrote, “The NDP will be the Official Opposition after the next election (whenever that is).” Darmok and Jilad from Tanagra contradicted:

The NDP will lose the not-quite-so-left side to the Liberals, and the Kermit the Frog Party (Greens) will eat up some of the other side, leaving Taliban Jack holding his thong after the next election (sorry for the disturbing visual).

Too predictably, George Bishop had declared,

..Canadians for too long have been taken for granted in that people with Money seem to blame everything on others, its time for average Canadians to speak up and demand a greater piece of the 'pie'

And, just as predictably, p m scorned,

its time for average Canadians to speak up and demand a greater piece of the 'pie' ....another 'lefty' heard from.. hey buddy, the pie is made in the kitchen ...by hard work...it is not handed out the serving window by the government.....get real!! you want more pie, get in the kitchen and make it yourself...just like the rest of us!!

Ayup. Great metaphor. Flawless. How we keep bickering for ever more pie than we can scarf, binge or purge -– while devastating, annihilating, demolishing, decimating and wasting what little natural habitat remains. If any habitat even remains at all natural. As if greener pastures should be made whole by our spinning the political hay. Or by our slashing, burning and contaminating in business as usual.

Nothing remotely “green” gets inspired by our petty politics. There shall be no rescue by governments. No rescue by regulation, legislation or completely inadequate accords like Kyoto. Regardless how warped, our governments can reflect nothing but our selves -– our convenient and terminally ignorant self-involvement. We’ll get nothing better from governance than we deserve. Nor can we expect corporate bailouts. Corporations can do nothing economic but cater our consumptions. Nothing but supply our demand for more pie to stuff down our endless bickering pie-holes. It is by our internal and eternal bickering that many of us starve while the whole earth is made waste. It is by our internal and eternal self-involved bickering we are each, every and single one of us implicated. By our ever increasing pie-choked bickering. That’s why there can be no hope for greener pastures which does not arise from personal and cultural grass-roots. From first and foremost principles.

The media monger such fears of global warming that the majority of my first-year students report feeling numbed and paralysed. None even recall media’s prior fear-mongering frenzy –- “nuclear winter”. Never mind beginning to appreciate how myriad the ways we make waste of our environment have become. As if, but for greenhouse gases or nuclear catastrophe, everything would be all right.

As if. We don’t need greenhouse gases. We don’t require nuclear catastrophe. We don’t depend on all our mercurial contaminants to utterly waste the natural. We’ve been overkilling and extincting in spectacular style ever since swinging that damned club of Moon-Watcher’s. Nuclear catastrophe? All we need is sticks and stones. Literally. Where are the Sabretooth Cats? The American lions? The Short-faced bears, standing near twice tall as Grizzlies? Where are the tremendous Longhorned bison and Mastodon those fabulous carnivores hunted? Where the magnificent vegetation which this continent’s tremendous herbivores browsed?

Where indeed. Absolutely nowhere. Extinct. We require no nuclear catastrophes. We did just great genociding with sticks and stones 10,000 years back. What’s absurd is how now “nature lovers” discover Chernobyl. How, after the worst nuclear catastrophe, nature came back to life. Not because the catastrophe failed devastating. Just because the catastrophe proved sufficiently devastating to frighten away most human intrusion. Just because absenting ordinary humanity everyday for a couple decades restored the natural like nothing else ever could. That’s how implicated each, every and single one of us are.

It’s at about this point that students lose all interest in whatever else I might have planned addressing -– and demand knowing what we can do about it. And, having no political inspiration or aspiration, I tell them straight: got no clue. I can only convey some of what I try and do about it. Merely on generally green principles. Only hoping for some less self-involved awareness at grass roots.

Only hoping. Couple weeks back, for instance, while rummaging the garbage for food, I was gently accosted by two female students.

“We’ve been watching you,” declared one.

“Are you lost?” asked the other. “Are you in some kind of trouble? Can we help you?”

For a moment, I felt like deer do in headlights. Or, in human terms, like the least legitimate of red-headed stepchildren. Then, recalling myself somewhat, I replied, “Sure you can help -– want to help feed the animals?”

Blinking, they glanced at each other. Gamely struggling with consuming preconceptions. Preconceptions of proper consuming.

“Maybe?” ventured one -- while the other nodded just barely. Both hesitant like I'd offered them candy. From the garbage.

“See,” I elaborated, “those hotdog buns you’re about to toss? Why send what you can’t finish to landfill far away? Winter’s here -– and the way we humans demolish every natural habitat, it’s much too hard for many animals. So why not share? Why throw perfectly good food in the garbage when birds and animals right outside go without?”

“Yeah,” they agreed, just about in unison. Almost enthused.

And we had plenty to share. Them with unfinished lunches. Me with five pounds of rescued organics. Trouble was, we couldn’t find any animals to share with. None. Everywhere birds and animals had clustered was deserted.

The longer we searched, the more chirping, whistling and clacking come hither sounds I made, the more suspicious they got. I was glad when they left. Relieved. Grateful they’d mostly contained giggling at the garbage digging loser –- i.e., me.

That’s how it was for about a week. Getting bitter roaming around campus. Not just the cold. I kept thinking how Turing-readily we get fooled into believing ought which mimics us intelligent. How utterly and persistently we fail recognizing -– never mind approaching -– any intelligence not entirely oriented and prejudiced precisely as our own. How despite my best human efforts, I couldn’t manage communicating any what I hoped to share with birds and animals about campus. What to do when -– in winter -– they no longer sought me out? I was getting bitter for, no matter how I kept whistling, jumping and throwing apple cores up in air, no single high-drifting seagull deigned batting one wingtip my way.

I’d ceased roaming campus by late last week. Mostly accepted my human ignorance. Just stood there throwing crumbs at the ground. Waiting for any pigeon to alight between the roaring of buses. Dimly kept hearing seagulls. Thought it was imagination but got to thinking, eventually. What’s it like to be a seagull? Cold is cold. Lee side to the wind is better. So I crossed to the other side. The lee side. And there they were. At least that day. In the open yet partly protected spaces between Stedman Lecture Halls and Vanier. Squirrels digging. Seagulls winging low.

The best part? There were two. When seagulls replied my pidgin “Found something –- out’ta the way!” whistles. And yet more so when they came wheeling, skimming, feet touching no snow and beaks snagging the apple cores I spilled.

It’s winter. Hard times. No more turning beaks up at apple cores. And the way they snagged those apple cores? Balanced on transparent breaths of air, curving perfect asymptotes against the snow? I have seen no grace more pure.

[Peter Fruchter teaches in the Division of Humanities at York University. His related essay, "Acts of Salvage", was recently published in GreenTOpia (Coach House, 2007)]

[Seagull image by Bryan and used via Creative Commons.]

Google Hijacked -- Major ISP (Rogers) to Intercept and Modify Web Pages

Lauren Weinstein's Blog
by Lauren Weinstein

Greetings. Please observe closely the image to your left, showing the home page for Google Canada (click the image for a full-sized, full-resolution version).

Does anything seem a bit odd about the normally clean and pristine Google front door? What the blazes is all that ISP-related verbiage taking up the top third of the page? Why would Google ever give an ISP permission to muddy up Google's public face that way?

Well, as you've probably already guessed, Google didn't give this ISP any such permission. The ISP simply decided to modify Google on their own, demonstrating a real world example of ISPs Spying On and Modifying Web Traffic that I was discussing yesterday.

Just brought to my attention today by a concerned reader who chose Google for his example, what you're looking at is reportedly an ongoing test by Rogers in Canada, scheduled for deployment to Rogers Internet customers next quarter.

In case you're curious, "ISNS" on the test Google interception page apparently stands for Internet Subscriber Notification System. For the morbidly curious, here's the javascript and associated code that enables this procedure, which can presumably be applied to any http: (unencrypted) traffic.

While Rogers' current planned use for this Deep Packet Inspection (DPI) and modification system (reportedly manufactured by "In-Browser Marketing" firm "PerfTech") is for account status messages, it's obvious that commercial ISP content and ads (beyond the ISP logos already displayed) would be trivial to introduce through this mechanism. By the way, PerfTech is even using Google for one of its linked promotional examples on the PerfTech home page. I wonder if they bothered to ask Google's permission for that?

Anyway, the fact that there's an opt-out present for future account status messages on the Rogers page insertions hardly changes the extremely problematic and network neutrality unfriendly aspects of such situations, as I noted in yesterday's blog item.

Question: Will Web service providers such as Google and many others, who have spent vast resources in both talent and treasure creating and maintaining their services' appearances and quality, be willing to stand still while any ISP intercepts and modifies their traffic in such a manner?

I can't say for sure of course, but I suspect that a likely reaction might be discerned by paraphrasing Bugs Bunny: "Eh, he don't know them very well, do he?"

--Lauren--