Bust Your ISP! Test to Determine Whether Your ISP Is Injecting Their Own Ads Into Your Browser   8/7/2007 - 2,313 views, 3 Comments

Up until now it wasn’t easy to tell if your ISP was doing it, unless you looked closely at the ads, or were otherwise very observant and knew what to look for. But now you can bust them!

A group of researchers at the University of Washington have developed a way to test whether your ISP is doing this to you. Basically, the way it works is that you go to the page that they have developed, which analyzes whether you are receiving their page unchanged, or whether your ISP has altered it to inject their ads into the page.

At last check they had found 305 unique instances of a user seeing altered web pages, with ads injected by the ISPs, from four different ISPs. There is no word, yet, on who those four ISPs are - if you find out that yours is doing it, please let us know!

To test it out for yourself, go to the University of Washington Experiment Harness Integrity Checker ISP Ad Buster.

[Ed. note: The subdomain for the Washington University ISP ad checker is “vancouver”. While we don’t know for certain, it may be that this is an homage to the Vancouver volcanology base station that monitored - and lost their own David Johnston to - the 1980 Mount St. Helens eruption, when Johnston famously radioed back to the Vancouver station “Vancouver, Vancouver, this is it!” moments before perishing in the eruption.]