From Duncan Riley at Techcrunch, Via Pharyngula:
Texas based ISP Redmoon has implemented software that hijacks pages being visited by their customers by placing Redmoon’s own ads on these pages.
The technology is provided by NebuAD, which boasts that ISP delivered advertisements are an untapped source of revenue.
Every single web site owner is affected by NebuAD’s technology: whether a site is running ads or not makes no difference, Customers of any ISP evil enough to run NebuAD’s platform are going to see ads on every page on every site; ads that don’t benefit the content creator. It is important to note that these ads are NOT pop-ups, and this is not a free internet service; the ads are served as if they were part of the page, to paying internet customers who are NOT made aware that these ads have been inserted by their ISP.
[My emphasis]
As a content creator I’m horrified that any page I create could be plastered with advertisements I don’t approve of as I’m sure many others will be as well. There are probably copyright issues as well in terms of hijacking original works for profit. We can only hope that this evil form of advertising does not spread beyond Texas.
I think that hope is a very faint one indeed – where there’s money to be made, money will be made.
Coming soon, to an ISP near you.
