[Vision2020] Counterfeiting

[Art Deco]

[image: Bits - Business, Innovation, Technology,
Society]<http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/>
April 6, 2012, 6:35 pmHotel’s Free Wi-Fi Comes With Hidden ExtrasBy BRIAN
X. CHEN <http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/author/brian-x-chen/>
The only visible sign of the extra code on most Web sites is some extra
space at the top of the screen, left.

Justin Watt, a Web engineer, was browsing the Web in his room at the Courtyard
Marriott<http://www.marriott.com/hotels/travel/nycmd-courtyard-new-york-manhattan-times-square-south/>in
Midtown Manhattan this week when he saw something strange. On his
personal blog, a mysterious gap was appearing at the top of the page.

After some sleuthing, Mr. Watt, who has a background in developing Web
advertising tools, realized that the quirk was not confined to his site.
The hotel’s Internet service was secretly injecting lines of code into
every page he visited, code that could allow it to insert ads into any Web
page without the knowledge of the site visitor or the page’s creator. (He
did not actually see any such ads.)

Mr. Watt posted about the
discovery<http://justinsomnia.org/2012/04/hotel-wifi-javascript-injection/>on
his blog, and that soon spawned
a conversation <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3804608> on Hacker
News, a discussion site for tech topics, about the ethics of this
technique. One commenter described it as “icky,” and another asked, “Why
aren’t they putting ads in my pillow?”

Mr. Watt had strong feelings about it himself. He said in an interview that
he had never seen an Internet provider modifying Web pages that a person
visits. “Imagine the U.S.P.S., or FedEx, for that matter, opening your
Amazon boxes and injecting ads into the packages,” Mr. Watt said.

A test of the Courtyard Marriott’s wireless network on Friday verified Mr.
Watt’s claims. The code was embedded in the pages of several Web sites
visited, including Reddit, GigaOM and TechMeme.

The lines of code include references to “rxg,” which stands for Revenue
eXtraction Gateway, a service aimed at generating money from Internet
access points. On its Web site, a company called RG Nets, which makes Revenue
eXtraction Gateway,
explains<http://rgnets.com/index.php?page=injection-s1krr>that its
system rewrites every Web page on the fly so that it can include a
banner ad. “As you can see, the pervasive nature of the advertising banner
on all Web pages guarantees banner advertising impression,” a narrator says
in the video.

An online store selling the hardware to provide this service even lists “Web
experience manipulation<http://www.wlanmall.com/rxg-a8-revenue-extraction-hotspot-gateway-for-hotel-and-wisp-1000-user.html>”
as a feature. It is not clear whether the technology is in use at any other
Marriott hotels.

The Courtyard Marriott’s marketing director referred inquiries to
Marriott’s New York office, where a spokeswoman said she would have to talk
to the national office. The automated phone system for RG Nets quickly hung
up on calls, and the company did not immediately respond to an e-mail.

Even though this ad-serving system was apparently not serving ads, it was
the principle of the thing that upset the online critics. Mr. Watt said
that the technique not only affected people browsing the Web, but also the
content creators, because they would not get a cut of the revenue and their
own ads could be blocked.

“Imagine the hotel delivering complementary issues of The New York Times to
every room, except some articles have been accidentally blacked out, all
the ads have been cut out, and on every page there’s a new ad that’s been
stuck on top,” he said.


-- 
Art Deco (Wayne A. Fox)
art.deco.studios at gmail.com
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