The hilarious thing about this is comcasts ridiculously buzz worded job ads for engineers. It's like they just cut and pasted everything any manager read in a blog or magazine and pasted it to dice: http://www.dice.com/jobsearch/servlet/JobSearch?op=302&d...
Comcast injecting JS
131–140 of 288 posts
Re: Comcast injecting JS
#132Earlier quoted context omitted.
So did Comcast IIRC
I believe Comcast hijacked NXDOMAIN DNS replies and replaced them with their own IP address, causing every non-existant domain name to go to their search page you had to opt-out of.
Shaw Cable (Canadian ISP) does this. I had never thought to look for an opt-out until reading this. Thanks.
Re: Comcast injecting JS
#133Earlier quoted context omitted.
if they weren't then all JS and CSS files loaded through them would have their script tags in it. i have had these types of issues a while back at coffee shops that try to inject ads, it was breaking my XML.
Oh, good point, I guess there's got to be some kind of semi-intelligent HTTP parsing going on in the background.
The point is that it is impossible to do this right. This system breaks software.
Re: Comcast injecting JS
#134This is probably part of their "Web Notifcation System". They have a published RFC talking about how it works (RFC6108). Using that system they can selectively notify customers. Like if they detect your system is infected with a virus. Or warn you your service will be discontinued if you don't pay your bill. http://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc6108
The real goal of this is for the copyright infringement notices they want to send. Which I'm sure they will deem "critical".
Re: Comcast injecting JS
#135Earlier quoted context omitted.
Ethical stuff aside, I can't imagine hiring someone to actually produce code THIS bad. Where the hell did they find the coder to make this?
They're all over the place. People just starting out. It could've been an intern fresh out of college. It could've been someone who just never graduated beyond copy-and-paste-from-StackOverflow. It could've been written by a person who never did web development before and was just told to make it work. The little HN/Twitter/Reddit "awesome programmer" bubble is just that... a bubble. It's easy for us to forget that l…
"People just starting out."
Ha, you give them too much credit.
This code is from a 10-year veteran "consultant," probably charging over $200/hour, brought on by the Global Services company hired by the Consulting Agency that Comcast brought in to assist in completing the critical time-sensitive project as quickly as possible.
It was also deemed a great success, and presentations were made about how effective it was, how smart the manager who hired the consulting agency is, and how skilled the global services contractors were who implemented it were, all only 2 weeks behind schedule—a new record for a project of this scope.
That manager got a promotion and is now VP of something or other. He sleeps like a baby and makes 100 times more than you.
Re: Comcast injecting JS
#136I'm torn. This seems bad, but the warning (exceeding your bandwidth quota) seems valuable. I can't think of another, better way to message this.
And what happens when your 6 year old kid gets all the notifications? Or your neighbor who is using your Wi-Fi?
Re: Comcast injecting JS
#137Earlier quoted context omitted.
They're all over the place. People just starting out. It could've been an intern fresh out of college. It could've been someone who just never graduated beyond copy-and-paste-from-StackOverflow. It could've been written by a person who never did web development before and was just told to make it work. The little HN/Twitter/Reddit "awesome programmer" bubble is just that... a bubble. It's easy for us to forget that l…
"People just starting out." Ha, you give them too much credit. This code is from a 10-year veteran "consultant," probably charging over $200/hour, brought on by the Global Services company hired by the Consulting Agency that Comcast brought in to assist in completing the critical time-sensitive project as quickly as possible. It was also deemed a great success, and presentations were made about how effective it was,…
Hey, hey, now. I did include people who never moved on from copy-and-paste too.
Re: Comcast injecting JS
#138Earlier quoted context omitted.
They could just inject it inline. No problem there. The whole document.write block 27-51 (possibly the CSS-block too, but I'm not sure about this) could be written far more elegant in jQuery. But the real saving is that "drag and drop" code - jQuery would abstract all that isIE/isNS crap from them.
The block of code they injected here was 7.9 KB (3.7 KB gzipped). jQuery is 93 KB (33 KB gzipped). So no, I don't think that would have been more elegant. Injecting anything into users' pages without permission is insane. Injecting a huge library like jQuery would be even more insane.
As long as you're already injecting something, why not go all the way?
Re: Comcast injecting JS
#139This is nothing new.. Rogers has been doing this for years in Canada already.. They use it to notify subscribers when they are approaching their bandwidth quota (75%) and then again when they hit 100%. You actually have to click a "I understand" button to have it not show up over and over.
Rogers also used to serve ads in place of an error message when a bad URL was requested. That was the final straw causing me to cancel my service with them and switch to Teksavvy.
For me it was their really low bandwidth caps. Acanac ftw!
Re: Comcast injecting JS
#140Mobile carriers do this too. I see the exact same feature being provided on my Sprint line.