[AusNOG] Telstra's Texan Teaser - Tin Foil Stetsun anyone?

[Matthew Moyle-Croft]

I can replicate it across APNs as well.   Disappointing that they're not honest about what and why they're doing it.  Transparency isn't just for HTTP proxying!


MMC

On 25/06/2012, at 9:20 AM, Eric Pinkerton wrote:

> Ausnoggers..
>  
> Whilst there is a lot of tin foil hattery and other spasticity on this WP Thread, http://forums.whirlpool.net.au/archive/1935438 - the questions it throws up have made me curious, esp given Telstra’s official response in the following article “
>  
> http://www.scmagazine.com.au/News/305928,telstra-says-its-not-spying-on-users.aspx
>  
> “But in a short statement, Telstra’s senior media boss Craig Middleton said the company’s wireless network management assured that “there is nothing untoward in what the Whirlpool member has observed - it is a normal network operation” NOTHING TO SEE HEAR MOVE ALONG.
>  
> In short, if you make a request to a web server on port 80 from a Telstra mobile, you’ll see a request immediately after your legit request from the Telstra gateway that originates from a US IP address hosted at Rackspace.
>  
> Legit request..
> 58.163.xxx.xxx - - [24/Jun/2012:23:12:09 +0000] "GET /test101 HTTP/1.1" 404 464 "-" "Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; CPU iPhone OS 5_1_1 like Mac OS X) AppleWebKit/534.46 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/5.1 Mobile/9B206 Safari/7534.48.3"
>  
> Curious identical request follows…
> 50.57.190.97 - - [24/Jun/2012:23:12:09 +0000] "GET /test101 HTTP/1.0" 404 526 "-" "Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.9) Gecko/2008052906 Firefox/3.0"
>  
> Whilst I accept this is probably benign, and can think of several reasons why the output of such a process might be of value to Telstra, I find myself less convinced than a certain senior media boss seems to be that this is “a normal network operation”. To me normal would be to say pull this info straight from the proxy server.
>  
> Also, just to be awkward, I am curious as to why a cloud provider, would be using what looks a lot like a cluster of VPS’s in someone else’s cloud based out of Texas ;-)
>  
> Also why is there a black helicopter hovering above me?
>  
> So many questions….
>  
> Discuss!
>  
>  
> E
> 
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