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Tell HN: China Unicom hijacking net requests to spam customers
FYI to anyone in China that China Unicom (中国联通) is hijacking browser requests to spam its customers. Requested webpages are stuffed into an iFrame and flash advertisements are loaded in the bottom-right after page-load. This appears to be a new form of spamming, since there isn't much detail about this online. Some more information here in Chinese for the curious:
http://jevosun.blogbus.com/logs/75696663.html
This is happening to me on maybe 1/300 requests. Which is enough to be noticeable and irritating over time, but not enough to make the ISP's behavior immediately obvious. I only made the connection after seeing the advertising appear on my own website and investigating out of concern my server had been hacked.
- maushu 16y agoThat has been done before, just not exactly that way. Remember AOL?
- garply 16y agoI live in China and am on China Unicom. Not experiencing this now. This happened to me ONCE (one page view on a very familiar site, might have been HN) about half a year ago and I was shocked. But I couldn't repeat it so I just shrugged it off and forgot about it. Interesting that they're up to it again. Maybe I got a test run.
- trevelyan 16y agoYeah... it's subtle. I only noticed it because I was on my own site at the time and (after closing the ad) stopped to wonder why the hell my site was serving up adverts.