DISQUS

Brett Glass · 1 year ago

Not only is "deep packet inspection" a "scary" name -- it is a misleading one. Packets on the Internet are one-dimensional; they have no "depth." And one does not need to "dig deeper" to see any part of the packet; it's all of a piece. While the alarmists who -- for various selfish reasons -- claim that packets are like letters in envelopes, in fact they are more like postcards. The addressing information (which all routers must see) and the header information (which must be altered at each hop the packet takes) is no more visible than the payload, or data. Any device that can see one can see the rest.

It's ironic, too, that Google would be let off the hook when it not only scans packets but parses your e-mail looking for keywords that will be used to select advertising. If anything is invasive, this practice is; checking the packets to see if they are VoIP and prioritizing them appropriately is nothing by comparison.

Richard Bennett · 1 year ago

Most of my network engineering work has been with layer two networks such as Token Ring, Ethernet, and W-Fi, and from that perspective IP is simply payload. In fact, you have to do "deep packet inspection" on an Ethernet frame to find an IP address. So yeah, there is no depth, just payloads within payloads.