Most interesting part was the reply from the Comcast employee.
But... this bit.
> ... [JL] This is our web notification system, documented in RFC 6108 https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc6108, which has been in place for many years now. ...
Oh, interesting, what Internet technology are they using?
> "RFC 6108: Comcast's Web Notification System Design"
> February 2011
Cue jawdrop. My instinctive response was to WAT and think "this is not what RFCs were for..."
But then I read this part,
> Status of This Memo
> This document is not an Internet Standards Track specification; it is published for informational purposes.
> This is a contribution to the RFC Series, independently of any other RFC stream. The RFC Editor has chosen to publish this document at its discretion and makes no statement about its value for implementation or deployment. Documents approved for publication by the RFC Editor are not a candidate for any level of Internet Standard; ...
Hmm.
Reading through, this outlines a way to avoid using deep packet inspection by using Squid and Tomcat instead.
Initially when I read this my brain was sort of going in the direction of "this kind of thing is where the net neutrality repeal thing started..." but now I've spent a bit of time reading it I don't actually think my snap response was particularly on point.
This is a bit of a stream-of-consciousness but I wanted to draw attention to that RFC.
Huh? It sure seems to be using deep packet inspection to me. If it's looking at the data section of your packet, that's deep packet inspection. And Squid and Tomcat do that. They're not just inspecting the packets, they're altering them, creating new packets, splitting packets, etc. The "RFC" seems to be outright lying by claiming they don't do DPI.
> Pre-established TCP sessions on port 80 are identified by the SMB and forwarded with no impact.
(SMB = Session Management Broker)
How does the system identify a "pre-established session"?
This seems to corroborate what you're saying
Customer: "Comcast has my phone office number, my cell for texts, my email, and my home address, yet they choose to molest my requested web pages by injecting hundreds of lines of code."
Comcast Response: "The notice is typically sent after a customer ignores several emails. Perhaps some of those ended up in your spam folder?"
To me this sounds like a crazy ex-lover. "You didn't respond to my texts so I came to your house." No, Comcast, don't do that. They ignore your emails because you're trying to sell them something they don't want.
Here is the Twitter of the Comcast rep for anybody interested: https://twitter.com/jlivingood