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Belkin Routers Route Users to Censorware Ad
The Register has a story today about
Belkin routers redirecting their users' network traffic.
To me, this seems like the logical next step after top-level domain name servers piping ads to your browser. Now the routers themselves hijack the traffic they are supposed to, uh, route -- and you'll love where they send you instead. But it's OK because you can opt out. Incidentally, the Crystal Ball Award goes to Seth Finkelstein, who in 2001 quoted John Gilmore's famous aphorism about the internet, and asked "What if censorship is in the router?"
Here's the usenet thread where this was first discussed. Especially noteable are the initial discovery, the response from Belkin and the first response to Belkin. After that it it's pretty much the same thing you can expect to see here on /.
<sig>Guvf vf abg n frperg zrffntr
Take an old Pentium I and put Smoothwall on it. No more Belkin and Netgear routers you get for $50 at Circuty City.
ericd@belkin.com
You're welcome. :)
Will your TV remote automatically switch channels to an infomercial?
Not my TV, but my cable TV set top box does. Telewest (UK) just upgraded their menu systems. Now, whenever I select the [GameZone] menu option, whichever cable channel I listen to (even the BBC World News radio) is automatically switched over to the FrontRow trailer preview - No negotiation. As soon as I leave the GameZone, the channel is automatically switched back to whatever channel was playing when I started, even if the FrontRow channel is now playing a trailer I want to see.
It's good to see that cable TV system developers really know how to design good user interface.
>> Boy did they blow this one. If they had stuck
>> to something simple like your very first HTTP
>> transaction brought up a configuration/advert
>> screen only once, then there wouldn't even be
>> a story.
Actually this is pretty much what happens. Here is a snippet from usenet.
We elected to re-direct one http request to
the "Register Now" reminder page. (There is a link in a previous
posting if you want to see it) This page asks the user to register for
the service for a free 6 month trial. Now, granted this looks like an
ad. It should, it is intended to be informative and easy enough to
understand. At this point, the user can register or click "No Thanks".
Clicking "No Thanks" sets a flag in the Router to stop the Router from
re-directing every 8 hours to the reminder page.
In summary, you have to click 'no thanks' ONCE and you'll never see the thing again unless you do a hard reset of the router.
I have one of these gems and it redirects the three PCs going through it about once every two weeks. Incidentally, I have clicked the opt out href probably 5 times and each time it gives me an error message saying my request did not go through then I keep getting the redirects.
I was incensed enough about this that I read all the usenet posts in NANAE about it.
In the post by the Belkin employee he notes that clicking the opt out link won't wotk if you're behind a firewall, because the response won't get through your firewall and back to the router. To turn this off, you'll have to go to the local http page hosted by the router, and opt out there. (And I'm not sure even that would work for me; my firewall is set to block localhost (127.0.0.1) to localhsot connections too, unless I've explcitly allowed them for specific applications.)
Also, the Belkin employee proudly states that the hijacking occurs once every eight hours, so if you're only seeing it every two weeks, it may mean that applications other than your browser that make requests to port 80 (http downloaders such as emusic's, rss readers, various applications auto-updating or calling wget, perl scripts, python scripts -- all of these things on my system might make http requests) may be failing silently.
If you see one hijack in your browser every two weeks, that means there are 41 (3 * 14 - 1) http requests in those two weeks being hijacked that are not browser traffic. Given that silent failure, who knows what's been lost, corrupted, or delayed on your computers.
Naturally, I'll never purchase a Belkin product again, unless Belkin certifies that whoever thought this up, and whoever approved it, have been fired.
Selling me a product, claiming it does something, and then making it intentionally fail, in order to sell me another product? Then you'll never sell me anything again.
Opinions on the Twiddler2 hand-held keyboard?
Try their public relations manager (fitting, since this is a public relations nightmare). Be nice.
Contact:
Melody Chalaban,
Public Relations Manager
Belkin Components
501 W. Walnut Street
Compton, CA 90220
melodych@belkin.com
(310) 604-2347 direct
(310) 898-1107 fax
www.belkin.com
-- @rjamestaylor on Ello
We're all part of the public, aren't we?
Contact:
Melody Chalaban,
Public Relations Manager
Belkin Components
501 W. Walnut Street
Compton, CA 90220
melodych@belkin.com
(310) 604-2347 direct
(310) 898-1107 fax
www.belkin.com
(this is (unless you get redirected by your router) publicly available information at www.belkin.com)
Opinions on the Twiddler2 hand-held keyboard?
Get a Lucent Orinoco card. At least in the 802.11b days, they were *by far* the best, and they work great with Linux (if that's a concern for you).
What has *science* done?!? -- Dr. Weird (ATHF)
Once that came to light Netgear themselves provided enough networking hardware to handle the traffic load and techs to support it free of charge to the university.
Actually, this isn't a great idea anyway, but there are all *kinds* of things that have soft real time requirements on IP networks (granted, probably shouldn't be, but are).
Actually, I can think of a couple of reasons this is still an issue. What if it isn't on the Internet...does the connection just get dropped?
Does this device send out DNS queries to determine where to redirect stuff to?
What happens if you have a test suite for a web-based application and IT just added a Belkin piece-of-junk router? Bam, mysterious failures. You could spend a week trying to figure out what the sporadic errors you're getting are from.
What if you're using SOAP or similar software, and the software you're using doesn't deal well with mysterious crap coming back from the server?
Belkin is a piss-poor company that sells lousy hardware and overpriced cables.
They aren't on my "buy" list anymore, either (and I *have* purchased Belkin products in the past).
May we never see th
Just got this from Eric Deming. Funny, he's working late tonight!
From: Eric Deming [mailto:EricD@belkin.com]
Sent: Friday, November 07, 2003 10:05 PM
Subject: RE: defective router
Please be advised, we are working on this issue. Here is text from our latest posting to NANAE on google. It just went up, so it may not show up for a while.
All,
We at Belkin apologize for the recent trouble our customers have experienced with the wireless router/browser redirect issue. We unintentionally overlooked the effect this feature would have. We never intended to compromise the trust of our customers, and we never intend to do so in the future.
We are taking responsibility for this, and we will be offering firmware fixes early next week. We do not have exact details yet as we are still working on them, and will continue to work on them over the weekend. What we can tell you now is that each Router's firmware that incorporates Parental Control as an option will be changed.
I'll keep posting as things develop. Stay tuned...
Next drop URLs into an almost-invisibly small FRAMEs, and have the main frame show one of those annoying "Site loading" things with a 5 second redirect to the next page of the site, target _TOP(No, there shouldn't be a space between 10 0, it should be 100 -- slashdot doesn't love me)
When the browser hits the "next page", it will trigger some classic windows exploits (for education purposes only, of course)
You could turn off ZoneAlarm and PC-Cillin too if you wanted.
Give a man a fish, he'll eat for a day, but teach a man to phish...