Belkin Routers Route Users to Censorware Ad

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Belkin Routers Route Users to Censorware Ad

Posted by jamie on Friday November 7, 2003 @08:28AM from the happy-birthday-megan dept.

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?"

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Usenet thread by turg · 2003-11-07 08:32 · Score: 4, Informative

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 /.

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1. Re:Usenet thread by Anonymous Coward · 2003-11-07 08:35 · Score: 5, Informative
  
  From: ericd@belkin.com (Eric Deming)
  Newsgroups: news.admin.net-abuse.email
  Subject: Re: [OT-evil marketing] Belkin does Verislime one better - router spam!
  Date: 5 Nov 2003 15:25:28 -0800
  Organization: http://groups.google.com
  Lines: 70
  Message-ID:
  References:
  NNTP-Posting-Host: 67.98.73.254
  Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1
  Content-Transfer-Encoding: 8bit
  X-Trace: posting.google.com 1068074728 22743 127.0.0.1 (5 Nov 2003 23:25:28 GMT)
  X-Complaints-To: groups-abuse@google.com
  NNTP-Posting-Date: Wed, 5 Nov 2003 23:25:28 +0000 (UTC)
  
  "JerryMouse" wrote in message news:...
  > Mr. Uh Clem wrote:
  >
  > [...]
  >
  > What does Belkin say when you complain?
  >
  > I'd make their life miserable until they removed the offending software from
  > my machine.
  >
  > You did not conset to this aspect of your machine's modification - this is
  > nothing less than malicious.
  >
  > Raise hell.
  
  I was made aware of this posting by an e-mail that was sent to
  Belkin's tech support e-mail box. Since I am a product manager for
  Belkin's LAN products and was very involved with the development of
  the Parental Control feature, I feel that I can shed some light on
  this subject. Firstly, without trying to sound too stand-offish, we
  are not talking about SPAM here. For me to clarify, an understanding
  of the Parental Control service will really be needed.
  
  Since Parental Control is a subscription service, Belkin wanted to
  make registering for the service very easy. Since the router actually
  will work in tandem with an outside server (Cerberian,
  www.cerberian.com) registration information needs to be collected and
  sent to Belkin and Cerberian to activate an account. Traditional
  methods of registration, such as asking the user to go to a website or
  navigate to the Router's internal Web page to enter information didn't
  meet the ease-of-use goal. 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. (Again remember, only
  one http request every 8 hours). Admittedly, there is no controlling
  which computer on the LAN this message will pop up on. If the user
  just closes the window without clicking "No Thanks", then the flag is
  never set, and the reminders will continue. Now, if you are the type
  that doesn't want to click the "No Thanks" button, then no problem.
  Navigate to the Router's internal web interface (default IP =
  192.168.2.1), click on the Parental Control menu. In the Menu, select
  "Don't Remind every 8 hours" (This phrase actually varies a bit, but
  you get the idea) then click "Apply Changes". DONE. Nothing to it. By
  the way, this procedure might have to be done if your router is behind
  a firewall. Reason: filter.belkin.com sends a response to the Router
  to set the flag. Firewalls will block the response. This might explain
  the problem in a school for instance.
  
  We did this not to be evil, we did this to make sure that any
  non-techy person (part of our target audience) would have ample
  opportunity to opt in or out of the free 6 month trial of the Parental
  Control feature. The Router doesn't collect information on you and
  send it to Belkin. We don't have the ability to SPAM you at a later
  time if you select "No Thanks" or turn off the Reminder manually. I
  know this feature might be misunderstood and might PO some people. I
  know the manual could do a better job explaining it. These are all
  things that we at Belkin are working to remedy.
use a real router by donnyspi · 2003-11-07 08:33 · Score: 4, Informative

Take an old Pentium I and put Smoothwall on it. No more Belkin and Netgear routers you get for $50 at Circuty City.
Re:Here's the angle I would take... by Anonymous Coward · 2003-11-07 08:38 · Score: 5, Informative

ericd@belkin.com

You're welcome. :)
Re:Some other ideas... by SmackCrackandPot · 2003-11-07 09:00 · Score: 4, Informative

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.
Re:Exactly by wo1verin3 · 2003-11-07 09:07 · Score: 5, Informative

>> 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.
Re:Here's the angle I would take... by rjamestaylor · 2003-11-07 09:19 · Score: 5, Informative

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
Re:Here's the angle I would take... by ChangeOnInstall · 2003-11-07 11:05 · Score: 4, Informative

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)
Re:Here's the angle I would take... by damiangerous · 2003-11-07 12:30 · Score: 4, Informative

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.
New reply from Eric Deming by FearUncertaintyDoubt · 2003-11-07 16:19 · Score: 4, Informative

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...