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EarthLink Establishes Their Own "Site Finder"
Guppy06 writes "Last week, instead of a regular DNS error, EarthLink's DNS servers started to return a redirect to earthlink-help.net, a site that bears a close resemblance to VeriSign's much-maligned Site Finder, to their subscribers. According to their official blog at Earthling, "By presenting users with contextual help based upon the non-existent domain the user entered, we believe we are improving the EarthLink user experience with a system that will not interfere with other network processes." Most of the responses in said blog posting aren't positive."
- A box showing suggested search terms
- A box in which I could search (through Yahoo!) for my page.
- Two banner ads.
When I enter in a term, say 'guitar', I get a page with yet more ads and sponsored links but still directed through earthlink help to Yahoo!I wasn't born yesterday, I understand the concepts of paid search, sponsored links & banner ads. They generate revenue and insult me. They waste real estate on websites and obscure my information that I would prefer to harvest un assaulted by sales pitches.
I'm betting I'm not the first to say this, but this is insane.
If they wanted to be 'helpful' they would provide you with some sort of new service. In this solution, they are simply deciding which search engine you will use and cashing in off of it also. If we want to search for another answer, I think we know where to go. If you doubt our abilities to select a preferred search engine, at least give us some choices. Do you know what happens in Firefox when I pull down the search engine on the upper right? I can select from a number of sites.
You're not improving anything, you're laughing all the way to the bank.
My work here is dung.
Earthlink subscribers can opt by not being Earthlink subscribers any longer. When Verisign did it, it affected everyone because they've been granted a monopoly on certain domain extensions.
I've kept an Earthlink dial-up account in case I took my notebook on a road trip. I haven't used it in a while though, and have been meaning to cancel it. I think I'll go ahead and take care of that now, and I'll make a point of telling the rep about this.
If EarthLink is the only dial-up ISP with modems in a given local calling area, as AOL was for a lot of the United States for a long time, then most residential users are not going to want to pay per minute for long distance just to get on the Internet. Even for more affluent parts of the country, what happens when the phone company has partnered with EarthLink, and the cable company is even less competent?
There has to be some way that this sort of crap can be banned, it breaks the internet, because the error code is now a "valid" page!
Here on /. the general zeitgeist follows what is commonly called the "Unix way". Things should be kept small and only do one thing, but do it well. Developers can gain power by tying these simpler components together.
The other way of thinking can be termed the "Microsoft way" or even better "Apple way". This viewpoint believes that integrating things into easy-to-use applications leads to greater productivity gains as well as a more pleasant user experience. Instead of giving a ton of pieces to the user and expect them to make sense of it all, this viewpoint presents a fully-formed solution to the user.
The Unix Way zealots will tell you that undermining this dirt road area of the internet by returning useful results instead of an error message is bad. The Microsoft/Apple Way zealots will argue that something useful is always better than an inscrutable error message.
The side you fall on is really a viewpoint issue, and not a technical one. There is no technical reason why Earthlink's move couldn't be worked around, if that is really a good solution. There's also no technical reason why Earthlink needs to go ahead with something like this when search engines are already built into most modern browsers.
How is this worse than all those "search engine" sites squatting on unused and misspelled dowmains? At least earthlink is trying to provide some meaningful info to their customers.
There are plenty of freely accessible public DNS servers; let those old school "do it our way cuz that's the way it's always been done" zealots learn to drive their own machines and stop telling everyone else how to run their lives and businesses.
Has Earthlink learnt NOTHING from VeriSign's debacle?e s-it-anway.something would I act criminally? I mean, the site does not exist, and Earthlink just poaches its DNS adress...
Blatantly ignoring established policy (if a DNS-request does not resolve the response must be "DNS-request does not resolve" not "here it is"). Let's not forget all the privacy issues with hundreds of thousands of e-mails, normally being undeliverable because the sender made a typo in the adress, now end up in their inbox.
Hmmm... if I were to DDOS www.this-site-does-not-exist-but-earthlink-resolv
+++ MELON MELON MELON +++ Out of Cheese Error +++ redo from start +++
Anybody who authorized this on a technical level should be packing groceries, not presiding over an ISP's infrastructure.
Please try the related content suggestions and paid advertisements below, or try another search.
You entered "http://www.slashdot.org/".
Advertisements for cow steroids, cars, and free computers followed.
Simple. Continue to use Earthlink, but don't use their DNS. Just run your own dns server locally. Or, point to another open dns server.
The place for offering "help" in the user interface is in the client software. Perhaps the DNS error needs a metadata field for offering messages, perhaps hyperlinked, for exception handling. But those must be presented by the user agent, like the browser, not tricking the browser into "passthru" to server misdirection. That violates the DNS specs. And makes that essential global system vulnerable to unpredicted failures when dependant systems get nonstandard results.
These ISPs attract marketing people with dreams of empire and ignorance of Internet. Execs put them in power over the engineers, and just rip across the careful system designs that make the Net work. Then they cry when their stuff doesn't work, and blame the engineers.
But they compete with each other on how well their stuff works. As long as we can switch ISPs among a pool with critical mass size, they'll exploit each others' weaknesses to grab customers. These "DNS hijacks" are going to be with us forever, avoidable only while we have a choice between independent, competing ISPs.
--
make install -not war
Earthlink also provides services for Brighthouse in Florida. And there IS a choice of 3 companies there. I believe RoadRunner and AOL are the other 2. They could lose a TON of customers, if the customers cared.
Earthlink has pissed me off before and I am seriously considering switching to roadrunner. The only thing that has stopped me is that every time I make even a small change to my account, Brighthouse (who isn't so bright) screws up the entire account and I'm out of service for 2 weeks. And I can't afford that right now.
"If you make people think they're thinking, they'll love you; But if you really make them think, they'll hate you." - DM
RE: "Most of the responses in said blog posting aren't positive" Hm. Sounds like \.
The default MSIE result is lousy too. What I would LOVE to see happen is that, if I get an URL that does not exist, UI control returns to the address window, so I can type another one (most likely just by correcting a wrong spelling). That is what I always do anyway. I never use the useless MSN Search that comes up by default.
Where were you when the voynix came?
I don't know if your wondering, but opendns (http://opendns.com/) does this as well. Its another way on income. This is one of their explanations: http://www.opendns.com/faq/#is_it_like_site_finder . Its not as bad when an isp does this compared to the whole world, and on the root dns servers like verisign did, which could of slowed down the entire .com/.net space. If users of earthlink have a problem with that, they can simply switch dns servers or start there own dns server easilly.
From the article: "The system is specifically configured to handle only NXDOMAIN HTTP traffic as it is being returned to the user's browser and to not impact email and other non-web-browsing traffic."
HI, MY NAME IS ISAAC.
"The Unix Way zealots will tell you that undermining this dirt road area of the internet by returning useful results"
Except that these results are not "useful", and are even less useful than a simple honest error message. When I type in a wrong URL, I don't want to be punished by attempts to redirect me to a useless second-rate search service. I just want enter the correct URL and go about my business. Such redirections to useless sites are like putting deep mudpits in the dirt road.
"There's also no technical reason why Earthlink needs to go ahead with something like this when search engines are already built into most modern browsers."
That's another lousy idea. When you want to search, you go to a search engine site. What could be easier than that? Search engines, like email clients, have no business being built into browsers.
Where were you when the voynix came?
Only terrorists would run their own DNS server.
liqbase
" it's no skin off my back, and it's more useful than "server not found"."
"Server not found" is actually more useful. Who is in charge here, you or the browser? If I want to go to "www.nascatr.com", instead of "www.nascar.com", that's my choice. The browser should not try to override my choice or second-guess me. The most it should do is make recommendations in the error page, and make it easy for me to correct my mistake.
Where were you when the voynix came?
I type in "slashdto.org" and instead of getting a "can't find server" error, I get redirected to earth-link's special search page? From a pure usability point of view that is rubbish!
I rarely type in domain names that I am not already sure the correctness of (when I don't know the domain name for something I... surprise... use Google...). So, when I type a domain name wrong, it means I simply made a typo. Normally, I'm looking at an error report in my browser window, and I've still got "slashdto.org" typed in to the address bar. I simply fix the typo and smack enter, and away I go.
If instead, I got redirected to earth-link's page, I have to retype the whole URL again, and furthermore I might not know what I did wrong the first time, since the address in my address bar is now "earthlink-help.net". USELESS!
Though also academic for me since I don't user Earth Link, but still.
"How is this worse than all those "search engine" sites squatting on unused and misspelled dowmains? At least earthlink is trying to provide some meaningful info to their customers."
It's worse. If you put in an URL to a page that does not exist, all the browser should really do is to tell you that the URL does not exist. The "squatting" you mention is not comparable, and not a problem. If I type "www.yahoqo.com", the browser is just doing its job when it takes me to the squatter page at www.yahoqo.com. After all, it is what I told it to do in the first place.
Where were you when the voynix came?
"Those "search engines" are not "squatting" ALL unused and mispelled domains. And do keep in mind that the squatters are actually owning the domains they are "squatting"."
Exactly. You know why there are pages found at names like www.altavist.com and www.googe.com? Because someone properly registered the URL the old fashioned way (same as altavista.com and google.com) and put web page material on it. It is not a "problem" that the browser is doing its job and taking you to www.altavist.com and www.googe.com. It's a very bad idea to treat "the browser doing its job" as a problem to be "solved" by an ISP hijacking the browser.
Where were you when the voynix came?
Just realised that because my DNS server is temporarily offline due to a broken switch, anyone on earthlink trying to access one of my sites will make earthlink money from banner advertising.
Horrible.
"The system is specifically configured to handle only NXDOMAIN HTTP traffic as it is being returned to the user's browser and to not impact email and other non-web-browsing traffic."
Since when is it supposed to be OK for an ISP to hijack and damage the information coming back to a browser? If this is OK, then ISP's should be able to destroy email and non-browsing data as well. Let the browser display what is being sent to it, thank you. I have no problem with Internet tools such as browsers doing what I tell them to do, even if I make mistakes and tell them the "wrong" thing. Accuracy = ease.
Where were you when the voynix came?
I decided from the outset I'd never deal with Earthlink, which is a branch of the Church of $cientology (with its horrendous track record of Internet censorship lawsuits). I don't know of any place in the country where Earthlink is the only choice
Where were you when the voynix came?
I don't understand why the big ISP's haven't formed deals with the large search engines to forward mis-typed urls directly to the engines. Its win win win, ISP's get click through revenue, engines get more traffic, and customers get a value added service they can actually use.
Too logical i guess...
I didn't say "ALL" I said "all those" - you need to go back to school if you cannot grasp the difference.
And many of those "squatters" (actually parkers) DO NOT own those domains, nor do they ever plan to - they take advantage of the system, registering the domains and then rolling them over just before time runs out to get their money back - then RE registering them, then rolling over the ones that got a hit or two.... ad infinitum. They create a giant pain in the ass for the LEGIT web businesses that would like to actually do something with those domains, meanwhile they rake in a quarter or two a month on a few tens of thousands of domains they have no intention of ever paying for.
There's your abuse... and earthlink's NOT the guilty party here.
I'm not on earthlink and don't have this problem but if it redirects to earthlink-help.net you can just add that entry to your hosts file no? Sure, sure if you run your own server but for most users...
This is terrible because most of the time the DNS error is just a simple typo, and most users don't need to see 50 links to websites that are entirely irrelevant to what I want. I think we need legislation that forces ISPs to just provide an internet connection and do nothing else. Quickly takes care of the net neutrality problem too.
I wonder if this is even legal because they are now monitoring search terms, and that could rather quickly turn to logging.
Reality must take precedence over public relations, for nature cannot be fooled.
See also: HTTP + port 80 being used for everything from chat to file sharing to video streaming to RPC. Add to that HTTP status 200 + HTML being increasingly used to represent every possible response status.
I should have had a disclaimer - it's really easy to make one of these suggestion pages get really bad, really fast, like a browser hijack search page. Maybe I'm just being naive but since Earthlink already has your money and will be making more money off the sponsored clicks, I suspect the number of ads will be at least within reason on these pages. The one thing that is decent about IE's suggestion page is that there's maybe two or three images, last time I checked (I have Firefox here, and IE at work).
HI, MY NAME IS ISAAC.
I noticed the Earthlink change this week and immediately put a non-Earthlink DNS server at the top of my DNS servers list. My browser now returns the proper "can't find server" message and not Earthlink's advertising. (If you do this, please consider the ethical implications of using another provider's DNS server if you do not subscribe to that provider.)
Wordnik, a dictionary project which aims to collect
"Nothing is getting sent to the web browser that is of use to an end user anyway. "Server not found" or some timeout message doesn't tell me a goddamned thing"
You have to a real idiot to think that "Server not found" or a timeout message does NOT mean that the page isn't there. I know that you aren't.
Where were you when the voynix came?
"xenu.net"
"Can't find xxxx.net - Would you like a Free Personality Test?"
This is a money grab plain and simple. I prefer to get a 404 response when I fat finger a URL and then use my brain to figure out that I might have fat fingered the domain. I don't want to ever be redirected to a commercial search engine not of my choice. For one, is the search engine going to remain agnostic and return a naked list without censorship or insertion of their own interest? Or is it going to push a preferred list of commercial site owners that paid a premium to have their site show up on a list for people that fat finger? The other money grab here is that now competitors have a way to associate themselves with a site that already did the hard work of creating the interest for the user to type in the URL. This seems to be powerful for what would be ordinarily a site that does not exist for the user; isn't it powerful to create something out of nothing? When I want to find competitors on a subject or for a site, I directly go to a search engine. This seems like opportunism. For instance, if I type in www.McDonards.com and I am redirected to a search engine that interprets my mistake that I want to look up fast food or hamburgers, a search engine can now affiliate with McDonalds other hanmburger restaurants and fast food. It is quite possible these competitors did not invest in marketting like McDonalds to create the impulse for a user to visit their website. However, with Earthlink's redirect to their search engine, a competitor can pay a small fee, nothing probably compared to what McDonalds pays in advertising, and they are instantly associated with McDonalds message even if it is a tiny amount. It is certainly more than what the previously nothing-site had in the user's mind before the redirect. This is hijacking. Also, you have an adsense type thing where advertisers can pay even more premium to jump on the coat tails of someone elses marketting.
Do you really expect Earthlink to be honest about its motives? When does the customer ever come first in a for profit company? This service costs money and customers aren't paying more, so this is Earthlink's business development and it will probably net Earthlink more money at the expense of spamming their customers with paid ads and advertising of sites that wouldn't have normally occurred in the course of things. 404 does not advertise, it tells you that you made a mistake.
-b.
I don't understand the uproar. Isn't this just an ISP-wide 404 page?
When you dial a non-existant telephone number you get an ear piercing tone, you have to hang up, and start all over again.
Maybe it's all just a matter of personal preference?
I'm a 2000 man.
The biggest problem with this is not the ads (though they are annoying). This DNS hack doesn't just affect HTTP, it affects every application that does DNS queries. The claim that the system is configured to only handle NXDOMAIN HTTP traffic is a bald lie. There is no way for the DNS server to determine whether a query is being done for HTTP or for some other protocol.
When an application queries DNS for A records (IPv4 addresses) for a particular domain, one of three things should happen:
1. if there are A records for that domain, they should be returned
2. if there are no A records for that domain but there are other records, "no information" should be returned
3. if there are no records of any type for that domain, "no such domain" (NXDOMAIN) should be returned
What Earthlink's servers appear to be doing is the following:
1. if there are real A records for that domain, they are returned
2. if there are no A records for that domain, return A records for several hosts that don't belong to that domain.
if the application tries to talk HTTP to port 80 on any of those hosts and supplies the Host: query request
(standard in HTTP 1.1) the HTTP server will do a search for the domain that appears in the Host: request
and return HTML that suggests other domains that appear to be similar to the one given in the Host: request.
however if the application tries to talk to other ports on that machine it will get "connection refused" or
it will time out.
(the behavior is actually a bit more complicated than that. the behavior seems to be dependent on the IP address from
which the queries were made - so if you make the query to their servers from a host that isn't on Earthlink DSL
you will apparently get normal results. the behavior also seems to be dependent on the domain being queried.)
There are several things wrong with this behavior:
1. It's not reporting the error correctly. Applications that do DNS queries quite reasonably expect NXDOMAIN
to be returned if the domain does not exist, and "no information" to be returned if there are no records of
the type they're looking for - not a list of apparently valid IP addresses pointing to hosts that have nothing
to do with that domain. Many applications behave differently depending on the error condition. "connection
refused" and "connection timed out" are often treated as temporary errors - the application assumes that the
remote server is rebooting or isn't reachable and tries again later. "no such domain" is more often treated
as a permanent error, or one that requires immediate user attention. So this Earthlink change can cause
applications other than web browsers to behave improperly, or to give misleading error messages.
For example: if an email server is trying to send mail to someone at a particular domain, it will first do
a query for MX records to determine if there are any mail servers assigned to that domain. If the MX query returns
no answers, it may then issue a separate query for A records. If this happens the Earthlink DNS server will return
bogus A records and the email server will try to send the mail to Earthlink's servers rather than bouncing the mail
like it should. When Earthlink's servers refuse the connection, the email server will treat the condition as a
temporary error and retry at intervals for several days. As a result, mail for nonexistent domains (say, bounced
spam) can clog up the email server's queues and slow things down.
2. It is hiding other records associated with that domain. Say an application will
Well, for one thing, if you're using a modern web browser your web browser is already doing this for you, and you may even be able to pick and choose which search engine to use.
For another, DNS results are cached by browsers and operating systems, so if someone's DNS servers are temporarily down then anyone who gets sent to earthlink-help.net will continue to see the site as "down" for longer than necessary.
For another, many applications need to know if a domain is not found. If they start getting valid results for unknown domains they'll break.
The system is specifically configured to handle only NXDOMAIN HTTP traffic...
There is no way for the DNS server to know that whether request that follows the domain lookup will be an HTTP request, so this is not actually technically possible.
A strong recommendation for someone who works in advanced broadband svcs @ BH Tampa Bay: insist on speaking to a Level IV rep to make account changes. Regional customer service is notorious for wrecking accounts when making changes involving internet service. We Level IV's are the ones who are called on to fix said accounts. In CS's defense, we have to deal with an unneccessarily complex billing system that isn't as straightforward as it should be.
"Server not found" or some timeout message doesn't tell me a goddamned thing.
Then switch to a browser that tells you something useful, or install a plugin or local proxy that does the same thing. Then YOU get to choose whether you'll use Earthlink's search page or Microsoft's or Yahoo's or Google's. You may be using Amazon's A9 service as your default search engine, which means this service could actually be costing you a discount on Amazon.
This is different from what VeriSign did because VeriSign had a monopoly in the market
This is less serious but not different in any fundamental way. Both break working applications and reduce your ability to choose how you want your errors handled.
how many of Earthlink's customers do you suppose heve the foggiest notion of what a DNS server is or does or knows how to set up an alternative?
That's as may be, but physically disconnecting my cable the next day, and then refusing to send a guy out for 2 weeks is inexcuseable. I don't care how complicated the system is.
"If you make people think they're thinking, they'll love you; But if you really make them think, they'll hate you." - DM
Two queries, one after the other. First it does its "sitefinder," then it gives NXDOMAIN, and seems to alternate randomly...
#1:
> host www.yahoo.coma ns3.mindspring.com
Using domain server:
Name: ns3.mindspring.com
Address: 207.69.188.187#53
Aliases:
www.yahoo.coma has address 209.86.66.93
www.yahoo.coma has address 209.86.66.94
www.yahoo.coma has address 209.86.66.95
www.yahoo.coma has address 209.86.66.90
www.yahoo.coma has address 209.86.66.91
www.yahoo.coma has address 209.86.66.92
#2
> host www.yahoo.coma ns3.mindspring.com
Using domain server:
Name: ns3.mindspring.com
Address: 207.69.188.187#53
Aliases:
Host www.yahoo.coma not found: 3(NXDOMAIN)
Is that enough? EL bought this "service" from Barefruit. Their website implies that they don't just hijack DNS, but ALL http server error codes. (Of course, for this to work EL would also have to be sending all port 80 connections through their own proxy servers. I'm not an EL customer so I can't try it.)
If they want to play that game then maybe you should just use:
http://www.opendns.com/
They have easy to use instructions for changing your computer to point to their servers.
If you don't like their service, you can always revert back to what your are annoyed with now...
I have been using them for more than a month with no problems.
Attempting to test VPN-related DNS lookups with a business partner.
I IMMEDIATELY called earthlink business T1 support and the guy on the phone had no idea what I was talking about.
Why would a company roll out something like this WITHOUT telling its support people and without letting customers know in advance? Why do they not have an opt out option?
I'm in the process of going over the contract for our T1 to see if it's early enough to break (the service was purchased before I came on board but only by a month or so).
I'll get a Speakeasy T1 and be done with it. Why is it so damn hard to find a provider who gives you IP with no bullshit?
"Fighting the underpants gnomes since 1998!" "Bruce Schneier knows the state of schroedinger's cat"
I noticed that too. So far I haven't seen any interception of 404 error codes, for instance. I can't imagine them being stupid enough to try that!
... but ISPs keep treating it like it is. If this kind of web-browser-error-messages-are-so-hard-to-understa nd-whaaaa-mommmy-hold-my-hand problem is so important, it can be done using proxying. Just have everyone who doesn't know how to type or can't understand the message "the domain ww.exampel.com couldn't be found" set the proxy settings in their browser. Or if you know your user base is composed of a bunch of idiots, use transparent proxying (obviously less effective with https traffic, but then significant changes to DNS, such as this is, effectively breaks https and what little trust you do get from https anyway). Can't proxy settings be served via DHCP or something too? This would provide all the advantages of dynamic configurations based on user/client machine (mac address) without even having to walk non-technical users through the process of changing their proxy settings in the browser.
On the other hand, if SRV records had been used initially to publicize HTTP servers, then only those records would need to be overloaded to provide this kind of service. At least then it would be restricted to DNS queries related to HTTP traffic, although still not ideal.
Maybe this is news to you.. but Earthlink owns VERY little of their dial-up infrastructure.. instead they lease from Qwest/UUNet/etc. There are many MANY other ISPs (like the one I work for) that have the same amount or more dial-up numbers nationwide then Earthlink does.
> a site that bears a close resemblance to VeriSign's much-maligned Site Finder
History keeps repeating itself again, and again, and again... Einstein was right: human stupidity seems infinite.
Half Time
I will admit that while I am not crazy about this search redirector, overall I have been happy with Earthlink as my broad band provider. They have been no better or worse then Time Warner/Road Runner was when I first got this cable line, and they are MUCH cheaper than Road Runner. I do not have cable TV just cable internet - RR wants $54.95/mo when I left them, and Earthlink has remained at $41.95/mo. It was a no brainer for me to switch when RR made their last increase (Its been about two years ago, IIRC). Earthlink is on my good side since they still don't block any ports that I need to run my bbs, website, and anything else I've wanted to do (I use DynDNS). I will say that Road Runner here didn't block ports either.
I use Earthlink, and this annoys me to no end.
Well, it wouldn't be *that* bad if it wasn't also accompanied by a downturn in DNS quality. In the last 48 hours, Earthlink's shiny new DNS system returned a "Site not found" for the following domains:
1) news.yahoo.com
2) spreadsheet.google.com
3) www.myspace.com
The system must cache too, because I couldn't access news.yahoo.com for at least 30 minutes after I got the first incorrect NXDOMAIN response. If this doesn't improve after the holiday weekend, I'm going to cancel my account...
Pissed.
I noticed this the day it happened. Called tech support to have it turned off, and he was clueless, or attempting to mislead me. I am very pissed off, can can't see how to fix this. I am probably going to just block earthlink.net on my router.
ASK the consumer if they want to do things the "traditional" way or if they want to do it the "better, exclusive {insert ISP name here}" way. Make sure the consumer can change this option at any time.
Savvy consumers will opt for the traditional way and get very-desirable DNS errors, suckers will go for the name-brand way and get "helpful" suggestions chock-full-of-ads.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
The thing is, for people who dislike this Service because of what it breaks are generally smart enough to work around it.
Earthlink is probably assuming "Well if they dont like it they can work around it, but hey, everybody else likes it!"
Your hair look like poop, Bob! - Wanker.
nt
I use Cavalier Telephone and they started this practice a few weeks ago. First I thought it was a bug in Firefox (my google search bar not working). Then I spent 2 hours checking for a virus or spyware. After that, I tried another DNS server and realized the problem. I never expected a small DSL provider to do this kinda crud.
Not many, of those that don't, how many appreciate the redirection service? Those that care, have alternatives.
Hey, the man said it was simple, deal with it.
I am sure he would be happy to explain to earthlink customers how simple it is to set up
Might I suggest 4.2.2.1?
's been my "test" DNS server for years.
sig?
"This recording is sponsored by Gromyko's Widget Works of Belle PPlain"
Wondered where he'd gotten to. Didn't know that Roger Rabbit is now doing voice work for phone message recordings.
Where were you when the voynix came?
i'll tell you exactly how many: the number of earthlink customers that have the foggiest notion of what a DNS server is, and how to setup their own bind/named or djbdns instance, is equal to the number of earthlink customers who actually care about this issue, and don't actually want to be presented with relevant ads/search results. It's that easy.
Extraordinary Vacations. Exceptional Prices
If I didn't know any better, this would look like paid search routing. As in, Yahoo paid Earthlink to put a search box on this result page. Then Earthlink goes as far as to place banners and skyscrapers as well. All things considered, it smacks of financial desperation, since other posters in this discussion have pointed out just how much this behavior does not follow proper routing protocol.
Do they allow porn sites(with slightly misspelled names of popular websites) and phishing sites go through? If I was Earthlink I would put a "hey, maybe you mistyped this URL" website going for known sites like that.
Okay... I'm a slashdotter and I have no idea how the hell to go about doing that (mind you, I could find out if I were bothered to do so). My (and most /.ers) knowledge of the inner workings of the internet is probably about three orders of magnitude higher than most Earthlink customers, or of any other ISP for that matter. Until something like that comes in the form of critical automatic update, there's not a snowball's chance in hell of it happening on even a small scale.
How are sites slashdotted when nobody reads TFAs?
AT&T provides dialup around the world, including extremely widespread dialup in the US. I've mainly dealt with the business service rather than the consumer service, but I assume the consumer DSL still provides similar coverage to Earthlink's.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
Most of the PR from Earthlink is extremely fuzzy about what it's actually doing. The pages it points to at Barefruit say that they're doing web-proxy manipulation, not DNS manipulation, and that if their web-proxy caching server detects a DNS miss, it'll go to the substitution advertising page. That means that if you try email, or ssh, or telnet, or ping or traceroute, or some other non-http protocol to a mistyped domain, you should still see the correct DNS message, though it's not clear whether they're doing it with https (that'd be very evil) or http on ports other than 80 (e.g. www.example.com:8080, which would be a relatively bad idea). They do say that they're not messing with email, but it's not clear that they're really doing it through the web proxy or whether they're doing something else instead.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
The customers that care about the problem don't need to know how to set up their own DNS server - they just need to know how to set their system to use some other DNS server's address. On Windows, you go into Control Panel and set up the network stuff; on Linux you set your resolv.conf file. Much easier.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
for lots of reasons stated in other posts. the ads are the least of the problems with this hack.
You could also set up your own personal resolver locally or on a server you have access to (http://cr.yp.to/djbdns.html http://www.powerdns.com/en/products.aspx -- the powerdns resolver, for instance). It's not really that hard. You loose the benefit of prepopulated DNS caches, though.
I'm sure something equivalent exists for Windows. Bind (*blech*), for instance.
Good Lord, they're redirecting people to their search page... at the DNS level?! Is that even legal? It certainly shouldn't be.
If I want to respond to NXDOMAIN by going to a search page, great. There's software that will let me do that. If you want to help me, point me to the software. (Or to the options in the software that I'm already using, as the case may be.) Let me decide.
If you take the decision out of my hands by hiding the NXDOMAIN response and forcing upon me the decision patronize a site that is profitable to EarthLink and tell me you're doing it to help me out... you're a worse liar than my girlfriend's kid!
Worse yet, a downstream DNS server is going to cache your bullshit response, preventing users behind such a server from reaching the erstwhile nonexistent domain even when it does come online! Of course, you see that as a good thing, because you're sure they're rather be going to your site than the domain they actually typed into their browser, right?
vnsc-pri.sys.gtei.net? A Verizon DNS server?
Isn't that like throwing out the bucket with a hole in it and replacing it with a sieve?
:-D
Check out my sci-fi/humor trilogy at PatriotsBooks.
send feedback to earthlink, to let them know what you think about this.
>>
e ssBarException and TypoInURLException , which attempts to divine what they were trying to do and get them back on the correct path to accomplishing it.
This is about the Computer Science way: returning an error when an error occurs.
>>
There is nothing "Computer Science" about always allowing an error to propagate up to the end user. If you drop a TCP-IP packet, do you pop up a window over WoW saying "We just lost a packet boss, what do you want us to do about this?" No, you *handle the problem in a way which makes sense for your application*. For *some* applications, *certain* errors and exceptions should be presented to the user.
For *many* applications, errors and exceptions contain no useful information to the user other than "For a reason which will probably be totally inscrutable to you, something went wrong", so recovering from the error/exception is a priority. All Earthlink is doing here is making an exception handler for the UnsophisticatedUserTypedSearchEngineQueryIntoAddr
An ISP whose customer base is non-technical users *is* a user-agent, in the literal sense, because the users pay them money to handle "The Internet" and if "The Internet" fails to work the first number that gets called is the ISP. An ISP whose average customer has a five-digit Slashdot ID can afford to provide a no-frills "we give you bandwidth, you take care of the rest" service. Earthlink is NOT that ISP.
Help poke pirates in the eyepatch, arr.
uhm that's because it's Time Warner service. Earthlink is just reselling the same cable service. They MIGHT have their own POP circuit and maybe even their own CMTS but it's still Time Warner maintaining the cable system.
I will no longer consider earthlink non-evil, and will move off as soon as convinient.
/etc/dhclient-up-hooks && chmod a+x /etc/dhclient-up-hooks
If you have fedora linux, you can run this:
echo SEARCH=earthlink.sux >
This will update resolv.conf with a overridden "seach" and apparently this will get a the dns servers to return NXdomain. Apparently they only fake results when it goes to things like *.com *.earthlink.net and *.dyndns.net. I personnaly think that dyndns.org should sue someone.
As a fellow pissed-off ELN user... what DNS server would you suggest?
~REZ~ #43301. Who'd fake being me anyway?
Of course, I used their "chat" window to get that info, which rewarded me with a Dell text ad at the end of the session. I guess shoveling ads at subscribers is the new business model over at Earthlink.
I've lost faith in you CmdrTaco...
Did you know that you can be apathetic to apathy? Not that I give a shit...
Found this pledge/petition agains Earthlink's SiteFinder: http://www.pledgebank.com/earthlinksucks
If enough people sign it, Earthlink might change its tune.