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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.
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.
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 aren't providing meaningful information to customers - they're just trying to make money.
Of course, that's what businesses are for, so as you say, if they want to do it, they should be entirely entitled to do so. However:
a) It's not fair on those who have paid for an existing service to have the nature of this service changed on them without warning - many people feel they are now getting a poorer service.
b) They should at the very least have provided an opt-out system for those who prefer untainted DNS that works in the way the internet standards require it to work. Then people with firewall, anti-spam or other systems that this change breaks wouldn't be so up in arms.
If my ISP did this, I'd leave them. Luckily my ISP is more sane.
Jolyon
Please read my Canon EOS tech blog at http://www.everyothershot.com
Only terrorists would run their own DNS server.
liqbase
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
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
Or we get a recording "doo-dah-dee. We're sorry - the number you have reached has been disconnected or is no longer in service. If you feel you have reached this recording in error, please check the number and try again."
We don't get "This recording is sponsored by Gromyko's Widget Works of Belle PPlain, Wisconsin, North American Wireless, and Joe's Pizza. You have dialed 555-1234. If you meant 554-1234, Smith, John, press 1, if you meant 556-1234, Mierzwiak, James, press 2, or if you meant 555-2233, Yung, M., press 3?"
Not to give the phone company ideas or anything :/
-b.
There's nothing fuzzy about what's actually happening. I can ping any random string of garbage and get a response. That's no Web-proxy problem; it's a fundamental breakage of DNS.