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OpenDNS Says Google-Dell Browser Tool is Spyware
PetManimal writes "David Ulevitch, the founder of OpenDNS, claims that Google and Dell have placed 'spyware' on Dell computers. Ulevitch made the claim based on his observation of the behavior of the Google Toolbar and homepage that comes preinstalled on IE in new Dell machines. He says that a browser redirector sends users who enter nonexistent URLs to a Dell-branded page loaded with Google ads. Another observer, Danny Sullivan, says that this is a different result than what happens on PCs without the redirector. However, the original article notes that Ulevitch has a vested interest in the results of mistyped URLs."
Now I work for a fortune 500 company and guess what we do with every box we get from Dell? Re-image it.
Now, for the 99% other Dell customers, this is just purely unfortunate because I'm not so naive to expect everyone to know how or why they should take the above actions. I hope that all the virus scanning apps (HiJackThis, Lavasoft's Adaware, etc) get this thing because Adaware is about the most useful thing I can show my family how to use frequently enough to keep the computer protected.
This sounds a lot like something the old Gateways would do. Huh, I never would have thought Dell would reach that level but, well, here we are. The important thing is to factor this in when you're thinking about a new computer. Hopefully some competition will spring up for Dell and, you know, quality of the software (not just the hardware) will start to matter for Dell.
My work here is dung.
... Or at least _not only_ The same behaviour happens on my company issued Dell D820. It comes loaded with IE6 and NO Google toolbar and yet when I mistype a URL I do not end up at the MSN search page like on any other IE installation! Instead IE redirects me to a Dell branded Google search page full of Google commercials.
I'm sure slashdot denizens will have a good time discussing how useless the bundled software and trialware that comes with Dell computers is, and how the sensible thing to do is reinstall from scratch, but that's been the case for a while. There is zero story here.
Lifehacker recently had an article on a piece of software called the PC Decrapifier. I haven't tried it, but it seems relevant to this thread.
This claim may very well be FUD but there is a way for people to test. Just download a network packet capture program and look at the traffic being sent. I did this myself and didn't see anything untoward being sent nor did I see any gibberish traffic to indicate encryption. But, that isn't to say that I didn't miss anything when scanning the log of the output. Basically, anything offered by a for profit company for free, really is not. If the service were entirely gifted, the company would rapidly drift into the red. Also, read the EULA. I get scared by long convoluted statements which can be subjected to interpretation. I do like Dell hardware but the first thing I do when I get my dell is to delete the partitions, re-partition, and format the HDD. I recommend everyone doing the same.
If you don't want to reinstal: http://www.pcdecrapifier.com/ My mother in law bought one. Now I am used to your anti-virus no longer getting updated if you don't pay. But when her spamkiller expired, her email stopped working . And I can assure you there is NO WAY she would have been able to fix that herself without paying.
10 ?"Hello World" life was simple then
AFAICT Google is just used by Dell on the Dell search page, thats all.
This wouldn't have anything to do with opendns being powered by Yahoo, right?
they track everything you do on their "guide" from what links you click on, when you exit the page, uses hidden iframes, the list goes on all 50+kb of script to help you just like Verisigns sitefinder helped,
what they do deserve credit for is convincing people clever enough to change their DNS settings that somehow breaking DNS in exchange for seeing adverts is a worthwhile tradeoff, just like spyware/adware convinces a user that viewing adverts for getting weather is somehow a good thing.
perhaps they should team up with new.net as they do the same just using a binary to help change those pesky dns settings
here's how to stop their crap
add this to your hosts file
127.0.0.1 guide.opendns.com
As I understand it, Mozilla DO do something like this with firefox.
c eid=mozilla-search&start=0
When you perform a search with the default firefox screen (with it's Firefox customised Google) Google is notified of this fact and kick back some money to Mozilla.
When you perform a search from Firefox's search box you'll also notice that it's identifying you as a Firefox user, here take a look:
http://www.google.com.au/search?q=test&le=en&sour
Note the sourceid in the querystring.
Nefarious? That's for you to decide.
Yesterday I got a lot of feedback from people who just assumed I was biased and an underdog out to complain about Google. This is not what it's about!
Here's what I mean:
Use the smell test. Does what Google is doing smell bad? Is it giving users a good experience?
Compare:
with
(and if you want to see ours)
If you just compare what google is doing to their own users you'll see that they are showing a terrible experience to the users who are Locked-In versus the users who have the choice to use any search service.
Thanks,
davidu
# Hack the planet, it's important.
Their product seems to use e.g. resolver1.opendns.com (208.67.222.222).
If I use that as my DNS, and do a lookup for www.google.com, I get
redirected to a CNAME of google.navigation.opendns.com.
What's up with that? DNS hijacking, anyone?
no, a toolbar is just a place to locate lots of tools and usually a nice visible logo for the company that made it, nothing more is implied. in some cases using browser tools causes interaction with the hosting site, but this is not the same as saying that the toolbar should necessarily be involved in other web browser functions such as intercepting bad domains. the old google toolbar only connected to home base if you did a google search with it or if you turned on the pagerank display
Yes, you can. (The following explanation is simplified but good enough for resolving purposes.) DNS is a hierarchy. The root servers know the IP addresses of the domains servers for the top level domains. The top level domain servers know the IP addresses of all second level domain servers in their TLD. Almost all of these servers don't do recursive lookups, which means they will only respond to queries for the information in their own domain. That's why you need a recursive resolver. When you ask a recursive resolver for www.slashdot.org, it asks one of the root servers for the address of the .org nameserver. Then it asks the .org nameserver for the address of the slashdot.org nameserver, then it asks the slashdot.org nameserver for the www.slashdot.org address. BTW, all of these responses get cached, so you rarely need to contact the root servers. These lookups each take some time, which is longer if there is a high latency link between the resolver and the nameserver, which is why people on dialup like to use better connected computers to do these lookups for them and return only the final result. But there's no technical reason why you can't request these lookups yourself and with today's networks it is not slow at all. Try it yourself: MaraDNS windows binary. Run the resolver with run_maradns.bat and set your DNS to 127.0.0.1. That's all there is to it.
This Google+Dell spyware comes preinstalled and is purposely more difficult to uninstall than it should be.
OpenDNS provides DNS service (duh!) which is often much better than users' default DNS service. OpenDNS doesn't come preinstalled. Users have to willing chose to set it up and can just as easily disable it. The pages it shows for malformed URLs can even be turned off if you have a static IP address.
It makes absolutely no sense for you to say "bravo to Dell" for "using the leader in search relevance to give users something relevant", yet describe OpenDNS as a "cyber-squatter of typo-domains".
Way too many people are into typosquatting now. From OpenDNS to the "toolbar" guys to the guy who paid off the government of Cameroon (try anything in ".cm"), there can now be several layers of typosquatting between the user and the actual domain. At least we got Network Solutions to back off from their attempt.
Search may be coming apart. There are too many people trying to "game" the search systems now. "Search engine optimization" used to be viewed as evil and was done by low-rent operations. Now we have publicly held companies (Marchex, ticker symbol MCHX) formed just to create dummy domains. Collactive, the Digg spammer, just got venture capital from Sequoia Ventures. Computer vendors load up their preinstalled machines with unwanted "toolbars", which, as this article mentions, produce mostly user-hostile information. All the sources of information which drive search engines, from inbound links to user ratings, are now being spammed by sizable companies. It's a big change from the situation two years ago, when the troublemakers were all little guys with limited resources.
It's going to get worse before it gets better.