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Comcast Intercepts and Redirects Port 53 Traffic
An anonymous reader writes "An interesting (and profane) writeup of one frustrated user's discovery that Comcast is actually intercepting DNS requests bound for non-Comcast DNS servers and redirecting them to their own servers. I had obviously heard of the DNS hijacking for nonexistent domains, but I had no idea they'd actually prevent people from directly contacting their own DNS servers." If true, this is a pretty serious escalation in the Net Neutrality wars. Someone using Comcast, please replicate the simple experiment spelled out in the article and confirm or deny the truth of it. Also, it would be useful if someone using Comcast ran the ICSI Netalyzr and posted the resulting permalink in the comments.
Was the original poster a shill for some other ISP or what? An anonymous user submits a story decrying a great technical wrong by Comcast, that no one appears to be able to reproduce. So a little fact check action might in order here. Up next, "toyotasuxors@ford.com says: Toyota tracking all US drivers with a device hidden in the glove box!
I judt got a nre Kinesis keybiartf so please excusr ant egregiou typos.
Just to be clear about the parameters of this test... I assume the PC from which you sent the request isn't on the same local network as the DNS server? (Since, you know, the ISP routers would never even see the traffic if it were?)
Isn't that the point of this outrage? Getting typojacked when you try to go to a genuinely invalid URL?
Actually, no. We've been outraged about that before. It's one thing if I use someone's server and it typojacks me due to a wildcard entry in the name tables. The alleged behavior we're discussing actually prevents* the user from using another nameserver outside of that ISP in order to sidestep the problem.
* (well, makes more difficult, requiring tunneling or something like that)
For quite awhile I've had the feeling that DNS will eventually be brokered through P2P/DHTs/etc with digitally signed payloads, and this type of behavior only makes that idea more appropriate.