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.

Comments

Re: Linus Torvalds is a turd burglar

[csartanis]

Cool story bro.

California?

[bogaboga]

Californians are in some kind of budget crisis...or are they? I am in Timbuktu if that matters.

Re:California?

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes. The "liberal laboratory" destroyed itself with excessive borrowing and excessive spending. Much like Barack Obama and the democrats are doing to the rest of the country.

The federal government has taken on so much debt in the past 9 months that interest rates have been pushed up, making home refinances and mortgages that much more expensive. Keep in mind that low interest rates mean people will buy houses and end the recession/depression. But the "stimulous" debt is preventing that from happening. Barack Obama's answer? Borrow and spend more money!

Re:California?

[Anonymous Coward]

Hasn't Cali had Republican governors for a while?

Re:California?

[Anonymous Coward]

Democrat controlled legislature. They've been borrowing and spending way beyond their income for years (relying on the never ending dot com bubble to have never burst, like they missed the memo, plus house flipping to go on forever and two days..another memo seemingly misplaced... they are sort of quite insane really) and years now.

  Governors can do some things, but where the budget rubber hits the road, it is in the legislature. The best Arny can do now is to just stop services and keep it in the news it is up to the legislature to achieve and maintain balanced budgets.

  If that means they have to end about 7/8ths of their grand multicultural massive social engineering spend fest, that is what they will have to do, or institute like a 25% sales tax or a state level 25% income tax or something. They are so far into the red there really aren't many options, and anyone with half a clue saw this coming a long time ago, but you can't talk to the social engineering folks, they think money is just something that they can spend as much of as they feel like....

I feel sorry for fiscally responsible people still in California, the best advice is bail now while it is still possible to go someplace else and maybe get a similar job. California is going down the tubes hard from their budget mess and the general economic malaise, their smugness and open ridicule of the rest of the nation because they are so smart and leet is going to be wiped from their faces shortly. Riches to rags real soon now. One of the world's largest economies to a second world level type debtor state. I imagine the social scene there is going to get quite *interesting* once they have 5 million or more totally unemployed people trying to exist in a still incredibly expensive to live place and no welfare for them. They already have a serious near insurrection with their gang problems they hardly ever acknowledge in public, like it doesn't exist. Hundreds of thousands of totally nutso ultra violent gang bangers, most of them illegal aliens that Cal welcomed with open arms. Totally nuts. These are hard core predators who will be going out and starting to prey on a lot of well meaning but quite naive ultra liberals soon, outside their traditional barrios and ghettoes so on.

It's really simple basic math, they are broke, beyond broke, they borrowed so much and started so many totally loony social engineering and biz unfriendly programs, just adding more and more busywork state government jobs, that the state is well beyond bankrupt and any fix will require rather draconian action which they will not take until it is well past the time when it might have worked.

Of course, the same can be said for the USA as a whole, the next few years will be a chapter for the history books. There's actually a decent chance the USA will break up like the old Soviet Union did,(I think this would be for the best actually) especially if the rest of the world stops using FRNs as a reserve currency. It will get pretty damn ugly here then. Our treasury sec just got laughed nearly off the stage trying to tell Chinese economic students that the dollar was still sound, the audience literally exploded in laughter and derision. That's a clue.

Re: Linus Torvalds is a turd burglar

[NickBurns329]

>>Windows machine that does its job perfectly well ... Wow, I didn't know Gramma used the word TurdBurglar ... , but, it must be Gramma on /. , since no one can make the above statement, and not be ..ah .. say +75f#$@! years old! What an azz

Re: Linus Torvalds is a turd burglar

[multisync]

I am interested in signing up for your TRON fanzine. Please advise, is it a monthly, or a quarterly?

Re:Not happening to me

[johannesg]

I just verified that it's not currently happening. I'm in California if that matters.

Me too. I'm also in CA and it is not curently happening.

Are you saying this is currently not happening?

Re:Fuck `Em All

[sharkey]

Comcast is like being forced to have group sex with Oprah Winfrey, Rosie O'Donnell, Roseanne Barr and Chelsea Clinton WITHOUT benefit of a blindfold, noseclip, earplugs and Wild Turkey.

Re: Linus Torvalds is a turd burglar

[machine321]

Probably a bi. Monthly. Bi-monthly.

Re:Not happening to me

[x4r]

you right, and US laws was wrong. in you dream.

Re: Linus Torvalds is a turd burglar

[Anonymous Coward]

Who's fucking retards? Maine Coons? Those cats are pretty big, but Corky has the upside of Downs Syndrome: huge dick, superhuman strength and the desire to hump everything in site. Maybe the touch of the Downs has confused Corky.

Main Coon == pussy
pussy != vagina

Oh, now I see. != confuses Corky. He's undoubtably confused "bang equal" with "banging equal". He's not much of a coder, he's really more of the idea guy. I'm pretty sure he wrote Matrix 2, Boxing Helena, Crash AND came up with the suck off scene in Swordfish. Best job interview EVAH! Don't you see what I mean? He's an idea guy! Oh, that Corky!!! Not too smart but a heart of Au (that's Portuguese for gold).

Please, my double personality AC, go and find Corky and let him know he's banging the wrong kind of pussy. He's really more of a Charo type. Cuchi-cuchi!

Steve Jobs on full recovery

[Anonymous Coward]

A giant customized Starbucks in Cupertino California where lattes and no soy skim macchiatos are given out free to all employees. The background music involves a playlist of Nora Jones, David Matthews, John Mayer, and Bono on loop from an Ipod docked somewhere in the Apple/Starbucks facility. Hours are long but morale is surprising high as developers, hardware and software, are given 30 minute breaks to masturbate to the new itunes interface.

All developers sit at cafe type tables with a Mac Book Pro while their lord and master Steve Jobs stands deskless in his predictable attire of a turtleneck and jeans. In fact, this is the preferred (mandatory) dress code at Apple. Jobs walks around to each and every department, separated by latte and vegan preferences, and checks on the performance and efficiency of his developers. At any given point in the day one may see Mr Jobs yelling at a programmer for not implementing a button in the perfect shade of corn flower blue (#6495ED) and immediately sends him to the apple punitive chamber, consisting of a HP Compaq running Vista Basic.

There are 2 software development departments and 2 hardware development sections in Apple. For software there is the Apple core team, Apple Open Source team. In hardware there is the Apple systems and management team and the iDevice team. Since the OSX kernel consists of a BSD darwin kernel there is no real need for low level programmers and as such the entirety of the Apple core team consists of UI designers and photoshop junkies. All software churned out from the core team is designed in a program strikingly similar to Visual Studio's form designer but with Cocoa Objective C generated instead. The 16 hour day (Jobs demands 16 hour days since he himself never sleeps) of a core dev involves lining up the right shade of chrome with the latest photoshopped graphite button and maintaining the correct color scheme, not an easy job at all.

The Apple open source team involves a little bit more coding, which is mandated to be done in TextEdit or the option of a $80 third party mac text editor. The Apple open source team doesn't actually create much code but searches the internet for interesting BSD licensed software and modifies it as it's own through obfuscation and conversion to objective C. Many of the items a mac user sees comes from the open source world stamped by apple such as the ability to play music taken from 67 different originally linux based players, CD burning, and the overall ability to click a mouse. Apple's legal department has no qualms about this practice and has assured many that since most of the code is BSD and if any is GPLed many Linux hippies should be grateful that Apple fostered WebKit by using KHTML and adding some Gecko bloat. Perhaps one of the most important items that the open source team has done to date is use parts of the FreeBSD to keep the kernel up to date.

There's not much to say about the Apple systems and management team. I suppose they can be classified in to desktop and laptop systems. Because hardware work is beneath Apple in general and thought of being only worthy of Windows Users and as such can be found working on these beauties in the starbucks bathroom. Desktops are currently made by buying dell machines and putting them in Lian Li cases, where the majority of the costs goes to buying titanium Apple emblems to paste on the sides. Laptops consists of the rebranding of only the most silver and black Sony Viaos but talk has been going around about rebranding Asus EeePCs for a new Apple netbook but you didn't hear that from me, for fear of my life.

The iDevice team's job is to develop for the ipod, iphone, itouch, and many other portable electronics apple may release in the future. Their jobs are very interconnected with the open source team as well as the core dev team. Using firmware from random samsung devices and giving it an OSX skin the ipod stands as a shining example that infringement only applies to greasy file sharers and that the music player remains the best in market