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Comcast DNS Redirection Launched In Trial Markets
An anonymous reader writes "Comcast has finally launched its DNS Redirector service in trial markets (Arizona, Colorado, New Mexico, Oregon, Texas, Utah, and Washington state), and has submitted a working draft of the technology to the IETF for review. Comcast customers can opt-out from the service by providing their account username and cable modem MAC address. Customers in trial areas using 'old' Comcast DNS servers, or non-Comcast DNS servers, should not be affected by this. This deployment comes after many previous ISPs, like DSLExtreme, were forced to pull the plug on such efforts as a result of customer disapproval/retaliation. Some may remember when VeriSign tried this back in 2003, where it also failed."
Some may remember when VeriSign tried this back in 2003, where it also failed.
Oh yeah, way back in the day. But let us not forget Earthlink's attempt at this or Canadian Rogers Cable or Charter or NJ Cabelvision or ... I'm sure you could find no end to this stream of providers offering their customers something the customers simply do not want.
And I'm pretty certain most of those ended or resulted in customers bitching out the provider. Yet here we go again. Why? Well, that's simple: ad revenue.
My work here is dung.
I don't want to name names, but Netalyzr showed that several major ISPs already do this, and allows you to check for yourself what the behavior is on your network.
Comcast is following the lead of other major ISPs which have been doing this for some time now.
Test your net with Netalyzr
OpenDNS does exactly the same. (unless you register account and change it, but thats the case with this comcast thingie aswell)
AT&T ... they aren't keeping a database of my URL lookups7.
Until the NSA asks them to. Let's not pretend that AT&T isn't evil.
* * * --they cant all be your best, that would be confusing
OpenDNS does the exact same thing. To avoid DNS highjacking if you use OpenDNS, you have to have an account with them, change your preferences and always be identifiable to OpenDNS so that it can apply your preferences. It's easier to opt out at Comcast than to opt out at OpenDNS. Besides, OpenDNS also redirects www.google.com to OpenDNS servers, not just nonexistent domains.
It doesn't redirect you to a third-party site owned by the NSA; it redirects you to a third-party site, full stop. This not only breaks a whole host of applications relying on DNS to inform them that a domain name doesn't exist, but it is in violation of the standards that hold the Internet together.
Score: i, Imaginary
Why do these OpenDNS posts keep getting modded up? OpenDNS utilizes the very practices this article bemoans! If you query a domain that does not exist, your browser is redirected to OpenDNS's ad-laden spam site.
Despite their claims to the contrary, OpenDNS's servers are likely farther away from you than your local ISP's. They also keep permanent logs of all queries, which could be subpoenaed by a government entity. Their joke of a privacy policy allows them to sell your logs to "Affiliated Businesses", which pretty much means anybody. Not that it really matters - they could amend their privacy policy tomorrow morning and be selling your info by the afternoon.
I think many people read the "Open" part of the OpenDNS name and turn their brains off.
In what way is this relevant to OpenDNS? They actually do the same dirty trick aswell. Just because they have "open" in their name doesn't mean they're great and everyone should use them. They run their DNS servers to make profit from non-existing domains and hell, they even redirect requests to google.com to their own servers.
Thankfully there are open dns servers that dont do such either, for example university in Gothenburg, Sweden: 129.16.1.53 and 129.16.2.53 and several others. Those that have the technical knowledge can also set up their own dns recursive dns servers on their linux box and use those directly (while it fetches the results from root servers)