How One Man Fought His ISP's Bad Behavior and Won

An anonymous reader writes "Eric Helgeson documents his experience with an unscrupulous ISP that was injecting affiliate IDs into the URLs for online retailers. 'It appears that the method they were using was to poison the A record of retailers and do a 301 redirect back to the www cname. This is due to the way apex, or 'naked' domain names work.' Upon contacting the ISP, they offered him access to two DNS servers that don't perform the injection, but they showed no indication that they would stop, or opt-out any other subscribers. (It was also the only wireless provider in his area, so he couldn't just switch to a competitor.) Helgeson then sent the data he gathered to the affiliate programs of major retailers on the assumption that they'd be upset by this as well. He was right, and they put a stop to it. He says, 'ISP's ask you to not do crummy things on their networks, so how about they don't do the same to their customers?'"

Comments

Use public DNS

[DigiShaman]

Google DNS is 8.8.8.8. and 8.8.4.4
Open DNS is 208.67.222.222 and 208.67.220.220

Norton Safe Connect (personal use, not for business) is 199.85.126.10 and 199.85.127.10. Supposed to protect against malware, phishing sites, and scams.
https://dns.norton.com/dnsweb/homePage.do

Re:Use public DNS

[Nerdfest]

You can try this tool to check your existing DNS for performance and behaviour. Google's is very well behaved by the way, so please don't spread FUD.

Re:Use public DNS

[Nerdfest]

I should add that both Google DNS and OpenDNS support DNS-SEC which is nice as well. OpenDNS also supports a form of DNS request encryption which hides even the sites you go to.

Not wireless

[Anonymous Coward]

(It was also the only wireless provider in his area, so he couldn't just switch to a competitor.)

No, the blog says:

You may be asking why don’t I switch ISPs? Well they are the only one besides a wireless provider in my area.

Which means there are 2 ISPs. The one he's using is not wireless, and the other one is wireless.

Re:Illegal behavior

[Anonymous Coward]

I think you are confused.

It was a CORPORATION that was scamming money out of affiliate links, so everything is A-OK!

Of course, we punish the little people for exactly the same thing:

http://www.justice.gov/usao/can/news/2012/2012_06_19_kennedy.sentenced.press.html

Both Amazon and other affiliates

[dutchwhizzman]

First of all, Amazon doesn't get a very high percentage of affiliate tagged traffic/purchases. If every ISP would do this, it would get 100% and the whole business model wouldn't work any more. Amazon would have to pay out way too many affiliate bonuses. Second, any affiliate that the user might choose, would lose out because their tag would get replaced by that of the ISP.

Re:What exactly happened?

[hey!]

Short, simplistic answer: the ISP found a way to fraudulently skim a percentage from online retailers for every purchase made by the ISP customers.

Slightly more detailed answer: the ISP directed users looking for online merchants like "amazon.com" to it's own bogus server. That bogus server then re-directs the user's browser to the merchant's server in such a way the consumer doesn't notice and the merchant thinks the customer is following a product referral from an advertising partner. Thus the ISP collects a kickback intended for people who make product recommendations and referrals, without actually having made any recommendation or referral.