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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?'"
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
Life is not for the lazy.
From the featured article: "There is currently no way to validate the DNS record you’re being served is what the person hosting the website intended." Apparently the author hasn't heard of DNSSEC.
(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.
Name of the ISP please?
Being from the part of Minnesota that Arvig is based in, I can tell ya, this behavior is very typical of them.
When I had gotten set up upon moving into the area, the install tech bragged how all the homes (over 200 of them) on this part of town were all connected on 1 cable loop. It was a heads up from the tech that I should have paid attention to. I ended up cancelling my service early due to a consistent 1mb down every Friday and Saturday when I was paying for 10mb. Customer service actually said "we guarantee up to 10mb" "10mb is the maximum you will get"
So many have switched over to 4g hotspots, they actually cut the offices hours here.
Saw this in Reddit this morning but thanks for reposting it.
Seriously, the drawback to using public DNS like OpenDNS and Google DNS is that they present a serious performance problem.
Even though the physical DNS servers are "anycast" and geographically diverse, the IP addresses are still the same. Threrefore, the large content delivery networks (CDNs) like Akamai and LimeLight still use the IP address of the DNS server to judge your location.
Therefore, any service that uses a CDN (even Google's use them in spite of their own network) will really serve your content out of a data center that is not geographically or logically near your machine's location.
The article (if you read it) mentions that his ISP, like most that have similar revenue-extracting services, really does offer alternative DNS servers that do not pack affiliate cookies. You should use those if you want to enjoy high-performance, edge-serve content via Akamai (AKAM) and LimeLight (LLNW).
Otherwise, you'll all get your edge content served from some random data center in the central USA.
Kriston
It would have been better to contact FBI and report this fraud. Whoever the hell runs fwdsnp.com needs to spend some time in jail.
Do a search for "DNSjumper". It's a great little tool that lets one well...uh...jump around various DNS servers and arrange them in any order you want, ping them much easier and more often and makes it comfortable to change one or all if you feel your current list isn't to your liking. (I'm not sure of the author's or company's official website, so I don't want to push one source over another).
I think I read 75% of the things here elsewhere around a day in advance.
Slashdot isn't (well, in its prime) where you come for breaking news, it's where you go (again, back in its prime) for great intellectual technological discussions.
Since when does being a Socialist mean 'someone who has a different opinion than me'?
I don't think the online retailers would agree. The ISP is doing nothing to promote specific items or online stores, so why should the online stores subsidize your internet connection?
"Remember, there never were pineapple-almond cookies here."
> It's not good enough that they track you at every site that uses Analytics,
> every site that uses AdWords, every site you go to from their search engine,
> every site you visit with their Toolbar in play. (I'm forgetting a hundred other ways they suck your data.)
Factoring in a few of the other ways you didn't list, like sites with YouTube videos, we can guess Google is aware of about 85% of consumer web traffic. Using their DNS would tell them the only the hostname of the other 15%, and only once per TTL. So call that 7% from using Google's DNS.
Using anyone else's DNS gives that other company 100% of your lookups rather than the 0% they had before. 100% is a lot more than 7% or 15%, so you're giving up a lot more privacy by using any DNS other than Google.
In other words, Google already knows which sites you're visiting - you got to those sites by searching Google. Why would you also give that information to some other company?
That was my thought process after I found that Chrome is so good for web development. I'm using Chrome, so Google has a profile of my web surfing. There is no reason to let another company have the same information, so I'm better off using Google services all around. (Besides the fact that Google provides good services, which get better as they are integrated.)
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.
I was promised a flying car. Where is my flying car?
To be clear, the ISP has committed a criminal act (fraud), it is obtaining financial gain by deception - the concealment of the fact that no person willingly used an affiliate link.
I think that if they weren't prosecuted then they committed a crime and got away with it. The victims being the retailers and any legitimate affiliates who lost out (if that is the case).
Waterfox - a Firefox fork with legacy extension support, security updates and better privacy by default.
Well, I like to use Slashdot as a filter to make sure I didn't miss anything. It may not post the fastest, but generally it covers most things.
How is it possible, that this post was modded Funny? Slashdot is exactly what this post describes. Slashdot is mainly great because of great comments and well done comment rating system.
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.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.