[143329] in North American Network Operators' Group
Re: US internet providers hijacking users' search queries
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Scott Helms)
Sat Aug 6 10:42:04 2011
Date: Sat, 06 Aug 2011 10:41:10 -0400
From: Scott Helms <khelms@ispalliance.net>
To: nanog@nanog.org
In-Reply-To: <20110806011359.GA24602@gweep.net>
Errors-To: nanog-bounces+nanog.discuss=bloom-picayune.mit.edu@nanog.org
Correct, I don't believe that any of the providers noted are actually
hijacking HTTP sessions instead all of these are DNS based tricks.
Since the service providers are also providing DNS (via Paxfire and
others) users don't have a lot of choice. You can switch to using a
known public name server (Google's 8.8.8.8 for example) but I hesitate
to recommend that to most end users because in non-evil networks its
better to have local name resolution (because of GSLB & other reasons).
On 8/5/2011 9:14 PM, Joe Provo wrote:
> On Fri, Aug 05, 2011 at 05:04:51PM -0700, Bino Gopal wrote:
>> http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn20768-us-internet-providers-hijacking-users-search-queries.html
> It is more than slightly misleading to say "hijacking search
> queries"; paxfire is evil as it hijacks dns and breaks NXDOMAIN
> and they've been doing that for ages. The user behavior of
> searching in the address bar has become more common place, and
> browser behavior to try and resolve first, fallback to search
> for the same input field has both trained the humans to keep
> doing this and made it possible for DNS query interlopers to
> appear to be generic-search interlopers.
>
>
--
Scott Helms
Vice President of Technology
ISP Alliance, Inc. DBA ZCorum
(678) 507-5000
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http://twitter.com/kscotthelms
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