Charter Implements SiteFinder-Like DNS

paulbiz writes "Charter Cable's DNS servers have just started resolving all invalid hostnames and pointing them to their own error page. The About page states: 'This service automatically eliminates many of the error pages you may encounter as you surf the web. No software was installed on your computer for this service to work.' It has an 'opt-out' page, but when you use it Charter simply sets a cookie that makes their page redirect errors to Microsoft Live Search instead!" One more reason to use OpenDNS, where you can actually opt out of the custom error page.

Run your own DNS resolver!

That's precisely the reason why I run my own resolver. Also, if I were a customer of those morons, they would get a nice letter demanding to restore their service to proper working or else they'd get no more money.

Re:Run your own DNS resolver!

Well Charter in particular has been blocking DNS ports to anything but their DNS servers for a long time.

So running your own resolver on a Charter line probably will basically mean no DNS.

Re:Run your own DNS resolver!

Well Charter in particular has been blocking DNS ports to anything but their DNS servers for a long time. So running your own resolver on a Charter line probably will basically mean no DNS.

This might be the case in certain areas, but in my neck of the woods, I'm able to use DNS servers other than standard Charter DNS resolvers just fine.

Have any of these survived?

I've read about various ISPs doing this from time to time, but have any of them actually stuck around for more than a month or so? The stories are usually followed up by a hasty retraction shortly after the launch.

Charter customers (I pity you): make your voice heard!

Although the recommendation to switch to OpenDNS has the same flaws from what I have read. They, too, redirect unknown domains to their "organic search" page. I'm not sure how trees and cows help your search, but I suppose supporting an open, free DNS system is better than letting Charter continue to rake in money at your expense.

Re:Have any of these survived?

Charter customers (I pity you): make your voice heard!

As a frequently-disgruntled Charter customer, I was given a golden ticket. I feel obliged to share it:

Charter Corporate Complaint Line: 314-288-3150

I have a feeling

I have a feeling that this will die a quick painful death just like sitefinder did.

I doubt it

Earthlink still has their version Sitefinder. Charter will likely continue with this bad idea. Others will likely follow.

At least Earthlink offers "opt out servers [earthlink.net]" that function properly.

opendns? over my dead...

Reading things on their faq, like "intercepts phishing attempts" and "corrects typos"

No thanks, I'll just use my work's DNS servers from anywhere I go, since we're not douchebags and don't want to make more income by hijacking other people's surfing.

Also, Earthlink has been doing this for months, which is why I recently replaced the DNS servers that have been burned into my skull since working there in 1998.

Not working for me.

I have Charter (who I hate BTW, I had to switch from Comcast to Charter the last time I moved and am now paying more money for worse service), and am still getting the standard "Page Not Found" screen. Of course, I'm running Firefox on a Mac, so . . .

Earthlink

Earthlink does this as well. I really hope this doesn't become more common. They're mucking with the way DNS is just supposed to work, which is bound to cause problems for customers.

Issue?

Well... It's Charter's network, so I guess they can do what they want, eh?

Re:Issue?

Well... It's Charter's network, so I guess they can do what they want, eh?

They can do what they want after they've dropped out of the exclusive franchising agreement they have with my city. Until then, they enjoy government protection from market competition, and they should be subject strict oversight to prevent them from taking advantage of their monopoly entitlement to harm consumers.

It's not like their DNS was worth using anyway

I quit using it months ago. Every time I had to go to their DNS to do a lookup I didn't have cached, the first lookup would timeout every single time. The second lookup would only work about 50%. Last time I checked, they were just as bad as ever. I've pointed several friends to OpenDNS and they were all amazed at the difference. Charter's customer server is horrendous and the only reason they have a market lead in this area is because they have exclusive service in so many apartments and subdivisions.

Actually openDNS is a good idea.

Every customer we set up I add openDNS as the secondary DNS in their router which act's as their DNS server. Granted you can only do this with a decent router or in our case the buffalo router with DD-WRT installed. (every customer has a DD-WRT router as we will only work with our router and not anyone elses)

Comcast is notorius for having their DNS dead and by us adding in a secondary DNS that is not ISP locked it gives them more days without problems than their neighbors.

Any geek that is not running a dd-WRT or a OpenWRT router at home is missing out.

If you have your own DNS...

Of course, if you're running your own BIND server on your NATted network, which forwards non-local queries to the upstream DNSs, you can use something like what ISC recommends in case of SiteFinder. In /etc/named.conf:

zone "COM" {type delegation-only; };
zone "NET" {type delegation-only; };

See their site [isc.org] for more info.

And this is different to OpenDNS how?

How does OpenDNS make money? [opendns.com]

OpenDNS makes money by offering clearly labeled advertisements alongside organic search results when the domain entered is not valid and not a typo we can fix. OpenDNS will provide additional services on top of its enhanced DNS service, and some of them may cost money. Speedy, reliable DNS will always be free.

Re:And this is different to OpenDNS how?

It's different because you're not already paying OpenDNS $29.99/month for the privilege to see their ads.

WOW does this too...

WOW / Wild Out West Cable (in Columbus, OH) has been doing this forever. they have their own site setup for it - seek-aid.com. I complained and at first they denied it existed. They finally admitted it but basically told me to deal with it. The "opt-out" sets a cookie which ignores the site and redirects you to Windows Live search -- yeah, BIG difference...

I use OpenDNS at home and my websites load a LOT faster (ones that aren't cached anyway).

ISPs are stupid and evil.

Standard?

Isn't there some sort of DNS standard that prevents this type of situation? There are applications out there that depend on getting reliable errors back from DNS. With such pages, DNS will always return an IP, even if none is registered. Sitefinder-like DNS breaks applications.

It's becoming increasingly clear that, in order to protect the internet from the greedy hands of corporations, we need to adopt their tactics; patent the DNS standard and trademark the "DNS" label, so nobody can mangle it and still claim to be DNS.

The FOSS community should start to pro-actively patent, copyright and trademark anything they can, so no corporation can mess it up.

I have Charter and OpenDNS stopped working ...

for me about a week or two ago. Coincidence?

ORSN is better.

I've been looking at different alternatives to the standard root servers and didn't like OpenDNS either as they also change DNS replies.
My search ended with ORSN [orsn.net], a European "backup" of ICANN servers. This way I shouldn't be affected by attacks and outages on ICANN servers.

My DNS settings

nameserver 151.203.0.85
nameserver 151.202.0.85
nameserver 65.121.99.5
nameserver 65.121.99.6

And rest assured, so far, neither ISP whose nameservers I'm using seems broken at the moment. (The first two are Verizon, the last two are Coffeynet)

-uso.

Another Charter 'Service'

When forwarding scam/spoof emails to either PayPal, or eBay ... your message doesn't get sent but you get a notification that it is being considered spam...

One might think they could build their anti-spam filters to accept messages going to such email addresses as those needed for spoofs..

Of course you can supposedly jump through several hoops to get the message sent, but I don't think that works as advertised (having gotten none of the thank you emails I used to from such online services).

Works fine for me.

I have Charter, and I haven't noticed any timeouts as some have said. In fact, the only reason I noticed that they switched, is because I mistyped a URL and it took me to their search page, so I started digging around. As long as it keeps working transparently, I could care less if they use it.

Emailing Charter about this

I guess I wonder what exactly you should demand out of Charter when a person emails them complaining about something like this. I noticed this page yesterday when I typed a domain name wrong. I was like 'WTF?', but I don't guess I know exactly how to respond to them.

Hosts file

I have Charter, and this annoys me to no end. I simply added www11.charter.net (the website they're currently redirecting me to) to my hosts file, so I get an "Unable to connect" message. It's not perfect, but it at least gives me a somewhat meaningful error.

Waiting to hear back from them...

I talked to their tech support a few days ago about this shadiness. He had no idea this was going on, and rightfully thought it was a malware/spyware problem at first, until I explained a little more clearly what was going on, and he did some poking around and found other blog and forum posts about this. He seemed somewhat surprised that Charter would engage in such a practice and that no one had been told about it.

He was talking with level 2 support while he was on with me and said that they just kept telling him it was probably malware/spyware. Hilarious that they at least see it that way too, but sad that their company pulls this shit on them without telling anyone first. I asked him for a followup, he said he'd pass it along to level 2, I gave him my email address, and that was that. I don't exactly expect to ever hear back from them, so I'll probably have to make a stink at a city Cable Board meeting to get any response.

In the meantime, I hope other folks out there start repeatedly and publicly asking Charter:

- Were they ever going to make an announcement/disclosure to allow customers to opt-out, or at least tell their staff about it?
- Will they provide options for customers who don't allow or regularly clear cookies, such as a non-redirecting DNS?
- Why were they pointing people towards http://optin.charter.net/ [charter.net] , which doesn't exist?
- How much information do they gather about visitors to their link farm?
- Is there a third-party involved providing Charter the redirect (like Barefruit did for Earthlink?)
- How much money are they making from their link farm affiliates?
- Most importantly, do we have any guarantees that they aren't redirecting or degrading other network traffic?

In the meantime, I've switched my DNS over to Level3 (4.2.2.2 and 4.2.2.3).

rolled out w/o letting their support know

I noticed this last night, called to complain about it, and spent over an hour on the phone with their tech support. First I had to convince them it was really happening and it was a change to their DNS, it wasn't some browser setting I had ``accidentally'' changed. So they apparently made this change without letting their 1st and 2nd level support know about it.

Then once I got high enough, they tried to weasel out of it with their lame opt-out solution, which even if it worked wouldn't help when I'm making non-browser-based connections. So I guess they want all of my typo'd telnet, ssh, ftp and ping commands to hit their search server instead?

At the end, I asked to be transferred to account services to cancel (gosh I hope Bell doesn't pull the same shit in a month), and the admittedly very understanding engineer begged for a day to look into a way to completely remove the feature from my account. So I'll be calling back tonight.

openDNS to weird comcast router

Comcast rents you a wireless router but they install some firmware that doesn't allow you to use all functionality. I think there is no way to put openDNS on those? I didn't see any menu that said "DNS" or similar...

This is getting common

Earthlink started this. My local ISP (Cavalier Telephone [cavtel.com]) has been doing this for 6 months.

Customer notification and experience...

I'm not surprised ISPs are doing this. More will be doing this. What does surprise me is how ISPs try to do this silently and behind closed-door without informing their customers, or even their tech support in some cases.

Think about it this way: Any change an ISP makes that results in 1% (or more) of their customer base calling in for technical support is a cost nightmare. Customer Service is a (*the*) major cost center for ISPs. I guess we have to imagine that they are making more money than the pain of doing the customer service is costing them.

The other thing that surprises me (and obviously I'm biased since I run OpenDNS) is that the search results page linked above is 100% ad-driven. There are no no organic search results for my typo (as far as I can tell). Moreover, when I click on a category to "refine" my results they totally remove the typo'd domain that I had there in the first place instead just giving me generic ads for a category (which is a mediocre CPC on their side) and a crappy search experience on the user side. There is absolutely no user-benefit to what Charter has done here.

I'm proud to say that our page [opendns.com] is getting better and better every single day. Compare [opendns.com] and contrast [charter.net]. Not only that, but we're driving more and more innovation in both user navigation and fundamental DNS operations. These things go hand in hand. Fundamentally the DNS is about navigation. It's about helping users get where they are trying to go. That's exactly what we intend to help our users do. We know that the changes we have made to how our DNS servers operate aren't for every user which is why we are so clear about how our system works and is why make sure we can manage account settings on a per IP basis (CIDR-style preferences down to /32's).

As usual, I'm happy to answer questions where I can.

-david ulevitch

Pointing them to their own error page?

Just how does a DNS error page work? Is this a specially crafted UDP packet on port 53? Don't think I've seen one of them. Returning the IP of a charter http server instead of NXDOMAIN for non resolvable domains is NOT a DNS error page (FFS). And thats the problem, its DNS and it should return a DNS error. TCP/IP is not the intraweb. HTML infomercials don't help one iota when you've mistyped a hostname into anything other than a web browser, whereas NXDOMAIN does.

OpenDNS? What's Open about it?

Triumph of marketing over rationality.

Just because it says "open" at the front it's better? What makes it open? It looks closed to me. It's run as a for profit company, and if you want any control over it you have to give them personal data.

I hate it

I emailed them a complaint about it yesterday. In some places the DNS redirects started over two weeks ago.

What pisses me off the most is that if I click "opt out", further redirects go to live.com. It's a fake opt-out. There is no opt-out.

Not seeing this in Saginaw on Charter

Just checked with a client who lives in Saginaw. Using default DHCP settings which presumably point to Charter's DNS servers, we just get normal dns lookup errors. Now, Charter does know they are using Macs, and I noticed the www11.charter.com webpage that others here have cited on slashdot currently seems designed to look like a PC error page so is it possible they are doing this on limited basis? Who knows.

I had not heard that ISPs are starting to do this... If so we'll have to do some investigation. We (like many others) have Federal trademarks on the word in our domain name. If an ISP doing redirects that make them money on people who are attempting to get to a URL that uses a trademark, then the ISP is making money based essentially on confusion or mistakes with a registered trademark owner and themselves. Trademark violations carry a (US)$100,000 statutory penalty per incident.

So I'd expect this will stop a soon as the ISPs' own lawyers hear about it and tell 'em "No! bad marketing driod, no donut for you!"

Fucked from both ends.

In my area at least, Charter rolled out this bullshit on the same day they announced a rate hike. They want you to pay more for this "service".

The most damning part is that "opting-out" just forwards you to "Windows Live" instead, which is obviously an attempt to pretend that they aren't doing what they're doing by doing what Internet Explorer would do anyway. Fuck you, Charter.

I called Charter about this....

I complained that my typo was being hijacked, and that I didn't know if they were replacing any web page they wanted. Yesterday I was getting error messages on a typo, today I get your webpage. I said, How am I supposed to know if you are replacing my website? I mistyped it, and I didn't know that I had, and then I get your website. I thought you had taken over my website!!

I am put on hold for a bit, then I am told this is a technical glitch and that it will be fixed by tomorrow.

-bub

Welcome to Hosts!

www11.charter.net, allow me to introduce you to 127.0.0.1

MOD PARENT TROLL

Everyone who wants a properly working Internet connection, moron.

Did you buy that UID on ebay?

Re:Pretty Confusing

Do you use your Internet connection for anything other than HTTP? If so, this 'service' could break things for you. If you use FTP, for example, and typo a hostname then instead of getting a 'server not found' error, you will get a 'connection refused' error. This will make it look like the host is up, but the FTP server is broken.

The same is true of pings. If you ping a non-existent host, then instead of being told 'this host does not exist,' you will get ping returns from their server.

This can potentially break a lot of things. On the plus side, since the ISP is now directly manipulating the data flowing over your Internet connection (and violating a few RFCs), it can no longer claim to be a common carrier and is therefore liable for all copyright infringement committed by its subscribers.

Re:Pretty Confusing

If you think that's bad, see what my isp (netcabo, Portugal) is doing:

Every now and then when they want to send me a message (e.g. to tell me about "special offers" or whatever), they intercept one of my http requests and reply with a redirect to a page on their website, with the oh-so-important message and a link to the page I had asked for.

Needless to say that scripts that automatically parse web pages get confused.

Re:Pretty Confusing

Not receiving correct DNS error pages is a problem for those that wish to resolve domains.

But to me it's more simple than that. It means misleading the consumer of the cable service. 'The website does not exist' is being changed to 'we're not being up-front that there was a type, misdirected link, etc, we're going to show you adverts instead'.

The Site Finder-like service further reduces the web from a meritocrious system of links and content, to a mess of adverts.

Will cable subscribers' fees be reduced because of this? Probably not.

There's a slippery slope from a (albeit idealistic) system of content and links, to an advertising mess, to outright DNS poisoning (which, living in China, I'm already experiencing - it was a big problem for Google in 2005).

Re:Pretty Confusing

"'The website does not exist' is being changed to 'we're not being up-front that there was a type, misdirected link, etc, we're going to show you adverts instead'."

A typo of "typo". Oh, the irony.

Re:registrars are worse.

Recently my bad registar forgot to tell the TLD registry to renew my domain (even though I paid them months in advanced).

I knew immediately when the domain had been dropped because things weren't resolving on it.

So, I contacted my registar (that decided to spend two days todo nothing on it), only to see that within the first few hours, the domain had been grabbed and it was some weird scamming thing that wanted me to offer a amount of money to buy it.

(Response I got from my registar since then [livejournal.com])

I'm certainly not going to pay anything to shady registars or whatever they are.

Re:registrars are worse.

Sounds like that costs more than taking them to small claims.

Morons

Wow, how did the Internet get invented, since it was around before the development of the 233MHz Pentium processor!?