Earthlink Offers Alternate DNS Without "Dead DNS" 136
Joshua Flory writes, "In response to the story about Earthlink and their version of 'Site Finder', I learned today that Earthlink has provided alternate DNS servers that will remain outside of their 'dead DNS' service. However, this is a completely unsupported service, which begs the question, WHY? Everyone can gain access to public DNS servers, or create their own. The point is that people wanted DNS servers supported by EL that do not include this dead DNS service." Sounds like it's time for Earthlink users to check out OpenDNS.com... they make it easy to turn off the bad-URL behavior.
Islamic Clerics declare Fatwa against BLOCKQUOTE (Score:5, Funny)
The BLOCKQUOTE tag, as introduced with the HTML 2.0 specification in 1994, has been used on websites throughout the world to signify that the text contained within is a quotation from an external source. However, due to an inability for islamics to grow the fuck up and understand basic communicative syntax, they now believe it is their holy right to murder anyone they want to just because one person quoted someone else within context.
This antithesis of freedom is a common theme running throughout all islamic interaction with civilised society. Rampaging islamic mobs worldwide have burned effigies of Dave Raggett, creator of HTML, alongside effigies of President Bush and Pope Benedict XVI. Police measures are now in place to put everyone who ever had a Myspace page or Geocities account into hiding.
Inventor of the World Wide Web, Tim Berners-Lee, was unavailable for comment. Which is probably just as well as we don't want to get bombed by the raghead fuckwits just for quoting him.
umm (Score:3, Funny)
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I have been an Earthlink customer for over ten years now, been on DSL with them for seven.
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I'm basically happy with it. I get 1.5/256k aDSL for $40, which is pretty pricey but it has flaked out for a total of 1 hour in 4 years. I've learned to avoid calling support, even for billing problems, unless it's worth wasting an hour and getting upset about. That's just never gone well.
Someday I'm going to migrate to a non-ISP-issued email account for good and just hop from cheapest to cheapest.
I miss my netcom shell account, I miss my
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Or just open a Gmail account.
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google.com/a [google.com]
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As to the broken DNS thing, IST
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Solution [earthlink.net].
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Do you know if/how I quit earthlink and register my current email address as a free account? I don't want to play roulette, it is a high-demand username.
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The other solution [earthlink.net] is about $10/mo.
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If I trusted them to cancel my email immediately and have it available again immediately it wouldn't be much risk. I don't trust them, though, all my chats/emails/calls to support have given me a headache.
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May i offer you an email-account in my domain, like tippy@lunatica.net ?
=)
imap/ssl, smtp/tls, webmail and basic spamfilter available. A shell-account is negotiable. Get my email address from whois or the webpage above.
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Thank you for bringing this disparity to our attention. We strive to ensure that all our users receive an identical experience with our service, and will work toward making your service just as reliable and useful as everyone else finds it to be.
Thank you for using Earthlink!
-Adam
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Each of these support experiences was more english-impaired, dysfunctional, time-consuming and hellish than the last. My latest (and, once again, allegedly last) support issue involved 3 phone calls, 5 chats, 2 emails, and over 3 hours of time spread over 2 weeks to correct a very simple billing issue.
Earthlink has screwed me extra on support becaus
They are my only alternative to Time Warner (Score:1)
Re:umm (Score:5, Informative)
They cost about $2 more a month for DSL + phone + long distance. The cost difference isn't really their fault, the FCC allowed AT&T and the phone monopolies to charge whatever they wanted for line access. But they make it up in other ways, like with 500 minutes of free long distance
Also, Earthlink's DSL service (provided by Covad) is faster than AT&T's was.
EarthLink over TimeWarner Cable Lines! (Score:1)
They're the only company in my area that will lease me a Time Warner line for less than what TW would charge me themselves, and I feel good by not cutting those bastards a check.
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I tried to use Earthlink (Score:3, Interesting)
When I ask if perhaps Earthlink could have contacted me to tell me this a couple weeks earlier, the person on the phon
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jwhois 66.218.65.224
[Querying whois.arin.net]
[whois.arin.net]
OrgName: Yahoo!
OrgID: YAOO
Address: 701 First Ave
City: Sunnyvale
StateProv: CA
PostalCode: 94089
Country: US
There isn't a sign saying DNS... (Score:1, Funny)
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Mods, that's a Pulp Fiction quote... this is not a GNAA troll.
Thanks, I'll never be able to read about DNS without thinking of that scene now... maybe you are a troll? You've definitely seen the movie too many times. :)
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OpenDNS doesn't work for everyone (Score:2)
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I almost made that mistake of using OpenDNS as well. I used Level 3's servers instead.
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-david
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eg. I just sucessfully sent an email to eguhrguh@rgherhithg.cm - something that my mailer would normally have picked up, and if not then the email server beyond it.
It's based on the same fallacy that sitefinder was - that the world is the web. Never mind email, ftp, ssh, sip, etc. etc.
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I don't know, but maybe their default is to track which domain names were requested, but not by whom? After all, if they really don't keep records of who requested the domain name, there wouldn't be a privacy concern.
I have no reason to believe that what I just said is the case, but it's one obvious way that you could reconcile the two statements.
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We can't really build a profile on you.
Think about it: we don't even see the full URLs you visit. Consider software like the Google toolbar, yahool toolbar and stumbleupon. In fact, think of any toolbar product, including alexa and netcraft. They're all in much better positions to build profiles than we are.
Just, you know, pointing that out.
-david
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It'll get there, just can't say we are there yet. It's all about checks and balances though, and your words are dead-on.
-david
But wait! (Score:5, Insightful)
Oh wait, no they're not. They *still* dont get what's wrong with what they're doing.
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Re:But wait! (Score:4, Insightful)
1. Make a fuss and become a potential target.
2. Complain amongst friends, and pray for a PR disaster that gets it shut down.
I think the bulk have opted for door #2.
IT DOES NOT BEG THE QUESTION. (Score:1, Informative)
Nucular (Score:1, Troll)
wait wait wait.... (Score:3, Funny)
Someone get me a glass of water. I think I'm going to faint and fall off of my segway!
Do You Say Wed-Ness-Day? (Score:2, Funny)
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Oh yeah, and get off my lawn!
Not until you can say it in Proto-Indo-European.
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The interesting thing about the phrase is that both the accepted and modern commonly used version can easily be distinguished from each other. That is, the original version is an adjective that could easily be replace with "sucks": "Your argument begs the question." The newer "incorrect" version is followed by a question, which seems more natural given the english words used. I personally find misusing it a bit irritating, but the original phase in actually sort of a bad literal translation from latin.
No, it does not "beg the question", it raises it. (Score:2)
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The latter would be an informed propagation of ignorance. Well, no, it's no longer ignorance since the phrase makes much more sense in the newer usage.
Perhaps we could call it an informed, willful attempt to patch a critically broken language.
---
On the other ha
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=)
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At first I thought it could be used as a really bizarre way of saying "I'd rather not assume", but It's always used in the context of "I'd just as soon not", so I can pretty much guarantee it's a simple misunderstanding.
If it were an awkward way to say "I'd rather not assume", you would expect it to be used in cases involving assumptions such as "He could be out with another girl, but I'd just as
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"Does debian always come with a 2.6 kernel?"
"I'd just assume not"
As in, in general, I would make a negative assumption on the general condition that had been queried.
But I see what you mean! crazy!
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Ummmm, "you're avoiding the question", "you're dodging the question", "you're not answering the question", "you're making a circular argument", "your logic is circular"... These days, saying "you beg the question" makes you sound uptight and old fashioned. In fact, I have a hard time saying it without feigning a Haaaavaaaad type accent, or at least upper-crusty British. Just picture it:
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Naturalment! Fig newton in a blender, fishbowl! But when you garble-zargle warble zous, igfrentic zlendish comprende nonsumus totem.
And when you don't, people can actually understand what you mean.
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He did indeed communicate the idea he set out to communicate. He could have communicated it more effectively and clearly had he used not used the phrase "begs the question" improperly. (Where "proper" is determined by usage of well-educated native speakers with an interest in language.)
He also - inadvertently - c
OpenDNS is no better (Score:4, Informative)
OpenDNS is not a solution to this problem those with dynamic IPs, which includes most Earthlink customers (like me). By default, they do exactly the same thing Earthlink does: from their webpage [opendns.com]: "...when we can't fix your typo we take you to a page with a set of search results." They do allow you to turn that behavior off on their prefs page [opendns.com], but only if you have a static IP. And I somehow doubt that there isn't a speed hit going off your ISPs own network for all your DNS queries, anyway.
The correct solution, of course, is to ditch Earthlink. Or in my case, not renew with them the next time I change my service -- unfortunately, changing now would be expensive. Until then, I'm going with Earthlink's secret, unbroken servers over OpenDNS.
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OpenDNS is not a solution to this problem those with dynamic IPs, which includes most Earthlink customers (like me). By default, they do exactly the same thing Earthlink does: from their webpage: "...when we can't fix your typo we take you to a page with a set of search results." They do allow you to turn that behavior off on their prefs page, but only if you have a static IP.
Actually, AFAIK, there isn't a way to turn off the "search results" page. If you look for a domain that doesn't exist, it directs y
The problem is the search pages (Score:3, Interesting)
I.e., what's desired is if you type in a bad address, you get a "domain name not found" error, not a search page.
Those search pages are called a "feature" to some, but to many people -- myself included -- they're just unwelcome advertising and an obnoxious waste of bandwidth.
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I know, I'm not saying the "search pages" are a feature. The person I responding to claimed you could turn off the search pages, and I was saying that AFAIK, you can't. Read one of the other responses and it seems to be someone from OpenDNS claiming that you can, in fact, disable the search pages, but when I tried it, it didn't work.
That's all. I'm not saying you should use the service or not. Just OpenDNS says you can disable the search pages, and it didn't work for me.
Re:OpenDNS is no better (Score:4, Informative)
That is absolutely false. If you disable typo correction you will never see the search page. The search page is intended to help users so if you turn off typo correction, you turn off that page. That's okay with us. You will see NXDOMAIN (RCODE=3) responses from our server. Like I've pointed out before, we're technologists and we're building functional and interoperable stuff here.
Not to toot my horn or get all "Slashdot's lame" on this thread but I've been here a long time and it's clear to me that most of the users who posted on slashdot when we launched didn't even read our site or understand what it is that we're doing. Can we not make that mistake again?
We're putting control and choice into users hands where there was none before. It's a fact of life that ISPs are doing this. They should be working with us, just like users are. We look at this as giving you a dashboard and all the knobs and buttons you need to manage DNS. DNS is the root (no pun intended) of a ton of applications and services so why wouldn't you want to manage it just like you would a firewall or anti-spam service?
Best,
David
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Certainly sounds odd to me.
-david
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I tried it, waited about 15 minutes, tried again. Same thing. I don't know what's up, I just assumed it was because you wanted the ad revenue, since that's where you make your money.
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If we did something like this we wouldn't have any users.
We just tested some stuff here and it works. Happy to diagnose with you offline if you'd like. ceo [at] opendns.com
-david
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http://www.internetbadguys.com/ [internetbadguys.com] doesn't resolve, expected,
http://www.craigslist.og/ [craigslist.og] doesn't resolve, unexpected
and the welcome page shows the Opps
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<sarcasm>
Of course DNS needs more user-friendly helpful value adding
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When these people then go to a machine without such a feature, it will hinder them greatly.
Aside from the fact that most common mis-spellings of popular domains have already been registered by scam artists anyway.
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I, with some other highly-clued folks, run OpenDNS -- maybe I can help answer some questions. We're going to be rolling out some code at the beginning of October to deal with dynamic IPs. I think you'll find it elite.
Ping me an email at ceo [at] opendns.com if you want to help us beta test.
I'm happy to answer other questions too, as most of you know.
Best,
-david
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Sorry, I don't have any specific URLs I can point out. This was a few months ago.
-l
You have to abide by the wishes of the patient... (Score:1)
Less savy people will not know (Score:4, Insightful)
Why do you think AOL is still in business? If people knew about their options, a lot of the large providers would go out of biz.
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editors (Score:2)
i dont think that begs the question at all. Slashdot so called editors strike a gain.
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Which question is it begging, and what is it begging of that question? Enquiring minds want to know!
And to those of you who say "language evolves:" Keep in mind that the phrase "{beg|begs|begging} the question" derives from the realm of formal logic. People who didn't really understand at all what they were saying used the phrase, thinking it meant "{raise|raises|raising} the question," but really they were just saying it to try to sound smart, without actually being smart. In other words, it's the
Moo (Score:3, Funny)
Let's make DNS a wiki!
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Dead DNS? (Score:1)
Can I get a definition? Please? Pretty please, with sugar on top, clean the fucking car?
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Uh... (Score:2)
1) Post a question asking what "Dead DNS" is
2) Get a response
3) Watch that person's response get modded up
4)
5) PROFIT!
Let me guess - your fingers are broken and you couldn't look it up, either? Or were you just trying to insult me?
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Re:Dead DNS? -Answer (Score:1, Informative)
What's the catch? (Score:1)
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Volume.
(old SNL reference, but one of my favorites.)
Paid links on the search engine (Score:2)
That's funny (Score:4, Insightful)
Strange, it sounds to me like it's time for Earthlink users to find a new provider. I know sometimes there are very few options for broadband in an area, but last I checked there were plenty of dialup companies still competing and about.
Ehhh... (Score:2)
But as for using "OpenDNS," my main objection is that I'm already paying for a DNS server with the cost of my subscription!. Why should I have to jury-rig this work-around, one that is only marginally less distasteful than earthlink-help.net, when I should be getting the Real Thing(TM) with the cost of my subscription (with support, thankyouverymuch)?
The only reason I'm still here is that my parents
Ditched EL and still get their CR*P (Score:1)
Even worse, I have discovered it breaks a nice feature that I particularly like with safari (yes, I use mac os x). Safari's autocomplete feature apparently relied upon the standard dead page error and attempted to fill in the "www." and ".com", ".org", or ".net" to find a vali
No such thing as a dead domain (Score:3, Informative)
That includes when it comes from OpenDNS nameservers, which is just another service that lies to you about DNS query results.
local DNS (Score:1)
Who else is running BIND 9 on their home network?
I use bbnplanet's dns (Score:1)
Pinging 4.2.2.1 with 32 bytes of data:
Reply from 4.2.2.1: bytes=32 time=37ms TTL=246
Reply from 4.2.2.1: bytes=32 time=21ms TTL=246
Reply from 4.2.2.1: bytes=32 time=23ms TTL=246
Reply from 4.2.2.1: bytes=32 time=21ms TTL=246
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This is literally final!