Submission + - Charter.net Hijacks Your Browser
csharpner writes: This may have negative ramifications for Charter as news of this unethical activity gets out:
As of yesterday (as best I can determine) (2007-04-26), Charter.net cable internet services is now hijacking bad DNS queries. In other words, if you mistype a domain name and end up typing one that doesn't exist, normally you'd get an error message. Your own browser has settings where you can choose to be redirected to a search page of your choice, or none at all, if that is your choice.
Charter took that choice away. Now, all bad queries go to here:
http://ww11.charter.net/search
It doesn't matter what your browser settings are. This is because your browser depends on an error code coming back from the Domain Name Servers (DNS), at which point your browser would either display an error message or redirect you to your chosen search page. Now, since Charter's DNS servers never return errors and instead respond with Charter's search page, your browser never receives the proper error code and therefore has no trigger to take you to your chosen search page.
This presents further problems as many software applications (off the shelf and custom, and enterprise software) depend on the internet working the same everywhere. Many applications depend on this error code. They will all fail to work as designed because Charter wants to make advertising revenue.
This unethical activity was attempted by Verisign back in 2003 (but in their case, it effected the ENTIRE internet, not just customers of a single ISP). You can get more information on the Verisign fiasco here for context:
http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=verisign+hija cks+browser
As of yesterday (as best I can determine) (2007-04-26), Charter.net cable internet services is now hijacking bad DNS queries. In other words, if you mistype a domain name and end up typing one that doesn't exist, normally you'd get an error message. Your own browser has settings where you can choose to be redirected to a search page of your choice, or none at all, if that is your choice.
Charter took that choice away. Now, all bad queries go to here:
http://ww11.charter.net/search
It doesn't matter what your browser settings are. This is because your browser depends on an error code coming back from the Domain Name Servers (DNS), at which point your browser would either display an error message or redirect you to your chosen search page. Now, since Charter's DNS servers never return errors and instead respond with Charter's search page, your browser never receives the proper error code and therefore has no trigger to take you to your chosen search page.
This presents further problems as many software applications (off the shelf and custom, and enterprise software) depend on the internet working the same everywhere. Many applications depend on this error code. They will all fail to work as designed because Charter wants to make advertising revenue.
This unethical activity was attempted by Verisign back in 2003 (but in their case, it effected the ENTIRE internet, not just customers of a single ISP). You can get more information on the Verisign fiasco here for context:
http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=verisign+hij
