Comments on: If you can’t trust your ISP, who can you trust?

By: guestington

guestington — Sat, 27 Aug 2011 06:44:03 +0000

i have frontier internet, which is nothing to brag about. when using the firefox browser (the toolbar-esque device) to do a search on yahoo i always get redirected to some frontier site with results. it sucks and doesnt make me want to click ANY link of their results page. using the yahoo site itself doesnt redirect me, so thats how i search now.

By: Mike Hammett

Mike Hammett — Fri, 12 Aug 2011 11:52:01 +0000

No ISP is artificially blocked from any market. It just depends on if they determine it worthwhile to overcome that obstacle.

Does your ToS give them that authority? I bet it does. Read your contract before signing and complaining.

By: Paul

Paul — Fri, 12 Aug 2011 02:43:37 +0000

At another level…is there much difference between this and what gmail does? I mean REALLY????

By: Matt

Matt — Thu, 11 Aug 2011 20:14:35 +0000

I live in an area .5 miles out of the city limits and am stuck with restrictions on what ISPs may operate there. AT&T is provided just across the street, but they are blocked out of our market. So we have a small ISP who has started calling constantly over P2P downloads and the like. ISPs have no right to play big brother and monitor my activity. Smithville is my provider and I recommend staying away from them if you can. I can see what would happen if ISPs aren’t kept honest. Let’s say you have a family member or friend struggling with addiction and you run some searches on the subject. Then all of the sudden you start getting redirected to rehab facilities and start getting marketed to by such a search. Total B.S. Investigate them, sue them, and shut them down.

By: DaveP

DaveP — Thu, 11 Aug 2011 19:56:05 +0000

Damn ISPs, I think we should all get together and demand that this companies who are selling and buying OUR data start paying us as producers of data a 10% commission on every transaction made. You want to collect my data and sell it fine… but it’ll cost ya.

By: Thomas Mc

Thomas Mc — Thu, 11 Aug 2011 18:33:37 +0000

ISP = Incarnation of Satan

By: randkrieg

randkrieg — Thu, 11 Aug 2011 18:17:40 +0000

The article IS accurate. They are not describing the old redirect when a domain name isn’t found; this is a new attack, where the ISP and its partners actively subvert the intended transaction based on the query keywords. They aren’t returning a result where you should have seen an error; they are instead returning a result that replaces the result you should have expected to get.

By: Guest2

Guest2 — Thu, 11 Aug 2011 17:52:45 +0000

This goes well beyond traditional DNS redirection, Guest. Take a look at the original research posted at the EFF.

By: Guest

Guest — Thu, 11 Aug 2011 17:32:06 +0000

Stacey…I am not sure this article accurately captures what is going on. The DNS redirect is going occurring in place of a 404 error (aka miskey by the customer). That practice has been occurring for years…and to many customers is actually a benefit. This isnt a scenario where they are replacing search requests off of Google.com. If you want to really see the real knife fight, look at what Google / Microsoft do to each other when you download one of their search bars. In those situations, there is active redirect happening. Of course, that isnt so different than what Google does to us anyway.

By: M

Thu, 11 Aug 2011 16:07:07 +0000

Any ISP who interferes with traffic in any way should be stripped of their Common Carrier status. This would open them up to millions of lawsuits based on content. That would teach them right away to stop screwing with people for personal gain.