[Chapter-delegates] Canadian ISP Rogers violates net neutrality by hijacking failed DNS lookups

Mon Jul 21 09:58:22 PDT 2008

Would it not be easy to just redirect all DNS lookups to that you are
disconnected page?

It looks similar as when you are in a hotel, when the internet lease is
expired, you will always get a login page for paying the hotel internet.
After paying you get access to the web.

There is no need to hack in your computer or change your browser at all.

Cheers

Arnoud

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Arnoud van Wijk

Disability Projects Coordinator

email: vanwijk at isoc.org

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Internet Society (ISOC)       "The Internet is for everyone"

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From: chapter-delegates-bounces at elists.isoc.org
[mailto:chapter-delegates-bounces at elists.isoc.org] On Behalf Of
Sivasubramanian Muthusamy
Sent: maandag 21 juli 2008 18:01
To: Gilles Massen
Cc: chapter-delegates at elists.isoc.org; Patrick Vande Walle
Subject: Re: [Chapter-delegates] Canadian ISP Rogers violates net neutrality
by hijacking failed DNS lookups

Hello Alejandro,

1.  I followed the original link and from there tried to go to
http://www.digitalhome.ca/forum/forumdisplay.php?f=28 or to page
http://www.digitalhome.ca/forum. Both pages returned a 403 error. 

2.  My ISP is Bharti AIRTEL,  I have noticed a more serious issue of a
possible backdoor intrusion by the ISP, which is a possible breach of
consumer privacy. This ISP - Airtel Broadband  is evidently in a position to
control the browser in MY COMPUTER to take over my browser to redirect any
URL to an Airtel page that says you are temporarily disconnected ( The ISP's
tolerance for late payments even for long standing subscribers is not even a
day past the due date, which is sometimes missed ) 

I have asked them in several repeated email messages 

a) How did you get into my computer to override my browser home page
settings ?
b) What gives you the right to do that ?
c) If you can do as much of a hack in all customer computers as to
override the browser settings and ensure that any address typed in the
address bar takes the browser to
http://203.145.184.29/cgi-bin/
<http://203.145.184.29/cgi-bin/airtel/frontpage.pl> airtel/frontpage.pl,
what else couldn't
you have done ?

This issue was raised in several repeated email messages, routinely
acknowledged but was conveniently left unanswered. In India Consumer Forums
are grossly inadequate and largely controlled or influenced by the
Industrial groups; Consumer legislation, the judicial process are
inadequate, so these large companies simply brush aside any communication
that questions their ways of working

Sivasubramanian M.

On Mon, Jul 21, 2008 at 7:05 PM, Gilles Massen <gilles at isoc.lu> wrote:

Alejandro, Patrick, et al,

There are more and more ISPs that tweak their DNS servers to return an IP
address when they should return that a name does not exist. Rogers is only
the last on a growing list.

Personally, I'd never accept that behaviour from my ISP, I'd either change
or
work around it (with services like OpenDNS, where you can at least opt-out
from such an 'enhanced user experience').

Verisign was the same idea on another level, and you could not easily work
around it, so I'm quite happy that that's gone.

But let's face it: net neutrality is slowly disappearing...be it by changing
the content of DNS replies, or by treating P2P traffic differently. To
many 'optimisations' do simply that: manipulate what's on the wire.

Best,
Gilles

On Monday 21 July 2008 01:54, Alejandro Pisanty wrote:
> Patrick,
>
> reminds me of the spat on wildcards with Verisign some years ago. Quoting
> it could be a good precedent Rogers clients may want to use. Rogers may
> not want to get into a similar mess.
>
> Yours,
>
> Alejandro Pisanty
>
>
> .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  . .  .  .  .  .
.
>       Dr. Alejandro Pisanty
> UNAM, Av. Universidad 3000, 04510 Mexico DF Mexico
>
> Tels. +52-(1)-55-5105-6044, +52-(1)-55-5418-3732
>
> *Mi blog/My blog: http://pisanty.blogspot.com
> *LinkedIn profile: http://www.linkedin.com/in/pisanty
> *Unete al grupo UNAM en LinkedIn,
> http://www.linkedin.com/e/gis/22285/4A106C0C8614
>
> ---->> Unete a ISOC Mexico, http://www.isoc.org
>   Participa en ICANN, http://www.icann.org
> .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .
> .
>
> On Sun, 20 Jul 2008, Patrick Vande Walle wrote:
> > Date: Sun, 20 Jul 2008 21:57:11 +0200
> > From: Patrick Vande Walle <patrick at vande-walle.eu>
> > To: isoc Chapter Delegates <chapter-delegates at elists.isoc.org>,
> >     ISOC Extended Board <isoc-ext-board at elists.isoc.org>
> > Subject: [Isoc-ext-board] Canadian ISP Rogers violates net neutrality by
> >     hijacking failed DNS lookups
> >
> > http://www.digitalhome.ca/content/view/2689/206/
> >
> > In what appears to be a violation of Net Neutrality by Rogers Cable,
> > Digital Home readers are reporting that Rogers High Speed Internet
> > service has begun redirecting customers "Server not found pages" to
> > webpages laden with Rogers advertising.
> >
> > See original link for more details and screenshots.
> >
> > --
> > Patrick Vande Walle

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