another brick in the wall[ed garden]

Fri May 15 02:06:59 UTC 2009

You are brave indeed to trust your packets over the air without a VPN or tunnel of some sort.

While it sounds like Sprint is doing something, for lack of a better word, lame, you would be well advised to not trust your packets to the built-in cell encryption (obfuscation).

- S

-----Original Message-----
From: Robert E. Seastrom <rs at seastrom.com>
Sent: Thursday, May 14, 2009 10:50
To: nanog at nanog.org <nanog at nanog.org>
Subject: another brick in the wall[ed garden]

Dear Sprint EVDO people,

Your man-in-the-middle hijacking of UDP/53 DNS queries against
nameservers that I choose to query from my laptop on Sprint EVDO is
not appreciated.  Even less appreciated is your complete blocking of
TCP/53 DNS queries.

Queries from my lab:

   rs at click [14] %      dig +short @192.148.252.10 version.bind. chaos txt
   "Just send your damn query already..."
   rs at click [15] %      dig +tcp +short @192.148.252.10 version.bind. chaos txt
   "Just send your damn query already..."
   rs at click [16] %      dig +tcp +short @192.148.252.10 hostname.bind. chaos txt
   "bifrost"
   rs at click [17] %

Queries from my laptop:

   Superfly:~ rs$ dig +short @192.148.252.10 version.bind. chaos txt
   "9.6.0-P1"
   Superfly:~ rs$ dig +tcp +short @192.148.252.10 version.bind. chaos txt
   ;; connection timed out; no servers could be reached
   Superfly:~ rs$ dig +tcp +short @192.148.252.10 hostname.bind. chaos txt
   "ns1-kscymar06.spcsdns.net"
   Superfly:~ rs$

Guys, I send you money each month to deliver packets for me, not to
invent new ways of being annoying (and breaking TSIG signed updates to
dynamic DNS).  Less is more.  Please stop dinking with 10-minute-idle
TCP sessions (which I complained about a year and a half ago) and
knock it off with offering DNS service that I did not ask for.

Sincerely,

Your Disgruntled Customer, RS

PS:  No, I don't expect that this open letter will get you to fix the
misbehavior, but if some Swedish guy comes along swinging a clue-bat
at you guys I hope he whacks you a couple of times for me.