US internet providers hijacking users' search queries

Sat Aug 6 14:41:10 UTC 2011

Correct, I don't believe that any of the providers noted are actually 
hijacking HTTP sessions instead all of these are DNS based tricks.  
Since the service providers are also providing DNS (via Paxfire and 
others) users don't have a lot of choice.  You can switch to using a 
known public name server (Google's 8.8.8.8 for example) but I hesitate 
to recommend that to most end users because in non-evil networks its 
better to have local name resolution (because of GSLB & other reasons).

On 8/5/2011 9:14 PM, Joe Provo wrote:
> On Fri, Aug 05, 2011 at 05:04:51PM -0700, Bino Gopal wrote:
>> http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn20768-us-internet-providers-hijacking-users-search-queries.html
> It is more than slightly misleading to say "hijacking search
> queries"; paxfire is evil as it hijacks dns and breaks NXDOMAIN
> and they've been doing that for ages. The user behavior of
> searching in the address bar has become more common place, and
> browser behavior to try and resolve first, fallback to search
> for the same input field has both trained the humans to keep
> doing this and made it possible for DNS query interlopers to
> appear to be generic-search interlopers.
>
>

-- 
Scott Helms
Vice President of Technology
ISP Alliance, Inc. DBA ZCorum
(678) 507-5000
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