[Cialug] DNS Hijacking

[Matthew Nuzum]

On Thu, Aug 6, 2009 at 7:07 AM, Jerry Heiselman <jerry at heiselman.com> wrote:

> Seems like pretty much everyone is doing this now.  I don't really have a
> problem with it as a customer so long as the landing page is clearly marked.
>

There are two reasons to do this. One is because the user experience for a
failed domain is not very helpful by the browsers. It's usually just a
"FAIL: Try again" type of message. The redirection pages often are
helpful... "did you mean..." and a list of possible matching pages from a
search engine. This gives the ISP a chance to look like a hero because they
get to help the lost user which improves their brand and customer loyalty.

Another reason to do this is because you can make a fair bit of money.
Interestingly, there are a couple different ways to layout a search results
page. I've been working with Google and Mozilla on this subject and they
have given me some great tips on how to maximize revenue. A main way is to
put ads above the search results (assuming the ads are relevant which they
usually are with Google's text ads). What's interesting is that the pages by
the ISPs I've seen often aren't optimized for maximum revenue. Maybe that's
because they're main motivation is to help users, or maybe it's because they
just don't know.

I think it really may be that they're trying to help users.

Now an interesting related point is that this service breaks samba in Debian
and Ubuntu. See https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/189168

The workaround is simple on Ubuntu but it's been deemed that we shouldn't do
this by default in part because in principle it's wrong for ISPs to fail to
return NXDOMAIN for invalid hostnames.


-- 
Matthew Nuzum
newz2000 on freenode, skype, linkedin, identi.ca and twitter
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