My ISP is a DNS Sellout!
Image via Wikipedia
This has been brought up in the past, but recently I’ve noticed that my Internet Service Provider (ISP), Road Runner from Time Warner Cable, has decided that when I typo on the location bar, it’s perfectly acceptable to send me to a not-so-helpful search result page.
The Problem
This usually happens to me when I typo my own domain, like this (or you can click on the picture for a bigger version):
As you can see, the result pages are pretty much bogus. In fact, even legit-sounding sites like myspace resolve to blatantly different spam and link farm targets. This page may look like a search result page, but it really isn’t. It’s a huge advertisement for Time Warner’s nebulous affiliates.
I’m guessing that it should include my site, since I simply transposed two letters, but it doesn’t. And I don’t think it ever will.
In the upper right corner, I noticed that Road Runner claims the search results are from Yahoo! It also has a link entitled, “Why Am I Here”? Which, when clicked, opens an ajaxy description:
Here’s the FAQ page. The other blue text, the Preferences page, is interesting in that it doesn’t seem to have any sort of login or other means of knowing who you are. I am guessing they log the IP I (or other Road Runner clients) are using, and use that as a basis for future URL typo preferences.
By the way, I also did a specific Yahoo! search for the same typo and here is the result:
Not helpful, but also not harmful.
The Obvious Solution
So, Time Warner doesn’t want to get in trouble for this practice, so the preferences pane is their way of allowing you to opt out of their crappy service. And indeed, after updating my preferences, waiting the requisite 10 minutes, and trying my URL again, I got the standard Firefox page load error page, see over there to the right.
This would be the easy and perfectly adequate solution to this predatory practice. However…
A Better Solution?
We can actually go a step further, and avoid using the ISP’s DNS service completely! You may think that you are stuck using whatever your ISP gives you via DHCP but you aren’t.
First, let me explain a bit. DNS stands for Domain Name System and it’s what computers on the internet use to figure out what the real number address for a website is. When you type in something like www.twitter.com, what your computer does is ask the DNS server what the address for that domain is. The server looks it up from a table, and returns a number.. the IP address. For Twitter, this would be: 128.121.146.100 .
Go ahead and try it… you can get to twitter with that number: http://128.121.146.100
But who wants to remember a long string of numbers for each web site they go to? Thus the existence of DNS.
Anyway, in order to distribute the load of all these computers doing DNS lookups all the time, what is set up is a tiered system of DNS servers, all pointing up to an authoritative name server (actually 5 or 6) up at the top. They are supposed to know pretty much every IP address in existence. Once the lower-level DNS server gets the result, it caches it, so that future lookups are faster.
Back to alternative DNS servers. In the past, if your ISP had an unreliable, slow or suspect DNS server, you could use a different one, pretty much any DNS server on the internet. In theory they are all supposed to give you essentially the same results.
But unless you really knew that the DNS server you were using was legit, it’s kind of scary to just start trusting random servers out there for your lookup results. Remember — the DNS server can tell your computer anything and it would be trusted implicitly. One second you are going to twitter, the next you might be going somewhere completely different.
So, a group called OpenDNS was formed to provide a safe, reliable way of getting DNS results that you can hold them responsible for. Also, they are committed to speedy results.
If you are going to go through the trouble of re-programming your PC or router to use a specific DNS server, I would recommend OpenDNS. They have full instructions for changing your PC or router settings on their page, and they work with other organizations (such as Google) to help prevent you from accidentally going to a phishing or other nasty site.
Best of all, they will never send you to an advertising-laden pseudo-search engine spam result page!
