OT: Verizon wildcarding DNS

[Jay R. Ashworth]

On Thu, Dec 06, 2007 at 01:51:03PM -0500, Kenneth Brody wrote:
> As you probably recall, Internic got reamed a couple of years ago
> for wildcarding all of *.com, causing any non-existent domains to
> resolve to their (pay-per-click?) advertising page.

Sitefinder, yes.

> Well, it appears that Verizon is doing the same thing for ("to"?)
> their customers.

"To".

> I mistyped one of our domain names into my browser, and it took me
> to a Verizon search page.  I was pretty sure that the domain name
> I actually typed didn't exist (and a whois confirmed that).  Delving
> a little further, I found:
> 
>     You reached the preceding search results page because Verizon
>     is using specific Domain Name Service (DNS) Servers to look up
>     domain names. These DNS Servers eliminate dead-end "no such name"
>     error pages you can encounter as you surf the web. This search
>     service is designed to make your web surfing experience more
>     productive. No software was installed on your computer for this
>     service to work.
> 
> They do, however, allow you to "opt out" of their "DNS assistance"
> service, and you can download a simple 9-page PDF with instructions
> on reconfiguring your router to do so.  (At least, the one for my
> particular router was 9 pages long.  Each router they supply has
> its own PDF on how to reconfigure it.)

What is this, now, Slashdot?  :-)

Verizon -- Earthlink is doing this too -- has put this hack in place on
their default customer resolver DNS servers, for all the stupid people
out there in the world, who can't type, and who don't understand the
difference between an Address box and a Search box.

(Ironically, I'm a contributor to this; my habit of making Google the
default page on machines I configure combined with Google's pull-focus
javascript causes some of my clients to type a lot of URLs into Google,
and waste a click and a page load.)

I agree that's it a Bad Idea -- not least because it breaks those
(admittedly somewhat arcane) applications which depend on NXDOMAIN
responses for domains which actually don't exist -- but it's easy to
fix: change the DNS servers on your workstation to point to the
alternative ones they also operate.  Or, as someone else notes, to
someone else's entirely (I used to use open-rsc.org's, but they appear
to be semi-moribund).

If your PC is behind a router, then it should be on a static IP address
(no, really :-), and this is trivial.  If it's DHCPd, you *may* have to
switch it to static to be able to set DNS servers manually, and whether
you can override it on your router depends on the router -- some
permit, it, some don't.

Short version, though: if you're savvy enough that this bothers, you,
then you're probably savvy enough to fix it.

It *is* an entirely different category of thing, though, than
Sitefinder: this affects only customer resolver servers, only for your
ISP, and you can get around it.

Sitefinder affected the *zone servers for .com*, and there was thence
no way *to* get around it; several orders of magnitude worse.

Cheers,
-- jra
-- 
Jay R. Ashworth                   Baylink                      jra at baylink.com
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