OT: Verizon wildcarding DNS

[Kenneth Brody]

Quoting Jay R. Ashworth (Fri, 7 Dec 2007 12:01:50 -0500):

> 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".

:-)

[...]
> What is this, now, Slashdot?  :-)

That's fPslashdot, TYVM.  (Or would that be "./fp"?)

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

True, but it would be nice of the to, at least, let you know that
they're going to offer this "service", without hiding the "opt-out"
link on a page that you can only get to by clicking on a button with
the "obvious" label "about this page".  Their 9-page PDF is basically
instructions on changing the DNS from DHCP-supplied server (5 hops,
7 ms away) to a static one out in Chicago (7 hops, 32 ms away, shared
by every Verizon customer that wants to opt-out).

> 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.

True, though it's just as annoying when you first find out.

-- 
KenBrody at BestWeb dot net        spamtrap: <g8ymh8uf001 at sneakemail.com>
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