joeykahn
join:2005-09-10
Bay City, MI
| reply to bylaws
Re: Charter Corrupting DNS protocol (ie: hijacking hosts)
Thats an interesting argument. When Network Solutions pulled this same routine, they were smart enough to not redirect unknown hosts within delegated domains.
Charter DNS server doesn't care and redirects ALL failed host or domain lookups; even within existing domains. To me, this is very nasty and I wonder what the Fortune 500 companies think of the practice, since it now looks like they might be sponsoring Charter's search results. |
|
joeykahn
join:2005-09-10
Bay City, MI | reply to hotoffthepress
HTTP/404 redirection isn't the same thing as DNS corruption. No 404 is ever returned; rather, a misdirected IP address for whatever host you typed in is returned and your browser blindly directs your request there. |
|
useless
join:2006-07-16
1 edit | This is def interesting, i do not use them so I dont care much, but it is contradictory to "accepted practice"
Problem is, there are no laws governing businesses in this type of activity. Im sure there is probably something in the agreement you agreed to that makes this a moot point, although I haven't looked. |
|
The Admiral9
join:2007-02-22
Belding, MI
1 edit | reply to Darkk
.
. |
|
joeykahn
join:2005-09-10
Bay City, MI
1 edit | reply to useless
Re: Charter Corrupting DNS protocol (ie: hijacking hosts)
Right now, I feel utterly powerless trying to do anything here and am embarrassed that Charter's own Engineering Staff aren't strong enough to stand up to their Marketing Department. Embarrassed for good Engineers, that is.
So far my letter to Charter has resulted in form-replies saying that they've received my complaint and will get back to me.
Phone calls have gotten nowhere useful; the experience has so far been frustrating -- I need a better speaker phone while waiting on hold.
I probably should iron a good shirt and put on a suit then visit the nearby office to see if there is anyone who understands the issue. There must be, right? |
|
useless
join:2006-07-16 | Sales > everything else. That is just about every company.
dunno what to tell you man sorry. |
|
Darkk
join:2003-10-03
Almont, MI
 ·Charter Pipeline
| I never got past the Charter corporate voice mail after I got the letter saying they had tried to contact me in the mail. So I haven't received an answer either.
Charter definitely blew it with this move...
What I want to know is whether they are tracking browsing habits now by IP, so that they can shape their new nasty advertising based on your browsing habits? Does anyone know any details about how the re-direct service handles this?
One other point is that since all domains now resolve, real ones to their IP and fake ones to Charter's bogus re-direct IP, there is no way to validate broken links with meta-search tools, or to validate bogus email domains to filter spam at the user level. Anyone know if this might break the Can SPAM act in that it prevents proper domain validation of email sender domains of potential SPAM email messages at the customer level? |
|
k7aab
join:2001-04-03
Granite City, IL | reply to joeykahn
Been using a different non charter DNS in my TCP properties ... no problems since. |
|
local_chtr_engr
@charter.com
| reply to joeykahn
said by joeykahn  :Right now, I feel utterly powerless trying to do anything here and am embarrassed that Charter's own Engineering Staff aren't strong enough to stand up to their Marketing Department. Embarrassed for good Engineers, that is. Don't feel bad for us. It has nothing to do with standing up to other departments. All you can do it vote with your wallet. Don't loose too much sleep over it man, because we don't. And please be aware that this is a corporate initiative .. be aware of that when barging into your local office yelling at poor Suzie, sitting behind the customer service desk. |
|
Darkk
join:2003-10-03
Almont, MI
·Charter Pipeline
| You know the sad part about it is that after calling the Corporate number, explaining my complaint with this to the initial call taker, getting a promise of a callback later by someone who could help me, never having Charter make that promised callback instead sending out a letter saying that they "tried to contact me and could not", me calling twice per day the phone number of the Escalation Specialist on the mailed out letter and leaving voice mail messages for 3 days (which say that a call back will be made that day on the recording), I still haven't been able to get charter Corporate to respond.
I mean at least answer the phone and tell your customers you don't care what they think and that you feel that it is your (Charter's) right to mess with the very standards that make the Internet run, foul up our locally run applications, track our every move online by IP address using your new non-standard Internet DNS ad insertion partner (who also does who knows what with that IP based browsing history) so you can use that data in your plan that breaks DNS to send us advertising we don't want, violate the Can SPAM act by resolving DNS lookups that anti-spam apps need to see fail to properly reject bogus email messages (you Charter were pretty clear in your filing to the FTC in that this was one way you were allowing your customers to handle the requirements of the Can SPAM act when trying to minimize any actions you had to take Corporate-wise), and break truth in advertising because you are not offering standards-based DNS resolution to allow applications that anyone would expect to work as expected and designed (and Internet RFC standards dictate) on an "Internet" connection without having to look elsewhere for some of the services that an Internet service provider must provide as part of the marketed service.
I mean, you didn't even configure the DNS redirect correctly.
I suspect that regardless of what Charter Corporate might be thinking right now, this isn't done yet. At some future date we may yet be thanking Charter for being the final straw that broke the camel's back and finally launched oversight across the board which may later affect themselves and other companies providing ISP services that dearly hoped to avoid such oversight. |
|
joeykahn
join:2005-09-10
Bay City, MI
4 edits | reply to local_chtr_engr
I would never barge into a local office yelling at anyone, for any reason. I would never doubt that Sally is sincere in her job. The proper place to address this problem is conversation with the corporate higher-ups, not screaming at Sally. It is most likely that marketing persuaded an entire corporation that corrupting DNS is somehow a good thing and they can some how rake in extra money by altering the very functioning of Internet Services. I simply have no direct way to engage decision makers and provide them with honest dialog. Charter's support escalation system doesn't appear designed for actual dialog.
If you are interested, you might want to read The Cluetrain Manifesto: The End of Business as Usual, available on amazon.com.
Either way, if you actually work for Charter, you should consider taking a stand for the doing the right thing. Not all corporate initiatives are worthy; this particular one makes Charter vulnerable to many problems which aren't too difficult to figure out. You might consider trying to find a way to protest from the inside because, regardless of the cliche', there are more important things than money and using your wallet, namely: social trust.
No offense and Best Regards,
Joey |
|
joeykahn
join:2005-09-10
Bay City, MI
| reply to joeykahn
Darkk,
I hadn't thought of your SPAM act point. I really thank you for taking the time to post about it.
Tonight I'm going to work on a factual letter in an attempt to explain why Charter's DNS change is simply bad business for Charter. Every bullet point helps 
(I may have emailed this note?) My route via Charter's support has also gotten me no place. Today I received a letter explaining how I can terminate my Charter account as well as how to use their new Epay service to pay my future Charter bills. Go Figure I never once hinted at terminating my account; rather, I simply asked for someone to interview to understand what they were trying to do to the core Internet Protocols.
Best,
Joey |
|
Darkk
join:2003-10-03
Almont, MI
·Charter Pipeline
| The way things are going, I doubt whether Charter will ever take a phone call on this. I suspect that the Escalation Specialist is ducking all calls using voice mail, and will only return calls they want to take. DNS hijacking calls aren't likely ones that would fall into this category.
The "tried to contact you" letter should have been the tip off.
It may not be the escalation person's doing, Charter corporate may have mandated no discussion on the nefarious and possibly illegal corruption of the DNS standard.
Surf to the FTC web site and file a complaint on Charter noting the DNS hijack breaks the reverse DNS required to be in compliance with the Can SPAM act, and also might in fact be false advertising in that an "Internet" connection and "Internet" services require standards-based behavior. A consumer has the right to expect this as this is the way the service is advertised.
Then write your elected representative and ask that they look into this balkanization of the Internet. ICANN reacted pretty strongly when VeriSign pulled this, and at least their hijack was configured correctly.
Lastly, I wonder what Charter and it's new hijacker are doing with all of the IP tagged browsing history they are collecting on customers? |
|
member101
join:2002-09-13
Bay City, MI | So by using other non-charter DNS (like 4.2.2.1), our browsing history can't be IP tagged?
Thank you,
Memeber101 |
|
anon_engr
@cogentco.com
| reply to joeykahn
said by joeykahn :Either way, if you actually work for Charter, you should consider taking a stand for the doing the right thing. Not all corporate initiatives are worthy; this particular one makes Charter vulnerable to many problems which aren't too difficult to figure out. You might consider trying to find a way to protest from the inside because, regardless of the cliche', there are more important things than money and using your wallet, namely: social trust. No offense and Best Regards, Joey I know what you're saying Joey, but trust me, the people at Corp are NOT interested in what we have to say from a local standpoint. They just call us to fix things when they're broke. I could go on for hours about Corp, trust me, but I won't, because deep down I want to believe we are doing the right thing as a company. The only thing I can tell you for sure is, engineers are never consulted on these decisions. We are just told what to do, and woke up at 4 in the morning when it breaks. |
|
keybrdmssiah
join:2007-01-29
MI | I just changed to the open source dns, thanks  |
|
bspesq
@charter.com
| reply to member101
The issue with using another DNS is that it's going to be slower...in my case, hitting those gte DNS servers is about double the roundtrip time that it is to my charter name servers. Charter is really going to be shooting themselves in the foot here, because now everyone (who has an interest to) is going to start pushing all of their DNS queries to DNS servers that are on the other sides of Charter's network.
I'd heard about this previously, but didn't think I was affected (St. Louis.) Well, apparently now I am. However, I did notice a discrepancy:
I'd always used the DNS servers 24.217.0.5 and .55. Those are 'nsx.charter-stl.com' and 'nsx2.charter-stl.com'. However, the admin contact (in whois) for charter-stl.com lists the DNS servers that the domain utilizes, which are ns1.charter-stl.com and ns2.charter-stl.com. Those are 24.107.0.3 and .4 Those DNS servers seem untainted, at least at this moment:
> asdfblagrg.google.com
Server: [24.217.0.55]
Address: 24.217.0.55
Non-authoritative answer:
Name: asdfblagrg.google.com
Addresses: 64.158.56.56, 206.112.100.132
> server 24.217.0.3
Default Server: ns1.charter-stl.com
Address: 24.217.0.3
> asdfblagrg.google.com
Server: ns1.charter-stl.com
Address: 24.217.0.3
*** ns1.charter-stl.com can't find asdfblagrg.google.com: Non-existent domain
First query shows the site-finder resolve, second shows proper, failed resolve.
Obviously those DNS servers will only be 'quick' for someone in the same region--could someone else check out the WHOIS page for their region and see if they have similar results?
(It's possible that the 'charter-stl.com' domain might just be a local, weird domain that was set up at some point...but it does stand to reason that they have _some_ untainted DNS servers on their network, because I can't fathom trying to keep a huge data network like theirs running if they had to rely on malfunctioning DNS servers.) |
|
wispagod
join:2001-06-28
House Springs, MO | Actualy, i just used the dude and scanned Charters network and found a DNS server on one of there static custermors and it works better than there's... and no hijacking, so FOR now i feel better. |
|
stivvy
Technonerd
join:2002-05-08
| said by wispagod :Actualy, i just used the dude and scanned Charters network and found a DNS server on one of there static custermors and it works better than there's... and no hijacking, so FOR now i feel better. First stealing neighbor's wi-fi now stealing services from a private DNS server.
WHy don't you guys just use Level 3's DNS servers?
4.2.2.1
4.2.2.2
4.2.2.3
4.2.2.4
4.2.2.5
They're public and often you will get better response than one inside of Charter's network. |
|
Lazlow
join:2006-08-07
Saint Louis, MO
| Stivvy
About stealing I agree with you. My and I think the OP's, point was that a major service provider is breaking Internet protocol. This is BAD. The reasons those protocols were set up was to prevent people from doing things just like this. Essentially Charter is doing the same thing that the guy stealing wifi is.
Lazlow |
|
