Windstream Quickly Fixes Google Toolbar Hijack > Bug or feature?

Bug or feature?

How was this a bug when they provided an "opt-out" from the beginning?

reply to nonymous
Windstream's presence on this forum has chosen to ignore my questions entirely. This is troubling since their responses are clearly buffered through some type of PR engine.

I am crafting an email now to Jeff Gardner, the Windstream CEO. This would not be the first time I've spoken with Mr. Gardner.

What has happened can in no way be construed as anything other than DPI gone awry. This is no way can be NXDOMAIN hijacking.

Windstream's silence in all of this simply makes them look more nefarious. There are many who are Windstream subscribers who may not be as outspoken or vocal as myself but rest assured, they are equally as livid as I.

In all of this the biggest take-away is the power of exposure and I thank Karl and the others here at DSLReports for bringing a light into all of this. It's a difficult situation Windstream subscribers are in; not only is Windstream the local telco but also the broadband provider. In many cases Windstream serves a rural community and is a monopoly. Alternate service providers are virtually non-existent.

To add insult to injury now the sole data provider is helping themselves our layer 7 data and manipulating it as necessary to increase revenue by milking it's customers. Instead of being transparent and owning up to the initiative they instead chose to ignore requests for more information or fabricate paper-thin technically inaccurate responses.

Riddle me this, since the Firefox Search toolbar does an HTTP/1.1 GET to 'www.google.com' with a specific URI, and those impacted are not using Windstream's NXDOMAIN hijacking DNS servers, how exactly could this redirection be accomplished without DPI? DPI either at the HTTP level or mangling of DNS responses from non-Windstream DNS servers.

It's not a routing issue when 'www.google.com' directly takes you to Google and a specific URI lands you at searchredirect.windstream.net (note the wonderful incriminating subdomain of 'searchredirect'). Pretty much describes the intended behavior eh?

"Glitch/bug" my ass.

I also don't use Windstream DNS yet I've been redirected. I've found that putting a 127.0.0.1 entry for searchdirect.windstream.net will prevent you from landing on their redirect. Of course your traffic is still subjected to their packet inspection but that's a much bigger issue.

DPI = fail, and there's no positive PR spin they can put on that. Gimp your DNS servers if you want to but keep your hands off my traffic.

BTW, the redirection appears to be done to HTTP traffic because straight DNS queries of NX domains still fail as they should.
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John M - Cranky network guy

reply to lacibaci