Very interesting...
I just got this in my browser (at the top of one of the loaded pages):
" Important Notice
As we complete upgrades in your area, there may be a brief service outage at 12:00 AM, November 14th. Thank you for your patience."
And here is the info-page from one of the links in that notice:
»
208.180.213.225/bg/About ··· e&linkedI am not sure if I like this or not. On one hand, I appreciate the effort of informing me about the outage.
On another hand, I have some problems on how it is done:
1. They don't have this information known through other channels:
a) Why there is no information about the upcoming outages on "My services" page?
b) They send a bunch of trash (aka advertisement/information) to the default SL-provided e-mail, but nothing about this.
c) To be fair, they had provided an automated phone information call previously, but ... whenever I tried to call the customer service to verify the time of the outage (as the answering machine cut out a portion of the message), - the CSRs were telling me that no outage were scheduled.
2. I don't have time now (and much of desire) to figure out exactly how they injected this information into the webpage/browser. I suspect they might have broken some of the RFC's (Internet community's accepted standards) as this has been done before. Previously they (as well as a few other ISPs) have done (and most likely still doing) redirection of the nonexistent pages to their own page with advertisements/links. It was done by essentially hijacking DNS records, and injecting their own IP number for the hostnames that didn't exist. That clearly broke the corresponding RFC's.
They allowed people to opt out of that horrendous behavior.
I was unable to find any information on Suddenlink website (except for the link above), - so if you "blinked" and opted out or closed that page, - you can never find it again.
(Why? Why such a secrecy?!)
I actually just found an earlier thread on this, but it didn't contain information on how this is done and what it potentially breaks (security/privacy/functionality).
So far, my feeling is that the summary for this behavior: "good intention, bad implementation, no information".