RE: Solution to prevent Verizon redirects

When only a handful of companies control such a popular and widely used system, you can expect them to incrementally tighten the noose and reduce options until they extract every available revenue opportunity! The man behind the curtain wants your time, attention and money. Muuauahahahahahahaha!

Charter Communications has been doing this for about 6 months too on their cable modem network in texas. just another annoying way to make a buck . . . its unfortunate the $60 a month im paying for the service doesnt offset the 25cents they're making for the 'ad click'

Verizon's not just hijacking web page typos here - by responding to DNS queries with VZ's web server IP address, it's also redirecting email and other Internet applications such as ssh and telnet, and redirecting SSL secure web page requests, which is a much more serious security violation than redirecting regular Port 80 web pages.

The Internet isn't just the web, and DNS supports all Internet Protocol applications, not just web browsers - but the only application VZ's providing an application for is the web, and it breaks other applications. Microsoft Internet Explorer also redirects unsuccessful queries, but it's doing it from the web browser, so it's not breaking other things, and it lets you pick other search engines if you don't like Microsoft's. When Verisign redirected DNS queries for all of .com and .net a couple of years ago, they also provided a limited-function email server that rejected connections. It broke some people's spam filters, and did the wrong thing if you mistyped somebody's email address, but it at least tried. Verizon's press releases don't say if they're even trying to support redirected email.

Verizon isn't redirecting web page queries that fail - they're redirecting DNS queries that fail, and that's a serious mistake technically, because DNS supports all applications, and doesn't know which one you're using.

If you try to send email to , your mail system checks DNS for the IP address of nonexistent-domain.com, and Verizon's supposed to tell it that the domain doesn't exist, so your mail reader can give you an error message. Instead, it tells your mail system to send the message to Verizon's web server, which might or might not have an email server on it, and maybe you'll get an error message right now saying "joe doesn't exist here", but more often you'll get a message next week saying "we've been trying to reach nonexistent-domain.com for a week, giving up, sorry", and meanwhile joe's been waiting for your mail and you didn't know it.

Even for web pages, redirecting DNS also doesn't redirect missing pages on correct domains - if you look for www.example.com/missingpage.html, and www.example.com exists and has a web server, that server will send you "404 Not Found" response page, and Verizon's not looking at the query or response there. If you look for www.nonexistent-domain.com/whatever.html, and Verizon correctly told you the domain didn't exist instead of giving you their own web server's address, your web browser could give you an error message, but most web browsers these days will let you pick whatever search engine you want to do the lookup, so if you like Google better than Microsoft or Yahoo you can use that.

Verizon could implement a web proxy server that would actually redirect your HTTP query instead of giving a wrong answer to the DNS query. Some ISPs and most business firewalls do this, because it lets them save bandwidth by caching popular web pages instead of fetching them every time, and also lets them run virus filters. But that's much more intrusive, and requires much bigger servers - hijacking DNS queries isn't any more work than answering them correctly, and they can afford a big web server for the typo traffic because they're making advertising money off every query.

Verizon is stretching the definition of "opt-out" here. My previous experience with opt-out has been mainly with financial organizations and on-line merchants where opting out means checking a box on the screen, or sending in a post card or letter with a box checked. For Verizon, it means reconfiguring your router. What percentage of verizon FIOS users do you think know how to check a box on a web page? What percentage do you think know how to reconfigure their routers? Compare and Contrast.

An opt-in requirement would require that Verizon actually lets consumers know about the option, something they don't do very well now. I could find nothing about the opt out option on the Verizon support page using various searches. The only way I could find get to the opt-out instructions was through the link in this article, or through similar links in several technical forums. How many Verizon FIOS users are going to be searching these forums for "opt-out" information? When you do go to the link, and select the current Actiontec router you get conflicting instructions. The directions on the web page don't match those on the PDF file they provide for you to print for ease of reading. Click on the opt-out link and check it out.

What Verizon provides is not an opt-out. It's a work-around.

quick edit to /etc/hosts for those of us without ready access to other DNS servers

About Redirect to other web address // html code --

http://html-lesson.blogspot.com/2008/06/redirect-to-web-addres.html