Holy S - virgin media

M4RKM

i hate branded dns redirects.. maybe i'm just old skool at the t'internet and prefer an error..

i never use the DNS my ISP provides, and currently use the demon one that is mentioned earlier in this thread, and one of the following,

4.2.2.1 - 4.2.2.6

so there are plenty of choices for alternative DNS...

M

fuzzball172

-TangleFoot- wrote: »

The Wikipedia article on DNS hijacking mentions the possibility of cross-site scripting attacks. Does that sound good to you?

Did you read the whole article on DNS hijacking, including the document citation, which is used to support the wiki posting? The possible attack is only possible if the server supplying the ad suggestions is easily compromised. Virgin's DNS redirect is powered by Yahoo, one of the webs most used and respected search and advertising services. I am only guessing here, but I think that Yahoo servers are hardened against this kind of attack.

I don't think Virgin are doing anything sneaky, just trying to offer help to users with clumsy fingers. Ads are clearly marked as sponsored links and the page carries Virgin branding to let the user know they are on a virgin supplied web site. The wiki article, in my opinion, is badly written as it uses irrelevant citations to support at least one of its claims. In particular the use of RFC2308 as supporting evedence for his claims of 'This practice violates the RFC standard for DNS (NXDOMAIN) responses' The RFC in question actually covers the internal caching of negative DNS queries and the time (TTL) that they should persist within the DNS servers internal cache.

Very few web sites / services nowadays run without some form of advertisment. Even this website generates money through affiliate marketing, I see nothing wrong with Virgin supplying a search box and rather than a generic error message. The result generated are identical to yahoo search results, with paid for advertisments on the right hand side.

As to snooping, do you know that the search engine companies store your search query, ip address, date and time of your searches? Your ISP stores your IP address and MAC address so it can trace dubious web traffic to your computer. The addition of an automated service that serves up a branded search service makes little or no difference in privacy of your data.

OneADay

fuzzball172

Oh dont tell me its Yahoo - hate yahoo search as it is (oh hang now its microsoft search under a different name). As for Yahoo being hardended I dont think so - they have plenty of glitches which allow various exploits in their gaming sites plus if they were secure they could at least deal with spam emails a bit better.

And virgin are being sneaky, we were with them for over a decade till we tried to use Sky for a month in 2007 and that failed. Went back to virgin on 12 month contract. That contract was extended for another 12 months from july 2009 without any mention of this extra intrusion to broadband service.

telewest/ntl and now called virgin have been advertising free as far as browsing has been going. Mention of phorm trials with virgin were less than pleasing - but now they seemed to be going down this other form of advertising which should be condemned before it gets extended.