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CenturyLink is blocking customer internet, saying Utah legislators told them to

richsnapp.com

21–30 of 294 posts

Re: CenturyLink is blocking customer internet, saying Utah legislators told them to

#21
post #4

And here we see the disconnect between what politicians say, and what they write into law. The bill's sponsor's response to the blog authors query: SB134 did not require that ...They were only required to notify customers of options via email or with an invoice. And here is the text of the statute that was written: (ii) A service provider may provide the notice described in Subsection (2)(b)(i): (A) by electronic com…

Nonsense. CenturyLink took an open ended option and made an absolutely terrible implementation decision and then tried to blame the law.

Re: CenturyLink is blocking customer internet, saying Utah legislators told them to

#22
post #4

And here we see the disconnect between what politicians say, and what they write into law. The bill's sponsor's response to the blog authors query: SB134 did not require that ...They were only required to notify customers of options via email or with an invoice. And here is the text of the statute that was written: (ii) A service provider may provide the notice described in Subsection (2)(b)(i): (A) by electronic com…

But given the options, it's absolutely CenturyLink's fault for choosing the option they did.

Right, CenturyLink probably could have legally hijacked DNS to send this message without the law too. Tons of laws have leeway for corporations to do shitty things. It doesn't make the corporations blameless.

Re: CenturyLink is blocking customer internet, saying Utah legislators told them to

#23
post #2

Senior network engineer for an mid sized ISP here: These people should be ashamed of themselves. I honestly don't care even the tiniest bit about whatever sort of excuses or justification they put up. It should not be necessary for a consumer end user (whether residential or business) of an ISP in the US or Canada to treat their ISP as hostile, and develop workarounds like VPN tunneling their traffic, such as I would…

My ISP (Time Warner/Charter/Spectrum) DNS hijacked bing.com [0] and non-existent domains for their own "search page" [1]. Since then I've been sure to always configure my own DNS in my router. (Used Google's 8s for a while, now on Cloudflare's 1s.) It's unfortunate that I have to treat my ISP as hostile, but they are the only high speed provider to my address. I sadly can't even assume that there is anyone in managem…

That's horrible, did you call them up and ask why their DNS servers are fraudulently lying about IP addresses of certain high traffic domains?

Re: CenturyLink is blocking customer internet, saying Utah legislators told them to

#24
post #3
post #2

Senior network engineer for an mid sized ISP here: These people should be ashamed of themselves. I honestly don't care even the tiniest bit about whatever sort of excuses or justification they put up. It should not be necessary for a consumer end user (whether residential or business) of an ISP in the US or Canada to treat their ISP as hostile, and develop workarounds like VPN tunneling their traffic, such as I would…

Unfortunately enough ISPs have abused their position that treating them as hostile is where we're going. VPNs are a stopgap. The future is end-to-end encrypted protocols like QUIC that obscure even connection state information and prevent anything from being modified in transit at all, DNS over HTTPS, etc. Everything has to be encrypted and authenticated end-to-end.

Unfortunately even QUIC and DNS over HTTPS can't save us from the ISPs (and Enterprise ITs) that think TLS/SSL proxies are a good idea, and especially sadly things like QUIC and DNS over HTTPS may push more ISPs towards that line of thinking.

Re: CenturyLink is blocking customer internet, saying Utah legislators told them to

#25
post #4

And here we see the disconnect between what politicians say, and what they write into law. The bill's sponsor's response to the blog authors query: SB134 did not require that ...They were only required to notify customers of options via email or with an invoice. And here is the text of the statute that was written: (ii) A service provider may provide the notice described in Subsection (2)(b)(i): (A) by electronic com…

So what's your preferred language? Can you suggest something that covers all cases without introducing undue limitations?

Re: CenturyLink is blocking customer internet, saying Utah legislators told them to

#26
post #19
post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Unfortunately enough ISPs have abused their position that treating them as hostile is where we're going. VPNs are a stopgap. The future is end-to-end encrypted protocols like QUIC that obscure even connection state information and prevent anything from being modified in transit at all, DNS over HTTPS, etc. Everything has to be encrypted and authenticated end-to-end.

> Everything has to be encrypted and authenticated end-to-end. This isn't really enough. Even with QUIC / TLS your ISP can still know what endpoint you're connecting to, which may in itself be too bad. This is the problem VPNs are solving (or at least moving the trust). There's also the touted alternative of conglomerate everything onto Cloudflare and have encrypted SNI.

If your ISP is doing netflow analysis and DPI on your connection (like the Chinese GFW), with malicious intent specifically aimed at you, you're pretty much screwed anyhow. If they decide to start blocking traffic to VPN endpoints and such. This can be seen if you try running a non-obfuscated openvpn link into and out of China.

Re: CenturyLink is blocking customer internet, saying Utah legislators told them to

#27
post #2

Senior network engineer for an mid sized ISP here: These people should be ashamed of themselves. I honestly don't care even the tiniest bit about whatever sort of excuses or justification they put up. It should not be necessary for a consumer end user (whether residential or business) of an ISP in the US or Canada to treat their ISP as hostile, and develop workarounds like VPN tunneling their traffic, such as I would…

Let’s not forget to include Belkin among the companies that have attempted variations of this. In this case, it was their wireless router which would grab a random out-going request and serve up advertisements instead. Imagine being in the middle of buying plane tickets and suddenly finding yourself at a random advertisement.

https://www.geek.com/news/belkin-routers-misdirect-users-to-...

Re: CenturyLink is blocking customer internet, saying Utah legislators told them to

#28
So what happens if a CenturyLink customer is not using their DNS, and using for example Google's DNS. They will suddenly have their internet disabled and will never see this page, where they have to click "OK" to reconnect their internet.

Re: CenturyLink is blocking customer internet, saying Utah legislators told them to

#30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My ISP (Time Warner/Charter/Spectrum) DNS hijacked bing.com [0] and non-existent domains for their own "search page" [1]. Since then I've been sure to always configure my own DNS in my router. (Used Google's 8s for a while, now on Cloudflare's 1s.) It's unfortunate that I have to treat my ISP as hostile, but they are the only high speed provider to my address. I sadly can't even assume that there is anyone in managem…

That's horrible, did you call them up and ask why their DNS servers are fraudulently lying about IP addresses of certain high traffic domains?

I hate how the conversation goes when I ask them why they are adding fees to my bills that don't make any sense. (I intentionally own all my own equipment, why would I ever have an "equipment return fee" show up other than them trying to screw me over and see if I notice?) I complained to some friends that are very low on the totem pole and they agreed with me that DNS hijacking is extremely wrong but had zero power to do anything.

We need strong Regulatory Commissions to hold these sorts of Monopolists accountable, and right now the political climate in states like mine remains that "Regulations are Bad" and "Profit/Greed are Good".

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