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The snippet ended up being some sort of alert about upcoming maintenance, but using a malicious technique for a benign purpose is the path to the dark side. Use HTTPS!
(I use 8.8.8.8, it didn't help)
Super shady stuff. I never rely on any ISP provided DNS servers. I'm glad you talked to the the etailers to let them know what was going on. These business practices do introduce latency, regardless of what he told you. Not to mention, they are highly unethical and dishonest.
A really shady ISP could intercept and redirect any outgoing port 53 traffic to their servers.
This experience has taught me simply to distrust the DNS protocol in its current form and use DNSCrypt in all situations.
[1]: Shaw Communications, chosen by the landlord.
[2]: http://dnscrypt.org/Earlier quoted context omitted.
A really shady ISP could intercept and redirect any outgoing port 53 traffic to their servers.
My ISP [1] actually does this. They offer an opt-out of NXDOMAIN hijacking, but silently proxy all port 53 traffic regardless. This experience has taught me simply to distrust the DNS protocol in its current form and use DNSCrypt in all situations. [1]: Shaw Communications, chosen by the landlord. [2]: http://dnscrypt.org/
It's been 7 years or so since I used Shaw.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
And GOOG-owned. Spam from a small-scale ISP, or tracking by a big ad firm? You lose either way.
https://developers.google.com/speed/public-dns/privacy "We built Google Public DNS to make the web faster and to retain as little information about usage as we could, while still being able to detect and fix problems. Google Public DNS does not permanently store personally identifiable information."
Cox does something similar but bypasses the the DNS records and just slipstreams in a response. I noticed Cox would redirect javascript requests to their own HTTP server and put in their own snippets, effectively doing mass javascript injection. The snippet ended up being some sort of alert about upcoming maintenance, but using a malicious technique for a benign purpose is the path to the dark side. Use HTTPS! (I use…
All is not lost though.
There are several ways you can protect yourself from these practices. The first thing I would do is get a router capable of using dnscrypt-proxy (http://www.opendns.com/technol.... Then you can be confident that your DNS traffic is not being modified by your ISP. It does require that you have trust in a 3rd party DNS provider like OpenDNS, but at the end of the day you have to trust someone to provide DNS lookups.
The second option is to setup DNSSEC so that you can verify where your DNS responses are coming from. While people will still be able to intercept what sites you're looking up, at least you know you're getting valid responses which is better than your situation is currently.
Third is to use both. =)
Anyhow, really awesome to see people standing against these practices. It takes users complaining to make change. The sad truth of the matter.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
https://developers.google.com/speed/public-dns/privacy "We built Google Public DNS to make the web faster and to retain as little information about usage as we could, while still being able to detect and fix problems. Google Public DNS does not permanently store personally identifiable information."
"personally identifiable"
As I mention in a related comment, if you're worried about the NSA knowing what websites you visit, you must not use TCP/IP. TCP/IP has no provision for obscuring the source and destination of packets; you have to add that at another layer.
(To wax philosophical, it seems that we're outgrowing the Internet. Nobody was worried about protecting their browsing history from their ISP or the government when the Internet was designed, so when we start talking about "if you use XXX service, the NSA can find out", that's true of pretty much everything except for things specially designed to hide browsing history from the NSA. Even those can be suspected to be compromised, meaning you shouldn't even be here commenting if you're truly worried about what information a DNS server might collect from you.)
Cox does something similar but bypasses the the DNS records and just slipstreams in a response. I noticed Cox would redirect javascript requests to their own HTTP server and put in their own snippets, effectively doing mass javascript injection. The snippet ended up being some sort of alert about upcoming maintenance, but using a malicious technique for a benign purpose is the path to the dark side. Use HTTPS! (I use…
Here's the code they use: https://gist.github.com/ryankearney/4146814
And here's my (extremely short) writeup on it: http://blog.ryankearney.com/2013/01/comcast-caught-intercept...