Is there a way we can choke companies like Apira by making a concerted distributed effort to disrupt the referral programs they exploit (either by reporting them or by feeding them false referrals somehow)?
I fought my ISP's bad behavior and won
41–50 of 115 posts
Re: I fought my ISP's bad behavior and won
#42Interestingly, you might have benefitted more from keeping quiet about this. While the original retailers are losing money through this, you aren't really affected negatively by them doing it. In fact, with this additional revenue source, they might be able to support thinner margins on their broadband charges, saving you some money. You did the morally correct thing, but perhaps at a potential personal cost.
The affiliates are getting hurt hugely though. Affiliate profits are supposed to be for helping the purchase - through marketing efficiency. The ISP is doing none of that, they are simply mafiosoing affiliate dollars through hijack. Amazon would not like this, the ISP gives exactly 0% efficiency boost to the e-commerce process, they're just a gypsie snake.
Re: I fought my ISP's bad behavior and won
#43If your ISP and/or Aspira were making any significant amount of affiliate commissions, I would be surprised if the merchants do not take action against them for fraud. This sounds like the same behaviour that Shawn Hogan got in trouble for with cookie stuffing http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shawn_Hogan
The ISPs that I've heard of using this claim to be getting low to mid thousands per month in revenue from it. I'm not sure if that counts as a significant amount of commission, but...
Re: I fought my ISP's bad behavior and won
#44Earlier quoted context omitted.
Thanks! I was in a state of hopelessness for a week or so till I had that idea.
I was very impressed with your firm but polite tone! We'll done.
Totally agree lol. Reading his final email felt like I was watching Erin Brockovich's ending again... f yeah! haha
Re: I fought my ISP's bad behavior and won
#45Super 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.
Super shady stuff. I never rely on any ISP provided DNS servers
Re: I fought my ISP's bad behavior and won
#46Super 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.
Super shady stuff. I never rely on any ISP provided DNS servers Doesn't that mean that you don't benefit from nearby CDNs? Perhaps worth the tradeoff anyway.
8.8.8.8 and 8.8.4.4 are anycast.
Re: I fought my ISP's bad behavior and won
#47This also shows a weakness in DNS. There is currently no way to validate the DNS record you’re being served is what the person hosting the website intended. That's what DNSSEC is for, but it hasn't become pervasive enough yet to be able to depend on it.
Sadly DNSSEC kinda sucks. Here's some earlier discussion on HN, with a lot of links. (Namedrop: tptacek is against DNSSEC and talks about it in the link.) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5937004 TLDR: DNSSEC is kinda complex and hacko, doesn't protect you as much as you might think, and introduces a whole new PKI that you should probably trust even less than the current ones. But read the links above for the rea…
DNScrypt only protects from your host to your nameserver. Your nameserver can still be poisoned as it queries other nameservers.
dnssec protects mostly from poisoning between nameservers. It does little to protect between a host and their namserver.
But in reality dnssec is not a solution, it's a problem. It will never be adopted in a meaningful way without major overhaul in spec.
Re: I fought my ISP's bad behavior and won
#48Is there a way we can choke companies like Apira by making a concerted distributed effort to disrupt the referral programs they exploit (either by reporting them or by feeding them false referrals somehow)?
Agree with this sentiment, but I think the effort would be better spent taking steps to switch to trusted DNS providers, as well as building layperson tools to monitor them.
Re: I fought my ISP's bad behavior and won
#49As a ISP when we were considering using Aspira they claimed that no referral tokens would be replaced and that the only behavior was injecting a popup coupon window. I decided not to proceed with it because it seemed like a support nightmare and tampering with non-malicious subscriber traffic crosses a line. Their marketing affiliates (such as Cash4Trafik) are always reaching out to CEO types at small ISPs and the mo…
> Cash4Trafik
It may be the cynic in me after seeing abuses for companies like Cash4Gold, but "Cash4" anything does not instill any amount of trust in a brand, at least to me.
Re: I fought my ISP's bad behavior and won
#50One a slightly related note, in Chrome extensions, it's possible to redirect DNS requests on a per-URL basis. This is how Media Hint works to allow non-US Netflix users access the US version of the site. I'm surprised we haven't seen similar behaviour from Chrome extensions. I'm sure it would be caught eventually, but this isn't exactly something that people tend to look for, so it would take a while for people to ca…
> I'm surprised we haven't seen similar behaviour from Chrome extensions The "Window Resizer" Chrome extension got a silent update a few weeks ago. It rewrote all the links on Google search result pages to point to a proxy that added affiliate links where possible.
I had an extension that did that as well. I reported it to Amazon and left a 1 star review warning other users.