Poisoning DNS perhaps a bad idea

This is insane. I’m sitting at a café in Sydney using their hotspot. Went to search for something, and I kept getting strange looking “site not found” pages. Huh? Thy were working a few hours ago. So I started digging.

The café’s upstream ISP is “Optus”, one of the major Australian carriers. To my astonishment I found that Optus’s DNS servers are interfering with Google searches, stealing their DNS lookups and serving results pages on their own (shitty quality) branded search instead! Try https:? No connection; and Google+ wouldn’t load either.

Obviously as soon as realized what’s going on I immediately changed DNS servers to something reliable. Before I did I found a tiny “about this page” link at the bottom of the heinous Optus search results page, where I was told how great this was for me, but how I could opt out of their “default” search engine if I wanted to but was warned this was an “advanced setting”.

Seriously, what do Optus think they’re doing? From a commercial standpoint, do they really think that their captive audience matters to anyone advertising on the web? Of course not, but in the mean time they’re certainly going to alienate customers who just maybe actually do want to use (in this case) Google sites.

There’s a bigger issue, though. Unaltered answers to DNS queries is a backbone of net neutrality. That’s our problem, but once carriers start poisoning nameservers in their own favour it will be but a blink before everyone is doing it to each other and lookups will become worthless. While I’m sure the morons in Marketing who thought that sabotaging DNS queries would be a good idea won’t be worried about the wreckage that will cause for everyone else, such a war wouldn’t be good for any of the companies involved, either. And meanwhile, if they really want everyone to learn how to install an app to “fix” the internet…

Of course, this is only a taste of what we’ll be in for when the communications minister finally gets his compulsory Great Firewall of Australia censorship in place, but one thing at a time. If you’re looking for internet access down here, clearly Optus or anything that uses their network should be blacklisted.
Retrieved from:http://blogs.operationaldynamics.com/andrew/engineering/internet/poisoning-dns-perhaps-a-bad-idea