Hacker News Reader

Comment by WorldMaker | Hacker News Reader

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 management there that feels ashamed at their hostile practices. It's just "good business" to squeeze free ad dollars from your users as you take advantage of your monopoly position to keep prices as high as the market will bear while doing so.

[0] Even if I didn't prefer Bing, hijacking any of the major search engines just because it might be an "accidental default" and "no one would notice" is just wrong on so many levels.

[1] Scare quotes because it was 90% terrible ads and 10% barely legible search results from who knows what API.

View on HN

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".

I have the feeling they wouldn't get much past the overly scripted front line service, unfortunately.

I keep telling myself that one day when some company run this way does me wrong enough, I'm going to go score a pile of Adderall, some cell phones and a pack of Depends and patiently battle/harass my way through the entire scripted management hierarchy until the CEO himself gets on the phone, personally apologizes for the mishap and invites me to his birthday party.

Excessive amphetamine-group intake would cause permanent brain damage.

I tried calling Earthlink about this once, back toward the beginning of the DNS hijacking craze. He didn't seem too familiar with it, and eventually matched it up in his script to something about redirecting web pages on typos. I tried to explain that I don't want to talk about the web, I want to talk about problems with their broken DNS servers, but it didn't really work.

Annoying and pointless conversation. I just cancelled.

Beyond a certain size of ISP (several tens of thousands of customers or more), there is literally no point in wasting your time or the phone representative's time. They'll have no clue what you're talking about and little or no power to escalate you to the people responsible for their internal network engineering decisions.

The right way, probably, is to educate folks, and nitpick w/ the sales guys. And call them out on the service's non-features, and/or if they lie. Once you're a customer, the support folks don't care, but the Sales folks are thirsty to close the sale.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com