While looking at some data statistics for one of our racks, I noticed that the DNS service has become incredibly busy as of late. Now about 4 years ago when these particular name servers were set up, they were left with their default option to respond to DNS queries to anyone for anyone. It’s not really terrible but hardly ideal so I began changing some settings. I do notice though that we seem to now be providing name server access to the large majority of the world. Only recently did I read an article on DNS Hijacking that certain ISPs use to deliver pay per click ads to their subscribers when they do anything from first start their browser to each time they hit a DNS error.
Now personally I think it’s a pretty cheap thing to do, and it’s also quite frustrating to those users that have to suffer this ‘feature’. A number of ISPs use such methods to ‘improve’ the quality of your service and I think it’s all pretty bad. I don’t think there’s anything wrong with legitimate website ads in order to earn an author or site master some money – I’m going to put a few here sometime, however offensive advert popups or other nasty behavior are really not acceptable by anyones standards anymore.
Hijacking DNS queries, sniffing and modifying HTTP in any way, sniffing or modifying any kind of email or email failure, redirecting IPs, transparently proxying web traffic, analyzing your traffic, shaping your torrent-like or other rule matched traffic, etc, etc – you get the idea, are some of the more popular techniques out there. In worst cases an ISP would even firewall your inbound and outbound port access.
Bottom line, it’s not right. In a reasonable ‘open source’ mentality, an ISP should offer a clean, usable connection. They should not affect or modify your traffic in any way, seek to gain advertising from it or anything similar. If you mess about with end users connections, users usually end up complaining to site providers about something that isn’t their problem, and don’t get to understand what they’re doing and how or why their internet behaves differently to the next guy’s.
With that, I was confident that injecting ads for profit or otherwise messing about with my now-popular DNS service wasn’t a good thing to do, even if my subscribers shouldn’t have been subscribers 
. I restricted access to the relevant ranges, and with that I was done.
Get used to it. ISP’s are a business, they will do what they feel they need to do make a profit. If you want what they have to offer then you will just need to suck it up and deal with it. You can always go somewhere else. Capitalism at it’s finest, no different than ATM fees.
Reader Bob,
You are right on.
While I object to folks that do tricks with basic DNS services that disrupt normal operation there is a place for that sort of thing.
I’ve been using OpenDNS servers here for a while and find that the added value I’m seeing is well worth getting to see an ad from time to time.
Looks like Bob and Adam Palmer are ISP drones.
I remind you good gentlemen it is also an ISP’s job to provide reasonable and opt out options of services such as you support it is not in their domain to enslave users and force their subscribers to conform to their pocket book popups. It is a direct violation of the internet fair use and the customer’s rights. Get used to it the ISP’s can be sued out of existence or supplanted by another that offers the un managed access that people want and expect.
In your own words … “Get Used to IT!!”