incrediBILL - 1:10 am on Aug 6, 2009 (gmt 0)

[edit]NOTE: Comcast is not just targeting Firefox. There was a technical issue that caused me to initially jump to that conclusion which is discussed fully later in this thread.[/edit]

Comcast is currently targeting Firefox users in the SF Bay Area with DNS Hijacking [arstechnica.com], or "Domain Helper" as they call it, and showing pages of advertisments when inactive domains are accessed.

The new product, which has been tested in trial markets since July 9, redirects nonexistent URLs like www.example.com/clinteckergoatbonedbyhisnewbicycle to a search page slathered in advertising instead of returning the proper DNS error to the browser. Readers began reporting the change to us yesterday.

Just happened to me today for the first time so I thought I'd report it since it has gone live. This whole mess scared me at first because I just upgraded to the latest FF 3.5, perfect timing with a new FF release, and thought maybe it was a new "feature" and I couldn't find any way to disable it. Tested on a couple of machines with both FF 3.0 and FF 3.5, same results, no change for MSIE 7.

So I go check example.com [search2.comcast.com] to see what happens and we got ads, which is amusing because example.com technically responds with the following:

You have reached this web page by typing "example.com", "example.net", or "example.org" into your web browser. These domain names are reserved for use in documentation and are not available for registration. See RFC 2606, Section 3.

If you simply change your user agent to be MSIE 7 the "Domain Helper" behavior stops.

Just to see how much hijacking is going on, I tried CURL from my desktop command line to access a non-existent domain and got the proper error:

curl: (6) Could not resolve host: example333.com; No data record of requested type

So Comcast is definitely targeting just the smaller, yet substantial subset, of Firefox users for this test.

This will most likely interfere with any Firefox plug-ins that link check your bookmarks or anything of this nature.

Gee thanks Comcast.

[edited by: incrediBILL at 4:57 pm (utc) on Aug. 6, 2009]