I was a happy Earthlink customer. I haven’t had troubles with their service for six months almost (since I signed up). To make the story short, today after I mistyped an address in my browser I was redirected to a page from earthlink-help.net, a page that besides the common message “The web site address you entered could not be found” contained also the text “Please try the related content suggestions and paid advertisements below, or try another search.” followed by a list of ads.
I am quite a privacy freak, so I have a bunch of anti-adware, anti-spyware, anti-trojan and firewall software on my pc. But I double checked. As I thought, no “guest” was present in my environment. I did some research on the net and I found out that it’s a new “feature” that earthlink provided via dns handling without asking the customers (http://blogs.earthlink.net/2006/09/u…handling_1.php).
I called earthlink and for half an hour some guy insisted on explaining to me what a browser is and the benefits of microsoft antispyware, although I tried to tell him that I know that it’s an earthlink problem and I’m not really a start level user. I bared with him while smoking a few cigarettes and finally I got transfered to a technician who said that the best way to solve this is to provide feedback and that they don’t see this as an invasion of privacy, but only as a help provided to the customers. Yeah right…I ended up using a public dns in my router.
Earthlink, you’re a disappointment.You’re going the same way AOL did. This is OS hijacking and you have no right to do that. As much as you want to hide behind the RFC, you are only allowed to provide the users “RRs that the name server thinks will prove useful to the requester” and by no means spam. And yes, any change of the system configuration without the consent of the user is considered malware. The same way as bannerfarm.ace.advertising.com(the site showing up in the browser status bar in the screenshot) is a well known adware site.
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Sunday, September 17th, 2006 at
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One Response to “ Earthlink provides unsolicited ads”
I am having the same problem only with people pc, I thought that this was some kind of OS hijacking……