[dns-operations] "RoadRunner Intercepting Domain Typos" (slashdot)

[Roy Arends]

On Feb 26, 2008, at 8:13 PM, Paul Vixie wrote:

> RoadRunner Intercepting Domain Typos
>
> "Sometime around midnight on February 26th (at least for the SoCal  
> users),
> TimeWarner's RoadRunner service started intercepting failed DNS  
> requests,
> redirecting them to RoadRunner's own search and advertising  
> platform. To see
> if this has been enabled in your area, try visiting {some random  
> string}.com
> in your Web browser. This feature subverts user preferences set within
> browsers, which allow the user to select which search engine  
> receives their
> typos and invalid domains. RoadRunner users can disable this  
> functionb  or
> they can just use OpenDNS. Here is an example RoadRunner results page.

OpenDNS intercepts failed DNS requests as well, redirecting them to  
OpenDNS own search and advertising platform.  The difference could be  
that OpenDNS users can opt-out of this service, and RoadRunner  
customers might not.

Roy