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Tiscali: breaking DNS for fun and profit

Ghosts of typo hijacking past

Tiscali is hijacking mistyped URLs to serve to its customers sponsored links.

The ISP started rerouting DNS errors to a page plastered with advertising yesterday. An irate customer has started a thread on the firm's forums criticising Tiscali allowing a third party to pump ads for ringtones and dating sites.

A screen grab of a hijacked DNS error page from Tiscali

Tiscali: helping you on your journey

A company rep, "Mr Tibbs" (who we last met during Tiscali's marathon email debacle earlier this year), replied that the ads (pictured) were "aimed at helping the customer on his/her journey rather than getting an error page."

The customer writes: "I urge you to withdraw the service. Meanwhile, enjoy the bad publicity, and enjoy running a business based on a pathetic, seedy business model that was proven not to work back in the 1990s."

In response, Mr Tibbs, says the "service" will be opt-out, but does not provide details.

Tiscali is not the first to attempt to squeeze more cash out of internet users this way. Verisign invoked the ire of the top level domain regulator ICANN when it attempted something similar in 2003. Verisign quickly bowed to ICANN's pressure and abandoned the system.

Despite this, Orange tentatively began gauging 2007 surfers' reaction to hijacking in April.

Hijacking error pages in this way causes a host of problems for users, and is in contravention of Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) standards. The Internet Architecture Board has a commentary here here, and Tiscali's angry customer lists a few of the practicalities in a second post to the thread.

We are waiting for more comment from Tiscali.

Expert web users will be able to circumvent Tiscali's error hijacking by using a third party DNS list, such as OpenDNS. It's relatively simple to do and has no effect on your broadband contract, so plenty of Tiscali's 1.4 million subscribers should be able to vote with their feet.®

Bootnote

OpenDNS got a write-up in the New York Times this week. It works similarly to Verisign's 2003 hijack operation, and it serves adverts.

However, unlike Verisign's wheeze, which had free rein over the .com and .net top level domains controlled by the firm, OpenDNS is voluntary, and has a much bigger web address cache than ISPs. So is more likely to find what you were looking for than serve you a ringtone ad.

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