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Comment by JumpCrisscross | Hacker News Reader

What is so insidious about ISPs serving ads on un-occupied domains? I can't see who it hurts and seems like a rather clever way to monetize dead space.

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If I have a script that is listening for a response to ping or trying to confirm an HTTP request or something, I damn well want to know when the host is unreachable.

I don't want to successfully reach your bullshit ad host. I don't want to get successfully served an ad instead of timing out. I just want to fail.

Any other behavior is wrong.

I assume you ask this honestly.

The problem isn't something like "Oh, hey, well, there's some empty space so let's setup a lemonade stand until someone buys up the property." The address is supposed to be valid, or fail fast. It is of much greater utility to everyone (except the ad farmers) to fail fast.

>It is of much greater utility to everyone (except the ad farmers) to fail fast. //

No it isn't yours in an extreme minority edge case compared to most internet users. Users don't want a blank page with just a weird code on it.

They want links to click to get to the page that they meant to type in, or failing that a similar page link supplied by their ISP ...

You might be surprised to learn that the Internet Protocol and the DNS are used for many other things besides serving web pages to browsers.

They want to see a useful message from their browser, like:

This page does not exist. Did you mean '...'?

Which most modern browsers give them provided their ISP does not hijack the NX response to present their ads.

Except that's what the ISP, or DNS provider, is providing - a page indicating the domain isnt there and giving other options.

If users want that, it can and should be solved in the client instead. One of the really nasty things about ISPs doing this is that it actively prevents clients from doing it, since they can no longer easily identify a nonexistent domain.

You're silly, that's silly--stop being silly.

This "average user"? Frankly, we've had the 'net for like fifteen years--now's a good a time for users to learn as any.

Unless, of course, you prefer to spoonfeed the next generation of consumer whores?

We're talking about a barely vsible change for most users in which instead of having to retype a domain or repeat a search when the domain name is a typo (or the domain has closed) a list akin to a SERP is provided.

User make mistakes, domains are abandoned - for those cases this provides a simple service which reduces user effort.

Do I want to spoonfeed a generation of consumer whores? Would love to. But I suspect they like errant toddlers would spit out my message of anti-consumerism, sustainability, social action, fair trade ...

Article author here. These ISPs are violating long-venerated network protocol. As for who it hurts, it's a highly annoying experience for folks who are used to having the browser -- not their ISP -- handle errors for non-existent domains. In addition, there are a number of other ways in which this breaks the Internet; feel free to refer to the bullet points under "Examples of functionality that breaks when an ISP hijacks DNS": http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DNS_hijacking

Suppose you want to ssh into a host and you mistype the hostname. What do you want the result to be? Do you want your resolver to return NXDOMAIN immediately so that you can quickly identify your mistake, or do you want it to return a bogus IP address that drops incoming SYN requests to the sshd port, causing you to think the remote host is down?

Interactively viewing a web page is far from the only thing that DNS lookups are for. Breaking the standard (by returning an address when NXDOMAIN is really the correct response) may break other protocols.

Wanting to access a website is not the only reason to resolve a domain.

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