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Comment by sbarre | Hacker News Reader

This is nothing new..

Rogers has been doing this for years in Canada already..

They use it to notify subscribers when they are approaching their bandwidth quota (75%) and then again when they hit 100%. You actually have to click a "I understand" button to have it not show up over and over.

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Rogers also used to serve ads in place of an error message when a bad URL was requested. That was the final straw causing me to cancel my service with them and switch to Teksavvy.

For me it was their really low bandwidth caps. Acanac ftw!

That was reason #2. Going from a 60gb cap (which I'd often go over by about 20gb) to a 300gb cap actually saved me a lot of money because of overage charges.

So did Comcast IIRC

I believe Comcast hijacked NXDOMAIN DNS replies and replaced them with their own IP address, causing every non-existant domain name to go to their search page you had to opt-out of.

That's rediculous. Airtel in India also used to do this. Annoying as hell. Miss-type the domain and type all of it again.

Afaik, Airtel still does it and people still put up with it. I think they do the usage % notification hijacking as well without understanding even a bit that that internet is a pipe and people use applications other than web browsers and protocols other than http.

Yea I was not sure. I left them after their data cap for "high speed" "unlimited" internet cap was 3 gb per month. I can put up with js injection but ridiculous data caps are something I can't live with.

Shaw Cable (Canadian ISP) does this. I had never thought to look for an opt-out until reading this. Thanks.

T-Mobile is currently doing this and does not allow for opt-out.

I'm pretty sure you can forcefully opt out by using a DNS server that isn't run by scumbags, like 8.8.8.8 and 8.8.4.4 for Google Public DNS. I hear OpenDNS is similarly good.

OpenDNS does the same thing these people are complaining about -- they wrap the missing domain in something like a search page that has their logo and custom ads on it.

Next up, hijacking DNS queries to external servers.

Originally I wrote a GreaseMonkey script to redirect me from their ad page to a Google search. At the time, it was better than nothing, but still not enough to keep me from dropping Rogers. YMMV, Last updated 2008: http://userscripts.org/scripts/show/30326

How do they do it? Inject into every page or just once you've exceeded the limits? (curious as i use rogers)

If you go into your MyRogers account, they actually give you a log of when you've accepted these notices.

Well it's checking for Netscape 6 so who knows when this was originally written...

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