Check To See If Your ISP Is Diverting Your DNS

Posted on March 17, 2008 by Michael Froomkin

Lauren Weinstein's Blog, Testing Your Internet Connection for ISP DNS Diversions

I passed, but then I've set my machines to use OpenDNS, which may take me out of the BellSouth default.

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4 Responses to Check To See If Your ISP Is Diverting Your DNS

  1. Lauren Weinstein says:
    March 17, 2008 at 11:19 am

    Actually, part of the reason that I announced this test procedure is to help people who thought that they had configured for alternate DNS servers (e.g. OpenDNS) but due to ISP port 53 diversions actually were not in communication with the servers that they had configured! Unless testing is done against a known test zone, it can be very difficult to be sure, since diverted DNS data can lie about its origin, as in the example that I noted. It’s better to test and be sure!

    –Lauren–
    Lauren Weinstein
    NNSquad Moderator

  2. Michael says:
    March 17, 2008 at 11:30 am

    BellSouth uses transparent proxies — I think they get you on the http request, not the DNS….

  3. fnord says:
    March 18, 2008 at 7:06 am

    On a somewhat related note, I hadn’t bothered looking into it, and still haven’t, but when I previously visited your site, your sidebar map via BF Maps at:
    http://mapstats.blogflux.com/
    would show me as coming from Sherwood Park, Alberta (Canada), a suburb of Edmonton, Alberta (Canada), which is at least as far away from me in southwestern British Columbia (Canada) as Miami, Florida is from Atlanta, Georgia. I have since switched from Shaw.ca to Telus.net as my IS provider so I am now shown as coming from Oyama, British Columbia (Canada), which is the right province (you could drop any five states in here and they’d get lost), but that is some town I’ve never heard of. I could use googlemaps to find it but if google is that flakey, why bother. I’ve already ranted about a google.ca web search returning different results than google.com, at least they have my IP #s down to the right country. No wonder China is so enamoured of this technology. Meanwhile if I get an adultfrendfinder.com banner ad on some site they know exactly where I am, showing me women from down the street, how they know I’m male, or if they even care, is left to the imagination. Co-incidentally I’m just finishing up an article on IANA IP address changes to Wikipedia, it should be on your icannwatch.org desk by tomorrow. Thank goodness I’m just auditing your courses and not taking them for credit. 🙂

    Good to see Lauren still kicking at the pricks though. -g

  4. David Ulevitch says:
    March 18, 2008 at 10:24 am

    I just joined the NN list. I’m actively interested in pursuing a better understanding of this. I know a lot of ISPs are hijacking their users into using a DNS they don’t want, but I’ve not heard of any that actually block the use of OpenDNS.

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