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More Armstrong News

Man, it's Armstrong Cable week here. Here's some additional info on some stuff they're doing. Yes, they blacked out the Steeler game, by the way.

Anyways, if you are an Armstrong broadband customer, and you type in a web site that doesn't work, like 29gbjedbg8sweg.com, for example, usually you get a message from your browser that the site doesn't exist.

Armstrong recently began re-routing your invalid requests to a third party that places advertising on those pages, with Armstrong most likely getting a cut. This was pointed out by a commenter in Wednesday's Armstrong post. It's a little technical but here goes:

Don't forget to mention how Armstrong is starting to roll out a typo catching service that forwards dns requests to a 3rd party. Goodbye customer privacy, hello corporate profits!

$ dig @24.154.1.9 armstrong.sucks.balls

;; ANSWER SECTION:
armstrong.sucks.balls. 60 IN A 8.15.7.124
armstrong.sucks.balls. 60 IN A 65.200.200.54

This has also been confirmed to me by another Armstrong subscriber in the Pittsburgh area.

So what do you do if you don't want your ISP tracking what you do? Use a different DNS service. That way queries aren't sent through your ISP's DNS servers, who can't mine your queries and monetize them.

I use and recommend OpenDNS. It's rock-solid, has nice features like phishing filters and spoofing blockers, gives you stats if you want, and I've noticed it updates records much faster then my ISP's servers. This is helpful when setting up new websites or making changes to domains.

OpenDNS has great tutorials on how to change your DNS. I did it at my router so all the machines behind it see the DNS and I don't have to change it on every machine, game console and toaster.

Posted by Mike at December 21, 2007 7:10 AM | Add to del.icio.us