

The Five Levels of ISP Evil - jeffreymcmanus
http://corp.sonic.net/ceo/2011/08/11/the-five-levels-of-isp-evil/

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TimH
Just to help connect the dots on this - Sonic is the ISP that received a court
order for Jacob Appelbaum's email. <https://uloadr.com/u/rA44.png>

The author of the "Five Levels" article is the CEO of Sonic.

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dmk23
Failure to live up to promised quality of service is one obvious "evil" to be
added to the article.

ISP does not even have to be "deliberately" evil to underinvest in their
network and oversell their capacity. Measure your latencies and actual
bandwidth throughput and often you might smell a rat. This is not even
necessarily by malicious intent, the infrastructure of ISPs could be
sufficiently complex that some subtle mis-configuration somewhere in the
upstream router could kill your performance for certain operations.

ISPs act as Internet gatekeepers and have enormous power over its
clients/users. With this great power should come great responsibility.

~~~
ars
No it is not an obvious evil, it is an off topic evil.

This is a list of privacy issues, not incompetence.

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casca
What if I offered you an ISP that did these things (NX redirecting,
clickstream tracking, ad swapping, affiliate redirection) but made it explicit
with a 20% reduction in your monthly bill? 30%? 50%?

Most people don't care about these things - it's evil because it is done by
stealth.

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phil
I'd switch to sonic.net in a heartbeat if they were available in Seattle.

Does anyone know if they are thinking of expanding their range?

~~~
techsupporter
It baffles me that Seattle and the PNW in general are such hubs for
technologically-oriented people, yet really good Internet access isn't
available. There's pockets of it (CondoInternet.net, for example) but nothing
widespread. I had five choices for Internet service (and five for television,
though these didn't fully overlap) in my previous state, but only two for
anything above 768kbps now. Is the market up here really happy with Comcast,
CenturyLink, and Frontier doesn't-really-want-to-sell-FiOS?

~~~
nknight
Silicon Valley is much the same way. I finally gave up waiting a couple years
ago and now pay Comcast a bunch of money for an overpriced but functional
50/10 business connection to my house. It's pretty pathetic.

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bartwe
So I'm lucky to have an ISP that has a zero evil score ? Or is that something
i can expect normally.

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Robin_Message
Actually, putting an affiliate link into a sensible "I'm feeling lucky"-style
address bar doesn't sound that bad to me. They did provide a useful service
after all. Better than the spammy, crap search engine pages ISPs usually
provide.

As for the correct thing being to return NXDOMAIN, browsers could have started
providing helpful error pages for NXDOMAIN, perhaps with searches, years ago.
They didn't, so ISPs provided a useful service, which happens to conflict with
a 13 year old RFC.

Certainly though, the big evil is handing over customer data without fighting
or even so much as a warrant.

~~~
buff-a
The problem is that, in order for this to work, your computer doesn't get an
NXDOMAIN, it gets a "valid" domain with IP address. It does this for _any_ DNS
query, not just web browser queries. As for "happening to conflict with a 13
year old RFC", imagine if ISPs decided to interpret RFC 793 any way they
liked. "We're not intercepting traffic your honor. We're just interpreting RFC
793 in our own way."

~~~
Robin_Message
For most internet users, web browser queries are the only hand-crafted DNS
queries they make (except I suppose for their ISP mail servers but they are a
set-up once thing), so there is relatively little wrong with breaking all
their DNS queries to missing domains.

You're right about the RFCs and I think I made my point badly: I'm not saying
ISPs should interpret them any way they like, I'm saying that they deal with a
commercial reality and real end-users who just want things to work, and that
sometimes the best is the enemy of the good.

In reality, a technically incorrect DNS server can easily work better (help
them get their stuff done) for a naive user than a conforming one. Believing
anything else is just geek self-delusion.

The right way to solve this is to improve browsers so that NXDOMAIN causes
them to show a search page—which is exactly what they have started doing, so
hopefully ISPs will stop doing this in future.

~~~
buff-a
"commercial reality" appears to be "if we can make money from this then lets
do it, and RFCs be damned". If we accept that ISPs can interpret RFCs any way
they chose, then I propose a new interpretation of RFC 793 (TCP).

Specifically, whereas formerly the TCP protocol was a request for a connection
between two computers, I am now going to interpret the four byte destination
address as follows:

"Customer provides this information to us for use as we see fit. We may, if we
so choose, route the packets to this address, or we may choose to route it
somewhere else, including our own servers, or to a Value Added provider of our
choice."

After all, consumers don't know about TCP do they? So its quite alright to
define TCP as whatever the fuck we want, and therefore do, entirely legally,
whatever we want with that "communication". Right? There's _relatively little
wrong with that_ right? I'm sure Google does a better job of search than your
little start-up, so its _in the customers best interest_.

Same for all telephony traffic too. If we want to route it via the local
gestapo we don't need a wiretap warrant for that: we just interpret RFC 3261
(Session Initiation Protocol) our own way. After all, who says these bytes
arriving at our router have any meaning at all?

