OpenDNS does redirection of unresolved domains itself. I don't see that as any better or worse than your ISP doing it.

(Google - of course - does the technically correct thing)

This is also the revenue model of OpenDNS (although I agree that they are less aggressive than some ISPs).

Ah, my bad. I actually use Google DNS because they don't hijack anything, which was my prime reason. I'd assumed Open DNS was similar.

That being said, I can still get behind at least choosing to let someone hijack those pages, rather than sticking with a company that does it automatically.

At least you have the option of throwing a few bucks at OpenDNS and they'll stop filtering, or even add custom redirects/shortcuts for you.

You don't have to pay them to stop filtering - just make an account and disable the setting (my information is a few month old, I've since changed to Google DNS - it is faster for me).

Good to know, thanks.

So you have to pay to get what installing unbound (Win, OSX, Linux) on your machine will give you for free?

Not sure what you mean by unbound, but your Windows box does not have a DNS server installed by default. Most people depend on the DNS server that their ISP runs. If the ISP is doing unwanted redirects or filtering, or is just unreliable, you can point your DNS to OpenDNS which is fast and reliable. You can either use it for free and it will show you ads when you typo, or you can pay them some money for their service. (edit: expanded)

Unbound is a recursive & caching DNS server. You can use it to query DNS "directly", avoiding your ISP's DNS server.

At some point in time I'd have said this would increase your DNS latency, but given the poor level of service that many ISP servers provide, I don't think that's true anymore. Though I have no data to back this up, I suspect many home users visit a fairly small set of websites and so DNS caching would work very well.

Oh I see now. OK so yes, you can either admin your own DNS server, or get an ad-supported version, or pay someone a small amount of money to do it for you. I think that about covers the options :)

You get more than just "no ads". It also provides domain filtering, which is a nice feature with kids and a million internet connected devices.

In dealing with clients, I have found that DNS routinely sucks from nearly all ISPs. It seems the most important thing they put the least amount of resources into.

What country do you live in?

I have never seen an Israeli ISP do that. (Although, there were reports a few years ago that Bezeq intercepted .torrent files to add their own trackers to the file.)

I live in the US and have had Comcast do this to me before. I routinely use GoogleDNS because of that.

Also because Comcast DNS sucks horribly and times out with upsetting regularity.

That is my experience with comcast dns too. Although, I have had some issues with google dns too on a rare occasion where I had to change back to something else (comcast or opendns) for a short while until google dns worked again. They never hijacked anything, but it just stopped working for a brief period.

Note that you can opt out of Comcast's DNS hijacking, although the fact that it's on by default is still pretty bad.

There is, as far as I know, no switch to make their DNS more reliable, though.

I have Cablevision and they technically allow you to opt out. But even after opting out, I still get that damned useless ad-infested search page sometimes, seemingly at random. I'm not sure if it's because of their incompetence of malicious intent.

Comcast has disabled all DNS hijacking, and has since they implemented their DNSSEC validating servers.

Yeah, I think you are right. The "Domain Helper" options no longer appear in my accounts page:

http://dns-opt-out.comcast.net/help-index.php

If you're using Comcast Business, I've yet to find a way to do this. Comcast Support (email, phone, live chat) also have no idea. If anyone knows how to do it, please let me know.

That's crazy. You'd think the business version would have more customization available, not less.

I take it you've logged into your comcast.net account and the box to disable it isn't there for you?

Rogers and Bell in Canada both give you their own pages when you type a URL that doesn't exist.

AFAIK all of the major ISPs in the U.S. do this.

Verizon allows you to opt out of this, which incidentally I have done. These instructions are for FiOS, but I am proof that they work for DSL as well. (I still gripe that they don't tell people about this...)

http://domnit.org/verizon/

Those ISPs will soon jack all your DNS traffic.

A lot of them already hijack port 80 and inject random junk in there which is why HTTPs is the way forward.

> "A lot of them already hijack port 80 and inject random junk in there..."

That's a pretty bold claim. Other than free wifi at hotels, I've never seen an ISP use transparent proxying to intercept pages and serve ads.

Do you have any examples?

My provider at home, Rogers Cable (Toronto), will inject things in the pages you see when you're approaching your bandwidth cap. It's extremely irritating and somewhat worrying.

Basically they mangle the HTML and slap in their own banner which means they must be doing some kind of stream inspection and processing to manage this. I do not have a proxy configured, and requests don't indicate that this is being done.

I would be VERY interested to see a packet capture of the same page when you're under and near your cap.