Monday, August 07, 2006

Ya.com says "The internet is mine"

Ya.com, a Spanish ISP, has just thought the internet is of its property, as for now, each page you visit that does not exist, like http://www.thispagereallydoesnotexist.com/ will get you redirected to their search page if you are using their service, obviouly abusing from DNS power. They may argue this is to help the user as "maybe" in the search page they'll find what they really were looking for, but as i have experienced in real life it's nothing bug disturbing, as i typed http://newbugs.kde.org/ (URL where i thought Dirk was doing his experiments for the new bugzilla) and ended in a ya.com page thinking "since when do we have hosting on ya.com pages?".

I've already sent them a mail asking for the removal of this service, if you are a ya.com user please do so too and let's see if we can get the internet to work again.

If you want to test the pain i feel use 62.151.8.100 as your DNS server.

10 comments:

Anonymous said...

Does changing your DNS solve this problem ?

Albert Astals Cid said...

It does, but having the ISP server as DNS is quite nice as it's the quickest roundtrip one can find.

Anonymous said...

Run your own caching DNS :)

Anonymous said...

is OpenDNS a viable solution in Europe?

Anonymous said...

I have experienced this as well. Bluelight (NetZero) is the ISP at home and at some point they did the same thing. It is extremely frustrating because I frequently run bad link checks on sites and bad links show up as good if it is because the domain no longer exists.

Anonymous said...

Verisign did that a while ago, but to a scale much greater: it affected the whole Internet.

As well intentioned as the ISP may have been, it creates an enormous disruption because suddenly every domain tried over DNS exists.

There are many existing tests on the Internet that rely on DNS failures to operate correctly, so this "DNS poisoning" by the ISP is a really bad thing.

Try explaining them the situation with technical terms and maybe they'll see how their service is really misguided.

Anonymous said...

By the way, I think it's terrible for ISPs to do this to users without letting them choose it for themselves. I don't see why these services don't let users choose the features they want, if they truly believe it helps the users.

Most of these adware companies like paxfire and barefruit don't give two shits about the user.

-david ulevitch (of OpenDNS)

ps, I'm well aware people have similar concerns about OpenDNS, it's baloney.

Anonymous said...

The really BIG problem is that it occurs also with _some_ existing domains (mine, for example) and also one from kde (I think bugs.kde.org, but I'm not sure).

Changing DNS is a solution for individuals, but not in a general manner.

You can read a full history of this success on my blog (in Spanish, sorry) at http://tenak.net/blog/go/106/

Anonymous said...

The company at Ya.com are Golog a very poor error redirection service which was in trouble for false clicking. OpenDNS commercialise their NXD clicks through an PPC engine and give very poor relevance. Google and MSN have been making millions out of address bar search for years without the ISP getting any benefit. At least both Barefruit and Paxfire give quality results.

Unknown said...

Hey..its very easy.
Ya.com rent the line from telefonica.

So just put in telefonica's DNS.
80.58.0.33
80.58.32.97

Works perfectly.