Posts by John

Re: Title

Fraser: You obviously haven't discussed peer-to-peer file sharing (the illegal, "Pirate Bay" kind, not the legit "BitTorrent.com" kind) much. :)

It's amazing how many otherwise rational people will seriously argue that illegal downloading isn't stealing.

Obligatory...

mushroooooooooooom

Re: It costs the same...

How could they step in? "Oh, well it's OK to steal our products if you're poor."

Now, granted, does their marketing department maybe need to reconsider their pricing in that region? Sure...I'm just saying it doesn't make much sense for them to come in after a crime has been committed and say "oh, we're not gonna prosecute those guys".

Re: Thier not the only ones

Sean: You've got the cart before the horse here. If a company (in this case, Microsoft) is going to change their file formats, it's _that company's_ responsibility to ensure backward compatibility.

Sure, sometimes backward compatibility isn't possible...but in the instances where it's not, it sure isn't the fault of third-party vendors (in this case, Sony Ericsson and Motorola).

Re: Are Orange using stealth proxy then?

Paul: No proxying or monitoring of traffic is necessary for this to work; they're breaking Internet protocols at a lower level than that. Like VeriSign (who started this crap), and then EarthLink after them, what they're doing is mangling your DNS service.

Here's a quick "Breaking DNS For Fun And Profit 101" to make sure everyone's up to speed on this issue (and yes, for those of you who have already passed "DNS 824", this is the super executive summary version, yes I know about root servers and recursion but come on, it's a comment post):

1) Your machine has the hostname of the machine it wants to contact, which as far as finding your destination on the Internet goes, is useless except in the sense that it will lead you to an IP address.

2) To get this IP address, your machine goes to the "authoritative DNS server" for the controlling domain that corresponds to the hostname...this DNS server gives your machine the IP address that corresponds to the hostname. If you have an invalid hostname, instead of the IP address you'll get an informative error message explaining (to the best of the DNS server's ability, anyway) what the problem is.

3) Profit! Now that we have our IP address, we can route packets. Or, we have an error, and we can debug.

Now, here's where VeriSign, EarthLink, and now Orange come in. If you have a valid hostname, nothing changes in the process. However, if not (say you typed in "thereggistter.co.uk"), then step 2 becomes this:

2) To get this IP address, your machine goes to the "authoritative DNS server" for the controlling domain that corresponds to the hostname...this DNS server gives your machine the IP address that corresponds to the hostname. If you have an invalid hostname, instead of an informative error message, you'll get a completely different IP address corresponding to a machine under Orange's control...returned as a completely valid DNS reply, so your machine has no way to differentiate the "redirection" from a legitimate reply.

To equate this to the phone system; say you're at work, and you want to get someone else's phone number. You call your receptionist and tell him whose number you want, then hang up and wait for a callback (the receptionist is your ISP, in this case Orange). Your receptionist calls the phone company information number (the authoritative DNS) and asks for the number. He passes the number along unchanged if he gets one back, but if the phone company info number says "we don't know that person", then when he calls you back to tell you the number, he gives you the phone number of the sales line of a direct marketing firm he owns...without telling you it's not actually the number you asked for.

I'm with Paul Fleetwood; OpenDNS is the way to go. I switched to them years ago and have never looked back. Orange customers can try filling out the form if they want, but it won't do any good unless the note you send says "...and that's why I'm leaving" (in which case it may have some effect, but still won't prevent the inevitable). The percentage of ISP customers who understand this issue well enough to know why it's a terrible idea is much too small to overcome the pressure from the marketing department to implement this; remember, this isn't about "delivering a better service", this is about "making money from click-through advertising". Your odds of success are zero because marketing will convince the decision-makers at the company that the revenue generated will offset any possible losses by tech-savvy users jumping ship.