[LINK] unlawful interception of internet traffic?

[Craig Sanders]

On Fri, Dec 08, 2006 at 12:14:45PM +1100, Marghanita da Cruz wrote:
> Craig Sanders wrote:
> >OTOH, some customers are slack and don't bother to inform their (ex-)
> >ISP that they have got a new service provider.  ISPs aren't mind
> >readers, they can't magically know that their customer no longer needs
> >the DNS hosting service.  THIS scenario of customer slackness is far
> >more common than the ISP incompetence or ISP malice scenarios. this
> >could be seen as a good thing or a sad thing, depending on how you look
> >at it :)
> 
> Customer Slackness wasn't the case, my new ISP diagnosed the old one as 
> recalcitrant..but I thought we had worked through the DNS stuff only to 
> be surprised a year later (quite by accident) that there were still 
> problems.

yep, it happens sometimes.  too often.

in my experience, though, customer slackness is many times more common.

or ignorance. many (most?) customers have no idea how DNS works (or
even that such a thing as DNS exists), they just want "an internet. you
know, a site thingy". so they don't even know what they should do when
changing DNS provider. 

their new ISP should explain it to them, though. not that that's
guaranteed to work. ISP customers have a distressing tendency to suffer
from My-Eyes-Glazeth-Over (MEGO) syndrome on any attempt to explain
anything remotely technical to them.



> I should say, that the ownership of my original ISP had changed
> several times. It was only that I knew of the connection between the
> name of my friends ISP and my original ISP that I could diagnose the
> problem.
>
> Maybe in your case the DNS servers did once belong to the a different
> ISP.

nope.  that is not the case.

the ISP domain being hijacked has never been hosted by anyone else, and
certainly not by the ISP doing the hijacking.

even if it was, that still doesn't explain why they're responding to
all A and MX queries with localhost/127.0.0.1. there is no way a bogus
answer like that could possibly be a leftover from some hypothetical
time when they hosted the DNS for the domain (which, i repeat, they
didn't).  that answer could only be a deliberate, malicious act.


> But go for technical resolution over a law suit every time. 

i have no intention of initiating a law suit. i want a technical
solution to this. that is part of the reason why i have not named the
ISP concerned.

however, it is useful to be able to point out to them that what they are
doing is illegal, and to quote whichever law says it is. that was the
reason for my question to LINK.


craig

-- 
craig sanders <cas at taz.net.au>           (part time cyborg)