evatt.com

Teenage hackers are responsible for the Comcast DNS issues I fought last week. Dark Reading claims Comcast was under attack for about 5 hours. I believe it was longer. I can feel a little less angst towards Comcast now that I know they where not directly responsible for the DNS issues.

Comcast's DNS servers for home broadband users are now pointing traffic back to Comcast. Adine's father called me for help because his internet was down. His AOL account would not login, but gave no reason as to why.

I started firefox to determine if the problem was local to his machine or if he could hit his router. With Firefox, every page I attempted to visit returned a 403 permission denied error?!?

What???

After checking his firewall, I tried MSIE. With MSIE, all URL's served some Comcast page requiring him to install software on his machine and create a Comcast email account.

What does this software do? How many instabilities will it add to his machine? Why didn't they warn him of the change? His internet had been working for years.

After playing with nslookup, I discovered all DNS searches returned the same Comcast IP address (sorry, I did not write down the address). A friend suggested I override his DNS configuration to use Open DNS. After this change, everything started working again.

What is Comcast up to? Why did they make their capture page MSIE only?

Luckily, their system is not as intrusive as most hotels and we where able to get around it by change DNS servers. But how long until they stop this too?

Comcast included a copy of the "Comcast Agreement for Residential Services" in my most recent bill. I don't really have the time to read the 32 pages of fine print. However, I was lucky enough as I was thumbing through it to see point 13 about Arbitration.

Because of all the horror stories I have read on the Comsumerist about people being screwed over by arbitration, I started to read how just how few rights I have. Their definition of Arbitration means "you will have a fair hearing before a neutral arbitrator instead of in a court by a judge or jury." I was wondering if this meant that if the arbitration was not fair that it would not be binding. As if.

Anyways.. I get down to clause C. Right to Opt Out. "IF YOU DO NOT WISH TO BE BOUND BY THIS ARBITRATION PROVISION, YOU MUST NOTIFY COMCAST IN WRITING WITHIN THIRTY (30) DAYS OF THE DATE THAT YOU FIRST RECEIVE THIS AGREEMENT BY VISITING WWW.COMCAST.COM/ARBITRATIONOPTOUT, OR BY MAIL..."

The online form was easy and quick. I wonder how many people will see this clause and opt out.