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?