Earthling

FIOS is just down the block. The fiber is going up. If you don't give me a way to opt-out of this, I will be the first one on the block switching.

While some of that is nice to hear, a lot of it reads more like marketing trying to convince people that the service is good than actual technical commentary. For example, claiming this "service" doesn't affect spam filtering software is disingenuous at best, if only because it seems doubtful that you would consider *every* possible way spam blocking software can work. This claim is especially dubious when you rolled out a "service" with so many obvious flaws in the first place. Are we supposed to believe that you went from missing painfully obvious issues to covering every base? I certainly don't.

Instead of trying to hack your way around all these tiny individual issues (which you'll most likely never be able to anticipate all of), just let us opt out of this boondoggle if desired. This makes things easier for you by removing the need to code around all kinds of corner cases, and it makes things easier for people who just want reliable DNS by giving them the option to opt out of this hopelessly fragile "service".

If you're going to take the fundamentally unsound route of trying to think up every situation where this "service" would be objectionable, you're never going to arrive at something truly usable, and you're always going to be creating weird problems for someone. Please, please let us opt out.

If this is pro-consumer, why tag on the ads? The bottomline is profit. I refuse to pay for a service that wants to ad me to death. Going to cancel Earthlink today!

blah blah marketingspeak blah.

Not only do you not believe what you're telling us, you don't even understand it.

I've written my complaint to Earthlink, with a 1 week deadline. You now have 6 days to either kill this "service" or let us opt out. After that, I'm no longer your customer.

No one wants your "service", and no one is fooled by your claims that it's pro-customer. You're a liar.

I spoke to a few of your support techs today and had to explain this whole situation to them. If you are explaining the situation to them it apparently hasn't trickled down very far.

Your DNS is still stomping on my network. I have a server on the network which, when I try to ping it by name, starts pinging one of the barefruit IP addresses. My server's uptime is near 100%. My DSL modem has to be rebooted every day or so to jog the connection. What this means is that the server's DHCP host entry gets lost every day or so when the DSL modem is power-cycled. Normally this isn't a problem, because when the DNS fails to find the address, my computer crawls the network manually to find the host on it's own. Now that EarthLink is being so helpful, this use case doesn't happen any more. I can never lookup my server by name because the DNS lookup never fails as it should!

The best part: All I have to do to see my server again is turn off the DSL modem. Way to go, guys. Working on network machines and accessing the Internet are now mutually exclusive.

Your blatant violation of the standard DNS protocol is literally breaking my network.

I've tolerated your "service" long enough. For your sake I hope the revenue from this moronic move is enough to compensate for the lost revenue from all the smart subscribers you are chasing away (the ones that cost next to nothing in technical support costs!)

So long EarthLink.

I am displeased with this. I'm also giving it one week, seven days remain for me. Unless there is an opt-out or the service is turned off, I shall churn to RoadRunner.

Dave, if an opt-out is not an option then turn-off the "service" entirely until one is. I won't even tolerate a promissory post that an opt-out will eventually come. I don't want another day of this. It's totally unacceptable.

Hey, I worked very hard on that marketingspeak. :)

It's not marketingspeak.

Yes, I've chosen my language very carefully in addressing the questions that have come up. That's not meant to shut down discussion, and in fact, if there are issues still coming up with something that we think is resolved, we'd like to know about it. Since Spamblocker is our product, it's something that's fairly straightforward for me to look in to and speak of.

If I sound more formal than usual, it's because I want to err on the side of clarity. It's the nature of this medium that when I'm vague or off on something, I know you'll let me know.

This is not a feature, guys, and you're fooling nobody. Those leeches at VeriSign tried this already, but gosh, for some reason they stopped. I wonder why. Spare yourselves this.

Well, typing "google" still leads me to the redirect on my browser. Some URLs auto-complete successfully when my browser has already cached the page, but most of the time I get sent to the so-called help page. This is breaking a universally accepted functionality, for no good reason.

Some of you may have noticed that the "did you mean?" part actually takes a correctly typed name and changes the spelling. It mis-spells what you entered correctly! In other words, it is creating an error where there was none.

I would like to believe that these are just glitches, but I'm really beginning to wonder. It certainly smells of deliberate dishonesty, not just incompetence.

You entered "You probably won't see too many comments from most of the users who are helped by it."

Did you mean "we've received one hundred percent negative feedback, and I don'think I can pretend that Earthlink is cool much longer?"

I think what you need to do is realize that adding "services" like this is not in your best interest. Earthlink has my email address - send me an ad about this new feature that I can SIGN UP for. If I don't want it, I don't have to sign up for it. Don't force me to use it and say "This is better for you and we're not really breaking anything anyway."

After re-reading your post, it sounds like what you're saying is "We heard that you have problems, but we're not going to admit we made a huge mistake, so just suck it up and deal with it."

Regarding VPN - I too have been bit by this problem, connecting to my employer's VPN. I spent nearly a week trying to figure out why various apps, such as Remote Desktop, Citrix, Lotus Notes, Corporate IM, DB development environments, as well as a host of web sites and web applications would intermittently (much more often than not) fail, and while web browsing I would hit the aforementioned error pages. After stumbling on the threads on your blog related to this, it became fairly clear - I think a poster named Pete on the other thread summed it up best:

"This is causing no end of grief when I VPN in to my work network...if Earthlink responds more quickly than my VPN connection, I get the Earthlink error page rather than the one from my VPN."

I've since switched the DNS servers used by my router and flushed the DNS cache on all connected PC's - and no longer experience any problems.

Regarding your VPN fixes in the works: I am doubtful as to how helpful they will be. To connect to most of the servers/resources I use, the client apps use fully qualified domain names within our corporate network - not using simplistic one-word requests like "printer1", but "appserver123.oneofourdomains.net" or "lnotesserver987.anotherofourdomains.net" - we have multiple domains in our corporate network, so I'm questioning the ability of the ruleset to work properly in these kinds of situations.

Although I was able to resolve the problem on my own, I am very frustrated that I had to spend the time doing so when I trusted my ISP to provide "standard" connectivity and not re-engineer one of the backbone services of internet connectivity. Wasn't testing performed ahead of time, especially with corporate VPN customers?

At this point, I am considering the option of taking my money elsewhere if Earthlink in general - e.g. tech support, corporate, etc., does not own up to the issues at hand (Dave - I do appreciate that at least you are willing to admit there have been some problems). Who knows what other surprises may be in the works???

Fortunately, setting my DNS addresses to 4.2.2.1 and 4.2.2.2 made all this nonsense go away.

I'm now unable to recommend Earthlink to any clients.

I have no idea why Eathlink can't leave one of the primary protocols to get around the Internet alone. DNS works fine just the way it has for the last X number of years.

If you want to go ahead with this "feature" there should at least be a way to opt-out and use a "classic" DNS resolver.

If this was truely a new service/feature for myself, a subscriber, why would there be ads on this page?

test

Matthew, Frank, and JD - Thanks for the specifics. I'm sorry for the frustrations and I've passing your issues along to the team this morning. We're looking at the VPN issue in a number of ways. If you don't mind, we'll get in touch directly if we can use additional information.

Joe - I understand your feelings on your first point but I want to say something about the second. I've seen the argument come up several times that if a page has ads, it must not be useful and must be only a revenue generator. If the presence of ads was the acid test for the usefulness of a page, then the vast majority of pages on the web would not meet that definition. For anyone who might be picking this up half-way through, the first and main option the page provides under the "site you were looking for could not be found" are suggested urls based on our best guess for what the user was trying to spell. They're designed to pick out typos and spelling errors and give you the most likely choices.

Dave C.:

Are there alternate DNS servers we can configure that are run by Earthlink (that return NXDOMAIN when they should)? I feel foolish having to continue to "borrow" DNS service from another company just to get valid results.

It certainly sounds like Earthlink is going to ignore the knowledgable users who will leave Earthlink or figure out how to configure alternate DNS servers.

That leaves the masses of users who don't know better. These are people who are used to having their web computers "break" in some way they can't figure out and generally just go with the flow and change their habits. So yes, you will probably get away with it and make a bit more money, but it sure doesn't make it right. All this whining about how users can work around the problems and "tuning" the service amounts to saying: We want our money and whatever the technical people say doesn't matter in the least to us.

I don't think this is the right thing for Earthlink either. These users who "go with the flow" -- this is the same profile as the classic AOL user base. I think over time they will wise up as their more experienced friends tell them that Earthlink is now evil. Perhaps Earthlink will end up in the same situation that AOL is in now and become a free, ad-drenched substandard ISP. Do you really want to compete with AOL in a race to the bottom or do you want to be a real ISP providing reasonable service? Is Earthlink's financial situation so bad that you have no choice?

I feel pretty strongly about this issue, I don't want you to get away with this. If the marketroids are able to warp the network infrastructure to suit their marketing "needs" who knows what they will think up next? This kind of crap might spread industry-wide.

As a heads-up to commenters, I don't intend to limit anyone's ability to make the points they want to make and raise technical issues, but I'm going to be working on enforcing Earthling's ground rules, and especially rule #1 ("no fighting, no biting"), a little more stringently from now on. As you should be able to tell by how I've handled comments so far, it's not about turning away opposition or alternate viewpoints. Use as strong terms as you think are needed to get your point across, but be respectful of others and the space.

Mark,

We don't currently support alternate DNS servers. But you're not being ignored -- your concerns those who have commented likewise are being heard and discussed.

I read the ground rules - I am a gifted domestic animal.

I am not a newcomer to computer science. I programmed when we wired circuit boards, learned COBOL and FORTRAN and BASIC, love DOS, hate Windows.

I do not understand what this is talking about. Is there any way of writing this in English (my first language)?

Was thinking of trying earthlink dsl over the current. Good thing that we stopped. Certainly do not want to see tamper page on my URL error or dead page error. So thanks but no thanks. someday when this will be removed after added. Broadband reports is a great site even slashdot helping make informed choices. If anyone asks for my opinion on earthlink dsl. Will weight that in saying the service has a catch when users make errors or servers are down.

Hi Sharon,

Sorry to start you in the middle -- I should have included a link to the previous blog entry on this: http://blogs.earthlink.net/2006/08/handling_dead_domains_1.php , and I'll add that to the top.

In short, for EarthLink internet access customers, we're in the process of rolling out a system that replaces the basic "the domain name you typed could not be found" page with a page that offers suggestions for the likely site you were trying to reach (usually because of a misspelling). There are also contextual keywords and ads on the page.

That first blog entry and this one provide more detail.

I just want to disable this! My browser is smart enough to figure out when a domain name is not there, I don't need Earthlink telling me it's not. It screws up my browsers auto search feature. I have been loyal to Earthlink for many many years, but this just ticks me off! I want a way to opt out of this "feature" or I am going to RoadRunner!

I've been a happy Earthlink customer for a long time. It is dissapointing that Earthlink would change the behavior of something as fundamental as DNS.

I killed 30 or 45 minutes trying to figure out why all domain name typos sent me to an IP address owned by barefruit.com. We should have been told about this in advance.

I'm not going to threaten to leave Earthlink, but I would really appreciate an opt-out of this "service." For myself, and many others, it is not a service at all.

I agree with the poster who, earlier, commented that the fact that the service is in a state of constant change, in order to address concerns and fix issues, will create an unstable, and unreliable DNS service.

Please, please, please, offer an option to disable this non-standard DNS functionality. This is not about us liking things "the way they are," as you stated in your blog. It is about technically savvy Earthlink customers demanding a stable, predictable, and reliable internet connection.

Thank you,

Tom W.

How about reducing my monthly rate when you install this new money maker for the company? Bellsouth offers faster DSL for less money, but as a loyal MINDSPRING customer for nearly 10 years it isn't so easy to jump ship, but I sure would like you to be more competitive.

I couldn't work from home with the first "round" of this stuff and have had some successful attempts with the apparent change. I wish you would leave well enough alone and keep the Internet the way it was intended. That used to be the Mindspring/Earthlink tag line when you were trying to pull users away from AOL. Now you're pushing us away to other ISPs.

You need to let the blue hairs go on with doing stupid things in their browser, but don't penalize the rest of us experienced users with a "benefit" that is no benefit to our account in the way of LOWER MONTHLY FEES!!!

Oh, and where is my $5/mo for the "FEE" you have been charging me the last 18 months? I should have about 6 months free by now because of the fees you've collected that weren't needed. And now with this I should be able to get a few more months free or at a REDUCED RATE!

Hope to hear of a reduced rate without the need for a contract very soon.

Good luck keeping experienced users. Maybe next you can pick up AOL when Time Warner finally sells them off for being a drain on funds.

This "feature" has already cost my company time trying to figure out why perfectly valid IP addresses are redirecting to an earthlink site. Not only that, but the site we are getting redirected to returns a 404!

The notion that this is good for end users is simply ridiculous. Users already understand the current behavior and are likely to be scratching their heads (like us) over how on earth they ended up at an earthlink site. They will start scanning for spyware and wondering what the heck has infected their computer.

This move is a disservice to customers and is purely to generate ad revenue. Everyone who can should switch to a better ISP that is in the internet service business, not the ad business.

This is not a service. It is fraud. Your DNS servers are misrepresnting content that doesn't belong to you. It is violating protocols that applications expect to work as documented. It is unfair trade practice because you are misrepresenting DNS content in order to make money via advertising. It is harming your customers and harming people who aren't customers of Earthlink by denying Earthlink users access to their sites.

There is no technical way to make this work - it is simply too broken.

Earthlink's arrogance in this matter is intolerable.

Mark Said:
I don't want you to get away with this... This kind of crap might spread industry-wide.

That's my concern, exactly. DNS was never intended to be a vehicle for greedy corporations to rake in profit. What EL is doing is breaking the system. You can patch, and make workarounds, and it will still be broken. Returning anyhting other than NXDOMAIN for any reason is the wrong thing. Doing it to make a buck... it's just evil. Verisign set an example for you with their sitefinder fiasco, EL.

Dave C. said:
we're in the process of rolling out a system that replaces the basic "the domain name you typed could not be found" page with a page that offers suggestions for the likely site you were trying to reach

Full stop. The "domain you typed could not be found" page of which you speak is part of whatever web browser the user is running, right? The machine still received the NXDOMAIN error from DNS. What EL is doing now is intercepting NXDOMAIN errors from remote DNS servers and exploiting them for profit, breaking the DNS protocol in the process. Please don't spin this as something so innocuous as swapping one "web page" for another. It's much more than that... and it breaks things.

No good can come of this. When Verisign tried this stunt, the entire infrastructure of the DNS was put at risk, and admins all over the world fought back, and won. You own your network EarthLink. It's your private property to do with as you please. But don't tell us that you're doing it for the customer. You're doing it for the same reason Verisign did it. Greed.

A former EL customer, who will never again subscribe to, nor recommend EarthLink...

Jonathan

Safari is such a great browser for me that I only receive a "page not found" error when I have my AirPort turned off. The additional message is "you are not connected to the network," which is true in that case.

Maybe I'm one of those "go with the flow" users, but I've had EarthLink DSL for about a year and have not had any trouble connecting to sites because of a slow server anywhere.

It's far, far better than AOL.

Granted, I do not use a corporate network, so can't speak to that question. However, as a "normal person" I have been very satisfied with EarthLink's service and customer support. This new service might be a mistake, but it looks to me like they're seriously examining it and will resolve the issue to the satisfaction of most users.

As a result of this new "feature," I am unable to access my company's intranet or my email through our VPN. Thanks for making it impossible for me to work from home. I will be switching ISPs as soon as I possibly can.

This is AMAZING. After all the bad press you're getting and all the comments in the previous post you STILL think you'll get away with this.

You are BREAKING protocol. You CANNOT fix most of the errors generated by this because its impossible under current internet protocols.

You have broken many things one of the most basic of which is: PING! YOU BROKE PING! A person cannot even ping a server to see its status because they risk getting a FALSE ping from your stupid AD SERVERS that are hijacking the response.

To everyone who wants out: I suggest you cancel Earthlink.

You can use VERIZON's excellent dns servers INSTEAD of earthlinks flawed DNS servers. Try setting to: 4.2.2.1 and 4.2.2.2

I will more than likely be canceling my Earthlink account for Verizon FIOS after this. I cant see paying earthlink for sub-standard internet access that doesnt even follow the simplest of internet protocols.

Hey, Dave I'm just wondering, who had this idea to break DNS protocols anyway? I'd like to send a letter to the higher ups maybe with a link to all of these blog comments so that person can be terminated for making such a terrible, bad PR decision.

Oh and I wont be surprised if this isnt posted due to your "stronger enforcement of the rules" AKA you just want to censor the angry customers.

Byebye Earthlink, you were once good, but now you are no better than AOL.

I too am AMAZED and INFURIATED that Earthlink went this far. When I first saw the page, I thought my computer had been attacked. This is such a violation of privacy, it's not even funny. I want this removed ASAP or I'm closing my account. As if we don't have enough spammers and adware to deal with already.

Hi Dave,

In you last comment you described EarthLink's changes to the DNS system as: "...a system that replaces the basic "the domain name you typed could not be found" page with a page that offers suggestions..."

I understand that you were paraphrasing and knowingly simplifying, but I feel that description really gets at the core of the issue here: DNS is not a Web service, and DNS does not present Web error pages. But EarthLink's chose to act like it does, and then to "fix" this "problem" with this horrible DNS-based "service."

EarthLink is confusing the telephone handset with the phone network: "People sometimes dial wrong numbers because they forgot the right one. Even though some more advanced phones offer ways to store commonly used numbers, lets change the "Number not in service" tones and message on the network to an advertisement followed by a Voice Jail menu to select what to do next." Now you have ad revenue coming in, but you have caused immense problems for the systems that depend on the standard tones.

The operator error you are trying to "fix" is not a problem with DNS. It's a browser problem. It occurs in the browser. If you feel the need to fix it for your customers with your advertising "service," for God's sake, do it at the browser, and quit f-ing it up for everyone else by messing with the standard protocol.

At the top of this post, you list some fixes and half-measures that EarthLink is implementing to try to kludge around the various problems your users have been reporting. This sort of desperate flaying about, making individual rules-based exceptions, is not working the bugs out of a new system, instead it just illustrates that it is a fundamental architectural problem with your "solution." You know the old saying, "you can't polish a turd?" Just turn it OFF, fer chrissakes!

First, I *AM* an ELNK employee, but I do NOT play one on TV! :) My opinions herein do not reflect those of ELNK... "Engineers are not qualified to talk to customers". I was doing "Internet" before there was a WWW, and we used UUCP (I'm old enough to have watched Armstrong's moonwalk live.) So, I'm a bit of a purist and traditionalist. I nearly cried when we implemented Port25-Blocking because it spelt the end of an I-Era so to speak. Having said that, when my (non-technical) wife first saw these helper-pages, she told me how cool and helpeful it was. She'd never have thought to find a forum where folks are complaining about it and add her "I Like it". So you can't just say "nobody likes it". On the other hand, My Antivirus software is trying to connect to barefruit hostnames now, instead of our corp update server. :/

A couple technical-ish things:

* the Lunarpages problem should be fixed... we had to get them on the phone and tell them to stop blocking our resolvers' addresses.

* VPN issues (and some failed one-word lookups) *MAY* be related in part to default search domains. It seems that some of our access providers are sending DHCP params that make your computer search their domain first, for EVERY DNS lookup. Under Net connectoins/Properties/Advanced/DNS, try playing with putting your company's domain in the "DNS suffix for this connection". YMMV

* Don't forget: typing "google[CTRL][ENTER]" in the addressbar of FFox & IE (and others?) will immediately put www. and .com on without ANY dns lookup, meaning that its even faster than before we starting intercepting NXDOMAINs.

* you can use things like Guidescope to hide advert banners, which really helps everywhere.

In closing, well, I don't have anything clever to say. I personally wish we'd done better on this in a number of ways. For my part, I'm sorry some of you are suffering, and I hope we can make-good for you.

I also wish to send special THANKS to those of you who've provided concrete info that has lead us to identify problems we couldn't otherwise anticipate.

Sorry to keep battering on you, Dave, it's not your fault, but you, so far, are the only Earthlink contact (out of the eight I've tried) that will even admit that a change has been made in the Earthlink DNS. :(

You said: "the first and main option the page provides under the 'site you were looking for could not be found' are suggested urls based on our best guess for what the user was trying to spell. They're designed to pick out typos and spelling errors and give you the most likely choices."

I can change any ONE charcter in my personal domain - even just change ".org" to ".orh" and the 'recommendations' have not once stumbled on to my domain.

Please help us by lobbying for a set of DNS servers that comply to standards, or at least an opt-out if we need to.

Thanks for listening,
Tomas

I notice that anytime I try to post something that truthfully explains just how wrong this is, the post gets censored.

Mr. Coustan,

Much like the situation we're discussing - a proxy, at least of a sort - you are acting as a communication proxy between us and Earthlink employees that own a stake in this project.

I would like official feedback from the delivery team's leadership; the team delivering this "sign-post" gizmo.

I am asking that you provide the contact information for one or more of the following employees:

The Earthlink employee that proposed the project and/or composed the project plan

The Earthlink employee that signed off on the budget expenditure for this service offering buildout

The Earthlink employee that leads the team delivering the service

or

The Earthlink employee responsible for reporting project progress to Earthlink management

Thank you

"Typing "google" to get "www.google.com"' - We rolled out a change last night to exclude single terms like "google" without the "www" and ".com" from being affected by the system. As an aside, if you hit CONTROL-ENTER, many browsers (Firefox and IE for sure) will tack on www. and .com immediately."

You posted this on 9/7, but I'm still running into this error as of 9/9 at my home on our Mac 10.4.7 systems running Safari as well as the older Mac OSX version of IE.

Your new system now fails to resolve some domains without the "www" heading - even for domains which used to work just fine in the format "domainname.tld"

Here's an example: nyfa.org

Used to work just fine, now only works with the prepended www.

Fix what you broke.

Dave,

First of all I appreciate the open dialog Earthlink has allowed on this issue. This is a customer-positive move that most other ISPs your size would never consider.

However, as a mostly satisfied Earthlink customer for the past several years, I perceive the forced, unceremonious alteration of the DNS portion of my Internet service as a customer-negative move.

If Earthlink is as committed to this misfeature as it seems, there's only one compromise you can make to keep my business: Earthlink must allow customers to opt-out by providing unadulterated, fully standards-compliant DNS service. Nothing short of that is acceptable. I've followed this entire discussion yet I haven't seen Earthlink's position on this option addressed directly. Dave, could you please make a definitive statement regarding whether opt-out is on the table? If it's not being seriously considered I'd like to know now so that I can begin making arrangements to move to another ISP.

Thank you.

Okay, not cool. This new, so-called "better" feature is totally messing up my searching on the web. Before I could type whatever I wanted into the search bar, and it would pull up a list of pages via MSN. Now, I keep getting "The web site address you entered could not be found." Well, no duh...I'm not asking for a website, I'm conducting a search. I've searched, "before microdermabrasion," "search assistant," and "granite" (just for the heck of it) and sometimes they pull up MSN responses and other times I get the earthlink-help page. It's soooo frustrating, and a complete waste of time. Please give us an option to opt-out or get rid of this feature!!

If i type in gmail (a single term) in the address bar is does not go to gmail.com as you have stated it would in this post.

Also, for others who do not have an alternative, look in to http://www.opendns.com/ It provides the same functionality, except it has better goals.

With all due respect, the "ground rules" comment sounds like just another Earthlink attempt to treat us like children. We are not "fighting" or "biting" each other. There is no flame war going on here and you know it. The comments are in total agreement. Earthlink just happens not to like what we are all saying, so you are telling us to "behave."

As for the fact that Control + Enter adds the" www." and ".com" on Firefox and IE, that's nice. I kinda liked Enter myself. Call me old fashioned.

Since when does an ISP take it upon itself to change the default behavior of their customers' computers? Makes me wonder what else Earthlink has up their sleeves. If you want to make your own browser, with some wacky idiosyncratic features, go ahead. That would be the honest way of doing things.

And the "try the following suggestions" stuff on the "help" page is actually pretty wacky. The results have no relevance whatsoever to the address entered. Maybe you could turn Earthlink into a fun online game for bored office workers?

I like to type only the short-name (for example, ebay) and let my browser figure out the NXDOMAIN response. I don't care about "helpful" hints of extra key-strokes to fill in www. .com. Don't tell me this is "fixed."

I'm intermittently getting:

Non-authoritative answer:
Name: ebay.earthlink.net
Address: 209.86.66.91
Name: ebay.earthlink.net
Address: 209.86.66.90
Name: ebay.earthlink.net
Address: 209.86.66.95
Name: ebay.earthlink.net
Address: 209.86.66.94
Name: ebay.earthlink.net
Address: 209.86.66.93
Name: ebay.earthlink.net
Address: 209.86.66.92

As far as the helpfulness of your suggestions on the page you redirect me to, I think http://uopsucks.com/ is a better resource than the ones you present.

I'm giving this another week before I move to another ISP. Does aol even behave this unethically?

I totally agreed with Keith's saying. This is such a bad business practice. I am just glad that I'm not EL customer anymore.

I just wish anyone who knows a lawyer or a reporter should bring this dead domain feature to that person's attention.

I have been a customer since the dialup days of Mindspring and still hold that email.

I am ABSOLUTELY AGAINST the rollout of this "service" and will cancel service if it continues!

Bellsouth tried something along the lines of putting up paid ads on webspace we had associated in our accounts, and it took the threat of a class action suit to get hem to come to their senses.

These types of search pages irritate geeks and totally confuse newbies who may or may not be smart enough to determine th difference between a browser hijack, spam page or ISP-supplied page.

In my case you have 3 options:

1) Stop the rollout
2) Tell me how to opt-out
3) Say goodbye to me (yes it makes me THAT angry)

I suppose I have to wonder: now that EL is inspecting my packets, does it lose its right to Common Carrier status? I suppose that would make them liable for anything that gets transferred over their lines. Boy, the RIAA and MPAA are going to love this - a corporation that can be held liable for file sharing!

Translation of Earthlink management's marketingspeak: "You can't turn it off."

Summary of Earthlink customers' comments: "Earthlink is the new AOL."

when my (non-technical) wife first saw these helper-pages, she told me how cool and helpeful it was.

But what is it, in particular, that's "cool and helpeful"? [sic]

- the earthlink-help page suggests seemingly random respellings of the query. Google's algorithm for misspelled searches suggests statistically relevant ones most of the time. Yours doesn't. Why not? Perhaps because it's actually just filler for an ad revenue page?

It's completely obvious that the Earthlink engineers who worked on this spent pretty much no time on the search suggestions portion of the code. It's just random gibberish, and it exists only to justify the existence of the ad page. It provides absolutely zero value to any customer, period. Your wife might claim to disagree, but that's because her husband works for Earthlink.

Greetings:
Per the posting in this blog some of the worse problems with this misbegotten "service" should have been fixed. This is not the case, at least for me in forest hills queens using DSL. Single entries in the address bar are still being routed to the"service" and causing my browser's intelligent features to malfunction. Please correct this ASAP.

I'd also like some information on future moves. I am about to cancel service as of 9/13/06 unless this is reversed or an opt-out is available.

In response to the ELNK engineer: your customers shouldn't HAVE TO PLAY WITH THEIR SETTINGS to get their systems to work the way they were working before.

Dave,
This is unadulterated greed, I'm telling all my friends Earthlink = AOL, just like that 19 minute AOL youtube "cancel my account" video, this may sadly drive Earthlink into the ground. Perhaps the Earthlink team should really ramp up the speed of their "discussions". You've got 5 days and it's over to Roadrunner.

Signed, one completely disgusted customer — John.

P.S. Why do you not reply to specific comments or requests? Things like this "But don't tell us that you're doing it for the customer. You're doing it for the same reason Verisign did it. Greed." Isn't that your job to refute such crazy accusations?

I've been a customer for a decade -- You've stopped providing the service we're paying you for -- Internet access and DNS resolution!

Please quit this evil, ill-conceived trashing of my Internet connection. I do have alternatives (FiOS is actually cheaper) and I will exercise them. Shame on every last one of you who has to try to justify this blatant hijacking. You are each complicit in this corporate spitting in the faces of your customers. Shame!

Your e-mail retention policies were bad enough (unilaterally discarding my older mail to make room for spam; locking paid e-mail accounts if they're not ACCESSED for 90 days) and this DNS hijack is just... unspeakable arrogance and customer hostility. Shame on you. Turn the thing off.

Earthlink: You seem to be picking out specific technical issues and trying to resolve them, while avoiding the core ethical issue: if you really had the customer's best interests at heart, you'd turn off that infernal "service" now and allow your customers to use a standards-compliant DNS server until you get the bugs worked out. And when you think you have the bugs worked out, allow customers to opt in to that "enhanced service".

The more technically-inclined of your customers have deliberately chosen not to install the complete "Earthlink Experience" on their machines because they don't want it, so what makes you think you can foist your redirect service on them when they never asked for it, and even after they specifically ask you to let them opt out?

Unsolicited e-mail is called SPAM because people don't want it. It's taken from a Monty Python sketch in which a frustrated customer, offered only SPAM to eat, repeatedly insists "I don't want SPAM!" You offer SPAM filters as part of your service, but you're still shoving a form of SPAM down the throat of your customers.

You are hurting yourselves by your continued pursuit of this project.

My advice is simple: don't "work on individual technical issues". Return your DNS servers to their former standards-compliant selves, disband the team working on this project, and re-assign them to other areas. And do it quickly, before you lose any more customers (and credibility).

I actually might have considered using Earthlink in the future, but if you don't roll back this entire project, I'll never consider Earthlink as a viable option for internet service.

Heed the warnings posted by so many others on this forum: Don't ignore the ethical implications of this project. Don't be just another greedy MegaCorp. Do something for your customers--give them an easy way to switch to standards-compliant DNS servers without any penalties.

Thank you for your attention.

From Dave: "Don't forget: typing "google[CTRL][ENTER]" in the addressbar of FFox & IE (and others?) will immediately put www. and .com on without ANY dns lookup."

What utter nonsense. Why should I have to make any extra keystrokes just because EL thinks they wanted to fix something that wasn't broken? This is not a "helpful" feature, nor is it a "fix." It is having to be put out because EL suddenly decided to become a heavy-handed "to h- with the customers" sort of corporation. Please do consider the fact that not everyone has ten fingers that work easily and painlessly; even these few extra keystrokes can add up and make a difference to someone in pain. Dave also believes (or, perhaps, is required to make like he believes) that the reason this page is being offered is that domain names are being entered incorrectly. I can tell you that most of the time, I do type the names in correctly. This browser hijacking is neither helpful nor welcome.

In the past, I would have expected an email from EL, explaining this "service" and offering a way to opt out. Is this the New Earthlink? "Our way or the highway"?

I see some people are considering switching ISPs. If Earthlink can't be bothered to be more considerate of its customers, I, too, shall switch.

Several of you have asked for an update -- as I'm on the road, I may be slow to reply to comments and e-mails for the next few days. But I am checking in on the status of this from the road, and will publish any additional information as I hear it.

Try typing in roadrunneroffers in your browser, I'm guessing Earthlink will offer you a number of different URL's to try? They are doing 29.95 p/month first 6, touting 5mps down/384 up? And — take note Earthlink — no DNS spam.

Love,
John

I just spent half the day discovering this problem and spent the other half setting up static ips on all my internal machines and specifying them in host files on each one. I can no longer use DHCP internally and have to deal with this annoyance to get work done where resolving machine names on my intranet is critical. I do software development so this is all important. Thanks EL for making this extra misery for me. I will be changing ISPs soon!

Dave: If I ask nicely, will you allow me to turn this off? There seems to be some local, browser-based functionality I don't understand (I'm sure something to do with caching) that causes me to get this infernal earthlink-help link with every URL I type into a browser, once I get it (usually from an invoking a domain from a desktop URL shortcut that you guys don't acknowledge, even though it does exist).

Anyway - the only solution is to close the browser, and re-enter the URL manually, until *something* clears up.

Thanks for making my life "easier"!

ARE YOU KIDDING ME??????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????

THIS HAS GOT TO BE THE DUMBEST THING I'VE SEEN IN THE IT INDUSTRY SINCE WINDOWS MILLENIUM EDITION! I JUST SPENT THE LAST 2 HOURS GOING THROUGH FIREWALL LOGS BECAUSE I THOUGHT MY NETWORK HAD BEEN HACKED AFTER I FOUND OUT ALL MY WORKSTATION NAMES WERE RESOLVING TO IP'S ON YOUR BAREFRUIT NETWORK! I'LL BE CANCELLING EARTHLINK TOMMOROW AND SENDING YOU A BILL FOR MY TIME!

Shame on Earthlink, but are we all giving due credit to Dave C. for so graciously moderating this goat rope? I say, Cheers to Dave.

Typing "google" to get "www.google.com"' - We rolled out a change last - We're working with one customer wnight to exclude single terms like "google" without the "www" and ".com" from being affected by the system.

Still broken, four days after your post.

It doesn't "phone home".

Nonsense. An SSH query to a failed domain attempts to resolve to barefruit.com.

Interruptions to non-web services - We're working to update our rule sets and minimize these impacts.

See my comment about SSH above.

EarthLink Technical Support/Customer Service - A few of you had problems getting support for the new system. We're redoubling our efforts to educate our customer service teams on the rollout and the kinds of questions that could come up.

No one at any level of technical support has any idea that this is even going on, let alone how to field questions about it. I've spoken to probably 8 people in the last few days, at a variety of levels. Each of them was equally uninformed.

It's time to turn this off now. You made something that doesn't work very well, and all of your customers hate it. Listen to us, or we won't be your customers any more.

I cancelled my earthlink DSL account today. I made sure the nice lady who handled my call noted that it was because wildcard DNS, an intentional decision made by Earthlink, broke the Internet. I urge the rest of you to do the same when you call to cancel your accounts. As soon as I can get my hands on my parents' laptop, I'll be switching them over to a different dialup provider. My sister is looking for an ISP; I'll make sure she doesn't use Earthlink.

Those are the three (potential) accounts for which I am the chief decision-maker. Numerous other family members and friends come to me for "computer advice", and I'll be making sure they don't contribute to the degradation of the Internet by supporting Earthlink.

I don't say this to be vindictive or spiteful, but I truly believe this is the only way to get the message across to EL management. The rational (and sometimes fanatical) arguments on this blog don't seem to make a difference. Nor did (apparently) the pleadings of the technicians who implemented this non-standard behavior. I can only imagine that they did so with a (figurative) gun held to their heads because no one with enough understanding to implement this change would willingly do so.

In conclusion, I trust that the readers here will soon be voting with their wallets. When you do, just make sure EL knows why you are leaving them.

[SECOND ATTEMPT -- First (identical) post apparently not "approved".]

I hate to fill you folks in on reality, but ... The design specifications for a change (like the documentation) NEVER necessarily represent the *actual* change implemented! Whatever was *intended* by this ill-conceived maneuver, what has been WROUGHT for some of us is a barrage of utterly FALSE "DNS Not Found" errors from earthlink-help, issued on a highly consistent basis that goes well beyond *maddening*. (This "feature" is clearly not doing what you think it is!)

Having now located some alternate, *standard* DNS servers to replace your flawed, modified versions, I'm suddenly having NO problem thus far accessing sites that for the past week or so I had been nearly incessantly *denied* access to via your own DNS servers. Now, I'm no "ISP Geek" (as someone glibly put it). But neither am I a stranger to things computer-ish, having been intimately acquainted with the beasties since the late 1970's. And I'm quite aware of the difference between these enormously erroneous "error" redirects to earthlink-help.net and *actual* DNS problems, which are only *occasionally* encountered during normal web browsing. This "fix", for me, has been little short of a full-fledged "denial of service attack"! And I doubt that others will continue to consider the feature "friendly" when they too come to the realization that those "Not Found" DNS's are the very same ones they used to visit EVERY DAY, as was my own case, using only their Favorites menu (NOT typing).

Deny if you will, but Earthlink seems poised to careen over a cliff with this one. I may indeed be out of DNS Hell for now, via that switch-over to "bootleg" [but blissfully standard] DNS Servers. (Of course, no one at Earth Link facilitated any such fix, though I sincerely thank the *commenters* here who suggested it -- that switch to alternate DNS servers appears to work like a charm, thereby blowing away completely the prior insistences from EL that the modifications were relatively "harmless". They are not!) But if officially sanctioned, *standard* DNS servers are not rapidly re-introduced at EL, it will soon be "Bye-bye" time for me. You MUST provide a functional alternative to this mess for those severely impacted by the change, as I was. As things stand now, I have to completely circumvent my "Internet Service Provider" just to *get* decent Internet Service.

I was looking at the Firefox status bar as I was trying to load the NY Times site, and it was showing:

"transferring data from my.earthlink.net"
"waiting for my.earthlink.net"
"waiting for earthlink-help.net"
"read my.earthlink.net"
ad nauseum...

Just churning away for several minutes. The page never actually finished loading. Is this because of all the "help" Earthlink is providing? Is there actually any Earthlink content on these pages? What are you trying to achieve here?

I've not been able to connect to my company's VPN for two weeks. Last week earthlink helpdesk told me nothing had changed, so I went to my corporate helpdesk and they said it was earthlink. Spent many business hours trying to reconfigure my laptop just to access internal servers. Then a coworker finds this thread. I just cancelled my Earthlink service. Good business move earthlink -- you just lost thousands of corporate customers in the RTP area alone.

It's no longer time for discussion, it's time for Earthlink to take action to remove this. I cannot access my company's intranet without using fixed DNS, of which the first set no longer work. When will this be resolved and not just discussed?

Please, I desparately need a workaround to get my VPN to work being able to resolve names again!

I wasted a good amount of time trying to figure out why my browser was being redirected to an Earthlink help page, and finally found my answer here! This is completely unacceptable, and unless one is given a means of opting-out, I will be canceling my internet service with Earthlink, and my husband will be canceling his Earthlink Premium Mail subscription! In addition, I will be sure to warn everyone I know to stay far, far away from Earthlink!

I have been a loyal fan and user of Earthlink since 1996. This "The web site address you entered could not be found" ad page is terrible. I get it when I shouldn't. I am going to legitimate websites, well established sites that are listed in Google. What I'm being told is that the sites are having 500 errors. That's not what's going on here. Earthlink is purposely shifting use to these pages to make a profit off customers so they can slow down jams in their pipes. It's the dirty little secret behind triple play and it's coming to ISPs everywhere folks. The ISPs have successfuly lobbied Congress, will get there way and we will sit on these runways waiting for Earthlink, Comcast and the like to let us taxi down to the runway to our destination. The WWW just died today. It's now the WWI World Wide interstate complete with traffic meter lights (called "The web site address you entered could not be found right now while we make you look at our ads").

www.nydailynews.com no longer works. But since I don't get a 404 page, I have no way of knowing whether or not there's actually a DNS error.

Why can't I access this website? Why can't anyone at Earthlink give me any answers about how to fix this?

I complained last week about all the new headaches this new-found "help" has given me. That I have to switch how I used to surf the net due to this "help" is absurd. Now, I can't even access sites like nytimes.com or nydailynews.com (two of the biggest newspaper sites in New York City) even when I type the full URL. I am switching back to RoadRunner at the end day. When you guys come back down from the mothership and fix this, don't bother contacting me.

Where are you, Dave?

We know this isn't your doing, but you're the ONLY Earthlink employee who's publicly aware that this is happening - no one at Earthlink tech support will give any information.

Please respond to this thread and give us an update on the situation. I'm a few days away from cancelling unless I get some answers.

I switched my cable modem service to TIme Warner today. I called Earthlink and spoke to someone in billing to cancel and explain why I was switching. The guy, while very polite, was certain that I was experiencing a "fraudulent service." It was obvious that his area still has not heard anything about this. I tried to explain, but he wasn't buying it. I asked him to insert "nxdomain," "DNS error service" and "barefruit.com" as keywords in my comments on why I was cancelling. Maybe someone will see it.

Why is this still happening? Everyone hates it, AND it doesn't work properly.

If you're going to break the internet, at least do it consistently. Your service fails to work half the time, and kills completely valid domains the other half.

Turn it off.

I submitted a post yesterday, but, for whatever reason, it has not posted to this blog. At any rate, I voted with my wallet, and just got off the phone from cancelling my Earthlink Dial-up service. I suggest that others do the same. With that said, even if Earthlink gets rid of this new "feature", I will *never* use their services again! Very poor business decison!!!

Hi Dave,
This is from the Earthlink "CORE VALUES AND PURPOSE" page on the Earthlink corporate site:

OUR PURPOSE
"To improve people's lives by giving them the ability to communicate better than ever before"

Dave, let me ask you this question, you seem like a good guy, insiteful blogs and engaged in the tech community. So shouldn't you be playing the role of Earthlink police? This service appears to be a major felony according to the Earthlink brand bible. I believe it's probably a question of how many customers you need to disenfranchise before the powers that be (obviously not you) suspend this "service". If I type in "cnn" and I get "could not be found", when before it worked seemlessly, I think it counts as not communicating better than before — don't you?

Just as a refresher, here's the rest of the Earthlink "values & beliefs" code:
Anytime, anywhere, EarthLink connects people to the power and possibilities of the Internet. We deliver a reliable and personalized experience our customers trust.

To improve people's lives by giving them the ability to communicate better than ever before
To enable our employees and shareholders to flourish and prosper

What's important at EarthLink? We are convinced that the key to creating a truly great organization is an intense focus on the values that guide its people's actions. These are EarthLink's "Core Values and Beliefs". If we don't seem to be living up to them, call us on it!
We respect the individual, and believe that individuals who are treated with respect and given responsibility respond by giving their best.
We require complete honesty and integrity in everything we do.
We make commitments with care, and then live up to them. In all things, we do what we say we are going to do.
Work is an important part of life, and it should be fun. Being a good businessperson does not mean being stuffy and boring.
We love to compete, and we believe that competition brings out the best in us.
We are frugal. We guard and conserve the company's resources with at least the same vigilance that we would use to guard and conserve our own personal resources.
We insist on giving our best effort in everything we undertake. Furthermore, we see a huge difference between "good mistakes" (best effort, bad result) and "bad mistakes" (sloppiness or lack of effort).
Clarity in understanding our mission, our goals, and what we expect from each other is critical to our success.
We are believers in the Golden Rule. In all our dealings we will strive to be friendly and courteous, as well as fair and compassionate.
We feel a sense of urgency on any matters related to our customers. We own problems and we are always responsive. We are customer-driven.

I'm officially "calling you on it".
I dare you to email this to your CEO.

Thanks,
John

I just checked with customer service, and surprisingly got a quick and correct answer... Of course, I shouldn't have had to do this at all -- but it does appear there is a workaround...

TRANSCRIPT:

info: 'Valeria K' says: Thank you for contacting EarthLink LiveChat, how may I help you today?

xxxxxxxx@earthlink.net: the changes that earthlink has recently implemented for dns lookup has screwed up my vpn access. i can no longer work from home because earthlink is hijacking legitimate web addresses for my company's internal network

Valeria K: I apologize for the inconvenience caused to you in this regard.

xxxxxxxx@earthlink.net: are there alternate dns servers i can use that work correctly?

Valeria K: Yes, please give me a moment while I give you the information.

Valeria K: Please use these DNS settings :
In the Preferred DNS server field, enter 202.27.184.3
In the Alternate DNS server field, enter 202.27.184.5

Valeria K: Is there anything else I may assist you with today?

xxxxxxxx@earthlink.net: excellent. that worked. thank you.

Valeria K: You are welcome.
Valeria K: It is my pleasure assisting you.
Valeria K: Do you have further queries to assist you with?

Hello,

I've had a number of problems like others here with my corporate intranet access from home. Your system is flawed - it doesn't just redirect "DNS errors" - seems to redirect even when some page loads take longer. Not only the browser, but other intranet applications stopped working. I spent a lot of time looking into browser settings, registry etc. Why aren't customers notified of this? I'm surely switching providers now because of this dumb feature.

Dave, you asked me to wait a few days. It's now a week, any updates on this DNS nonsense?

WORKAROUND for IBM employees using wireless connections over Earthlink.


1. Connect as you normally would.


2. Open IBM Access Connections. Select Location profiles > Create new profile.


3. Name your new profile something like "home". Choose Capture current system settings to create this profile then click Next all the way through to Save.

4. Select Location profiles > Manage profiles.

5. Choose "home" and then Edit.

6. Click the TCP/IP tab and choose Use the following DNS addresses.

Add 202.27.184.3 and 202.27.184.5 (I tried the VA DNS servers someone had posted -- they didn't work for me). Select OK

7. Select to use the "home" profile when you work from home, and you should be set.

Works for me, finally! (Thanks, Ian -- you know who you are)

Hi 'help' - happened to see your comment this morning and didn't want to leave you hanging. A few rows up I mentioned that this is a travel week for me. I am checking in from the road periodically. There may be additional comments I haven't seen in the queue as well. I'll be back in the office on Monday, and if there's any information to pass along in the meantime, the blog is covered.

Hi Dave,
This is from the Earthlink "CORE VALUES AND PURPOSE" page on the Earthlink corporate site:

OUR PURPOSE
"To improve people's lives by giving them the ability to communicate better than ever before"

Dave, let me ask you this question, you seem like a good guy, insiteful blogs and engaged in the tech community. So shouldn't you be playing the role of Earthlink police? This service appears to be a major felony according to the Earthlink brand bible. I believe it's probably a question of how many customers you need to disenfranchise before the powers that be (obviously not you) suspend this "service". If I type in "cnn" and I get "could not be found", when before it worked seemlessly, I think it counts as not communicating better than before — don't you?

Just as a refresher, here's the rest of the Earthlink "values & beliefs" code:
Anytime, anywhere, EarthLink connects people to the power and possibilities of the Internet. We deliver a reliable and personalized experience our customers trust.

To improve people's lives by giving them the ability to communicate better than ever before
To enable our employees and shareholders to flourish and prosper

What's important at EarthLink? We are convinced that the key to creating a truly great organization is an intense focus on the values that guide its people's actions. These are EarthLink's "Core Values and Beliefs". If we don't seem to be living up to them, call us on it!
We respect the individual, and believe that individuals who are treated with respect and given responsibility respond by giving their best.
We require complete honesty and integrity in everything we do.
We make commitments with care, and then live up to them. In all things, we do what we say we are going to do.
Work is an important part of life, and it should be fun. Being a good businessperson does not mean being stuffy and boring.
We love to compete, and we believe that competition brings out the best in us.
We are frugal. We guard and conserve the company's resources with at least the same vigilance that we would use to guard and conserve our own personal resources.
We insist on giving our best effort in everything we undertake. Furthermore, we see a huge difference between "good mistakes" (best effort, bad result) and "bad mistakes" (sloppiness or lack of effort).
Clarity in understanding our mission, our goals, and what we expect from each other is critical to our success.
We are believers in the Golden Rule. In all our dealings we will strive to be friendly and courteous, as well as fair and compassionate.
We feel a sense of urgency on any matters related to our customers. We own problems and we are always responsive. We are customer-driven.

I'm officially "calling you on it".

Thanks,
John