Americans take action on something Rogers on us pulled years ago

Rogers tried this scummy technique out on us in 2008, read more here

They also know Canadians are not as litigious...they do seem to have stopped it though. Wonder what made them?

The researchers, Christian Kreibich and Nicholas Weaver, analyzed traffic from the ISPs and found that 165 terms were being captured and resulting in interference, usually directing users to the relevant site through an affiliate program. It’s possible (though it seems unlikely) that the third parties are doing this independently, as Charter describes to VentureBeat; they allege (from experience) that a service hired to do one thing (provide a standard page for broken URLs, for instance) might get ambitious and decide to make a little money on the side.

Google noticed this previously and caused the ISPs to stop tampering with their results, but while it’s easy enough to tell when your queries are being touched, it’s not so easy to tell if they’ve been sniffed. The ISPs may outsource the packet analysis portion of the job to companies like Paxfire as well, routing search queries through them for recording and possible database building.

Smelling blood in the water, New York law firms Reese Richman and Milberg have filed a class action lawsuit against Paxfire and RCN, a Virginia-based ISP accused by the study of the shady practices described.

Read more here.

Avoiding Rogers DNS redirect

There seems to have been some development on the Rogers and their unethical DNS redirection front.

Via Michael Geist:

Written by Parkerjon on 2008-07-31 15:26:49
I got the following from an anonymous but embarrassed Rogers employee. They bowed to pressure (many larger companies complaining that their remote workers were affected): and that even poor Edward was harassed.

Alternate DNS server that avoids the redirect:

altdns.rnc.net.cable.rogers.com
64.71.255.202

Apparently the engineers warned the marketing types... but the suits didn't listen.

Or you can try these:

dnsserverlist.org.

Internet founder blasts ISPs for hurting national interests

"The Rogers approach certainly isn't respectful of consumer choice,"..."The response that Rogers has been giving — 'this is our network and we'll do whatever we damn well please' — does highlight what is for many a concern."

Read more here.

Rogers thinks it can just brush off complaints from its users, especially since there really isn't a lot of choice in the Canadian ISP market. However, Rogers should be careful in treading so brazenly into what some consider "net neutrality" territory.

Read more here.