Rui CarmoRemember The Eleventh Commandment? At the time, I thought that transparent proxies were bad enough.
In the meantime I've confirmed, many times over, that more creative (and utterly asinine) notions are afoot, pretty much everywhere.
However, so far all ISPs I know of stopped short of breaking fundamental services. Over the years I've seen more than a couple of the Commandments broken or bent, but this one takes the cake:
Earthlink recently started fiddling with their DNS servers, and they did three things I find fundamentally scary:
- They changed their DNS behavior without warning their customers.
- They did not provide a way to opt out from the changes, not even for corporate customers.
- They tried to spin the change as a "usability improvement", publicly displaying their ignorance of how the Internet works.
All of the above are pretty bad form for an ISP, but the scariest thing is that I can see this sort of thing happening right here in Portugal.
Breaking DNS in this way is so fundamentally wrong that defies understanding, but I'm willing to bet someone will think of emulating this kind of "breakthrough" in an attempt at "improving" the customer experience on a browser - even if it completely breaks things like anti-Spam filters.
Anyway, I think it's time I formulated another Commandment, just for the sake of completeness:
12. Thou Shalt Not Bear False Witness Regarding Domain Names
There, you can now have the pleasure of breaking it.