About
Reverse Zone, weblog on urban planning, sustainability, and technology.
Martin Laplante
Subscribe
to an RSS feed of this weblog.
Links
A few favourite links.
- Planetizen
- Cyburbia
- LookWAYup dictionary
- RES Policy Research Inc.
- Medical Reference
- AI Topics
- Multilingual SharePoint
- Pattern Language
- Scale Down, Windsor
- Raise the Hammer
- Price Tags
- Urban Squares
- NYC Streets
- New Urban News
- Grush Hour
- Planning Politics
- Emergent Urbanism
- DNS Help
Friends' Blogs - David Wilson
- Viktor Toth
- Michael Geist
Recent posts
- Border Adjustments: A Solution to Climate Change Action
- Direct Democracy vs. Intolerance - the Swiss Minaret Vote
- The New Urban/Rural Relationship
- Is Manhattan, New York, or Greater New York Sustainable?
- Criticizing Me Is Unconstitutional, Says Architect
- Will High Speed Rail Reduce GHGs?
- Suburban Retrofit
- Lateral Semantic Indexing
- Resistance From Residents Near Carbon Capture Sites
- LEED for Neighborhood Development (LEED-ND) Voting Is On
- $300K Fine for Astroturfing
- Carbon capture from coal plants
- What is the Proper Role of Villages in Smart Growth
- Green Buildings Need Design and Geographic Context
- Ontario Coal Generators Are Shut Down
- Canada and US Driving No Longer Dropping
- This Year Ontario No Longer Needs Coal
- Shaping the Public Realm
- The Days of Sprawl Are Officially Over
- The Telescope is Backward
- Stop The Earth
- Amazon CloudFront New Pricing, Cheap At A Million Dollars
- Canada Spends Billions in Energy INefficiency
- Density as Persons Plus Jobs Per Unit Area
- Now is the Time for New Transit Investments
- UNFCCC Confuses Journalists on Direction of Greenhouse Gases
- Canadian Business Prefers Carbon Tax
- Streets To Home: Down With Continuum of Care!
- Close Roads to Reduce Congestion
- Science and Economics of Climate Change
2008
2007
2006
2005
Complete List of Posts
Top Posts
- Close Roads to Reduce Congestion
- The Delicate Balancing Act of Downtowns and the Death of Griffintown
- Places to Grow - Pictures Tell the Story
- Why We Still Need Separation of Uses
- Dense Condos Do Not Revitalize
- Hot Air - How to Beat Climate Change By Burning More Coal
- What's Best for Renewables, Merton Rule or Feed-In Tariff?
- LEED for Neighborhood Development Pilot Rating System
- Main Arterial Woonerf
- More on Which is Greener, Houses or Apartments?
- Which is Greener, Houses or Apartments?
- Zoning Exceptions and the Failure of Planning
- 18th Century Planning is Still the State of the Art
- Ontario Municipal Board Says City Can't Plan for Mix or Density of Mixed Use
- Brownfield Brutalism - Urban Planning for Sale
- The Causes of Sprawl
- Energy Star Sprawl
- Is High Density the Cure for Transportation?
- Why not Build Medieval Towns Here?
- Vancouver has it right - Ecodensity
- Ontario has it wrong - Places to Grow
- Jane Jacobs, Christopher Alexander, and Barry Wellman
- Review of This Land: The Battle over Sprawl and the Future of America
- New York's Downzoning Uprising
- Community Planning - are citizens powerless?
- Paris riots and urban planning
- Minimize Greenhouse Gas Emissions through Reverse Zoning
- Social Sciences: So Much Left Undone
A nasty surprise. Rogers updated my DNS so that addresses that do not resolve are instead sent to a "Rogers Search" web site. Its DNS servers resolve all unknown addresses to a server somewhere in the U.S. (8.15.7.107) that for port 80 gives a 404 error (which is not correct at all) that includes cloaked Javascript, complete with tracking code, redirecting to a web page on which it has advertising. It took me a while to figure this out while trying to diagnose a DNS problem. It uses different types of redirection for HTTP/1.0 or HTTP/1.1 requests, and different responses for ports other than 80. It is annoying as well that they do not send the full set of http headers, for instance no Content-Length and the connection is not closed properly so this consumes unnecessary resources (for us). HEAD and GET methods do the same thing for many User-Agents, meaning the HEAD method returns a message body in the response. The message body DOES vary with User-Agent as well. MSIE returns 400 Bad Request, Firefox and others gives a 404 Not Found. Oddly enough, the response to a HEAD method that claims to be from IE or unknown user-agents is better than most. It identifies the server as Apache, and closes the connection without a message body.
Their "opt out" option changes very little; The DNS does exactly the same thing, but it sets a cookie in your current browser that redirects you to a different web page, which looks like the default English-language IE error message (regardless of the browser you are actually using). I have spent some time trying to switch to a different DNS servers available to me. It looks like some other companies are doing the same thing although some seem to default to Google search instead. When DNS doesn't resolve, I don't want my tools to tell me that it simply moved to a new IP address, I want them to tell me that the DNS no longer resolves. Didn't Verisign get their knuckles rapped for doing the same thing a couple of years back?
Bad, Rogers. Very Bad.
Tags: computers internet Rogers DNS