--- Date: 7 Nov 2003 23:43:57 -0500 From: "John R Levine" <johnl@private> To: "Declan McCullagh" <declan@private> Subject: Belkin router replaces web pages with ads In case a hundred people haven't sent you this amazing message from usenet (it's gone from Google but it's real and available on most other news servers). Their routers hijack a web connection every eight hours and replace it with an ad for their filterware service. "Ease of use" now means "shove down your throat". Wow. I guess I know one company I'm not going to be buying any more network gear from. Regards, John Levine, johnl@private, Primary Perpetrator of "The Internet for Dummies", Information Superhighwayman wanna-be, http://iecc.com/johnl, Sewer Commissioner "I dropped the toothpaste", said Tom, crestfallenly. ---------- Forwarded message ---------- Date: 5 Nov 2003 15:25:28 -0800 From: Eric Deming <ericd@private> Newsgroups: news.admin.net-abuse.email Message-ID: <c91e821d.0311051525.70aa9920@private> Subject: Re: [OT-evil marketing] Belkin does Verislime one better - router spam! "JerryMouse" <nospam@private> wrote in message news:<wh-dnR5oc5YJnDSiU-KYhA@private>... > Mr. Uh Clem wrote: > > [...] > > What does Belkin say when you complain? > > I'd make their life miserable until they removed the offending software from > my machine. > > You did not conset to this aspect of your machine's modification - this is > nothing less than malicious. > > Raise hell. I was made aware of this posting by an e-mail that was sent to Belkin's tech support e-mail box. Since I am a product manager for Belkin's LAN products and was very involved with the development of the Parental Control feature, I feel that I can shed some light on this subject. Firstly, without trying to sound too stand-offish, we are not talking about SPAM here. For me to clarify, an understanding of the Parental Control service will really be needed. Since Parental Control is a subscription service, Belkin wanted to make registering for the service very easy. Since the router actually will work in tandem with an outside server (Cerberian, www.cerberian.com) registration information needs to be collected and sent to Belkin and Cerberian to activate an account. Traditional methods of registration, such as asking the user to go to a website or navigate to the Router's internal Web page to enter information didn't meet the ease-of-use goal. We elected to re-direct one http request to the "Register Now" reminder page. (There is a link in a previous posting if you want to see it) This page asks the user to register for the service for a free 6 month trial. Now, granted this looks like an ad. It should, it is intended to be informative and easy enough to understand. At this point, the user can register or click "No Thanks". Clicking "No Thanks" sets a flag in the Router to stop the Router from re-directing every 8 hours to the reminder page. (Again remember, only one http request every 8 hours). Admittedly, there is no controlling which computer on the LAN this message will pop up on. If the user just closes the window without clicking "No Thanks", then the flag is never set, and the reminders will continue. Now, if you are the type that doesn't want to click the "No Thanks" button, then no problem. Navigate to the Router's internal web interface (default IP = 192.168.2.1), click on the Parental Control menu. In the Menu, select "Don't Remind every 8 hours" (This phrase actually varies a bit, but you get the idea) then click "Apply Changes". DONE. Nothing to it. By the way, this procedure might have to be done if your router is behind a firewall. Reason: filter.belkin.com sends a response to the Router to set the flag. Firewalls will block the response. This might explain the problem in a school for instance. We did this not to be evil, we did this to make sure that any non-techy person (part of our target audience) would have ample opportunity to opt in or out of the free 6 month trial of the Parental Control feature. The Router doesn't collect information on you and send it to Belkin. We don't have the ability to SPAM you at a later time if you select "No Thanks" or turn off the Reminder manually. I know this feature might be misunderstood and might PO some people. I know the manual could do a better job explaining it. These are all things that we at Belkin are working to remedy. Oh, one last bit, when upgrading firmware for the Routers that originally shipped without the Parental Control feature, the new firmware has this feature added. This was by popular demand. Our customer install base began to notice the Parental Control feature on new models that we are shipping, and wanted a solution for themselves without having to buy a new product. So, we accommodated them. I'm happy to answer any questions if you have any. Thanks! _______________________________________________ Politech mailing list Archived at http://www.politechbot.com/ Moderated by Declan McCullagh (http://www.mccullagh.org/)
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