Re: Micro$oft wants to dominate the world!??

From: Matt Hite (mh_vulndevat_private)
Date: Mon Aug 27 2001 - 15:17:32 PDT

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    Not too far off topic, but a bit:
    
    I spoke with a porn site operator a few months ago whose scam wasn't
    the porn he was peddling, but rather convincing unsuspecting 
    surfers to download a "porn viewer" from his site.  This "viewer" did
    nothing more than replace the IE auto.search.msn.com functionality
    with a redirect to a search engine on which he received referrer 
    compensation.  The end result was that he made money every time
    someone made a typo when pulling up a page in IE.
    
    --Matt
    
    On Mon, Aug 27, 2001 at 10:15:36PM +0200, Syzop wrote:
    > When you type a non-existing domain name in internet explorer
    > you get redirected to some auto.search.msn.com thing....
    > I don't know when this was introduced, but AFAIK this was in
    > IE5 and not in IE4... Anyway, normally you get some (stupid)
    > general error page (from your local hd?).. but now you really get a
    > page online:
    > == <snip> ==
    > "We can't find "<domain>".
    > Click Go to try your address again.
    > [<domain>                       ] [Go]
    > Or, correct the spelling of your address above and click Go.
    > 
    > See more results for "<domain>" at MSN Search.
    > -----------
    > Get help
    > See technical details
    > 
    > Powered by: <%$&#$ logo> MSN Search
    > == </snip> ==
    > 
    > I think this time micro$oft has really gone way too far...
    > They can see every non-existing domain lookup from IE users...
    > They can redirect every user to some stupid site of them (actually
    > they are doing that right now) if somebody types an non-existing name.
    > I also noticed (when searching in the registry) the domain is added
    > to safe zone's or something.. mmm!
    > 
    > My question is: is it possible to edit some dll/exe/whatever to remove
    > this behavior (so apart from methods like adding your own auto.search.msn.com
    > record in your dns server [or hosts] and firewalling the whole msn stuff).
    > 
    >     Syzop.
    > 
    > PS: Note: this message was written in just a few minutes, it's very likely
    >       some things are incorrect
    > PSS: Some users (including me) are panicing and switching (back) to NS.
    > 
    



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