tor provided me first warning of corrupted ISP name servers

[Scott Bennett]

     On Sun, 24 Aug 2008 11:56:24 -0400 "Rochester TOR Admin"
<onionroutor at gmail.com> wrote:
>On Sun, Aug 24, 2008 at 11:47 AM, Scott Bennett <bennett at cs.niu.edu> wrote:
>
>>     Yesterday my tor server logged a message advising me of name server
>> problem at the Comcast name servers whose addresses are given via DHCP to
>> my computer upon connection to the Comcast network:
>>
>
>For those of us using Timewarner in New York state, Tor provided the same
>information.  According to recent news, TimeWarner is blocking "child
>pornography" by blocking traffic to all newsgroups.  If you are a Tor server
>admin in New York State, make sure you change the default DNS servers that
>are provided by the ISP.
>
     Wow.  What a bummer.  I hope those customers can find suitable
replacements and don't have contracts without a way out of them for corruption
of service.  Seems to me that Time-Warner is what should be blocked.
     In any case, I initially worried that the situation here was something
deliberate like hijacking to run everything through proxies or some such,
but when I discovered that the bogus answers were being given to everybody
by those servers, but not by *all* Comcast name servers, I concluded that
the problem is more likely a manifestation of one of those bugs in coding 
or, worse, design that have so often allowed name server caches to become
polluted by bad data received from other name servers.
     The frustrating part is that Comcast allows no rational reporting of
already gathered evidence to the people who could correct the problem.  I
guess I'll have to check into whatever Verizon offers around here.  It's a
bummer, though, for me because I just escaped my previous ISP, TBC Net
(tbc.net) a week and a half ago after putting up with their incompetence
and outright lies for months because of a contract I wasn't sure I could
get out of.  Each such ISP replacement is a significant upheaval for me to
deal with and also incurs a connection charge with the new ISP.
     While I'm at it, I want to mention that the customer "service"
"technical" support guy I talked with at Comcast's national call center 
didn't like the idea that I was running a tor server and claimed that it
violated the "terms of use" for Comcast residential service accounts.  I
got him off that subject to lead him through a troubleshooting process,
as opposed to his corporately scripted process, for a while, but I don't
know whether to expect some later problems from them over the fact that
I'm running a tor server.  I see plenty of comcast.net addresses in the
tor server directory, but have no way of knowing whether they are for
residential service or business service, for which the "terms of use" are
supposedly more liberal.
     All in all, a week and a half seems kind of a brief time in which
to have run into some many disillusioning issues with an ISP. :-(


                                  Scott Bennett, Comm. ASMELG, CFIAG
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* Internet:       bennett at cs.niu.edu                              *
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