Well, it is definitely wreaks of desperation: Comcast has recently decided to hijack DNS requests, especially when unsuspecting end users are “helped” when they type information into the URL field of their favorite web browser. Here is a picture of my typo “ig” being fed into Yahoo! Search without my consent:
So first, let me start by saying, “Thanks, Comcast.”
The worst part of what Comcast is doing is that there is an irritating opt-out process, as noted in Ars Technica, where one is forced to log in, when this could be done without a login. Worse, when I tried to opt out, the username I created with Comcast fails to work (yes, they’ve seemingly changed something). I hope 4G proves to be a winner in Chicago so we can eventually dump team Comcast. They obviously have complete disdain for their customers to be ruining the internet in this fashion.
Then I realized, “Why am I using their DNS servers anyway? I’ve always been smart about this, but when I did a recent upgrade to make my router developer-friendly, I forgot to change the DNS servers.
As luck would have it, Google recently announced their own public DNS service. You simply set your nameservers to 8.8.8.8 and 8.8.4.4 (easy to remember, eh?) on your router and you won’t ever have to deal with Comcast’s DNS squatting again. This gave me a nice little performance boost (pages loading almost instantly) so I was able to kill two birds with one stone, pardon the cliche.
There are other public DNS options for those of you out there who don’t trust Google and the Internets. I’m not going into that here but you can search for public DNS easily enough.
Happy surfing (again). God only knows what Comcast will do once they figure out that we don’t want their help.
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This is usually a tradeoff between speed and control. It’s three hops to my ISP’s DNS servers but nine to Google’s. Nevertheless, part of the lost speed can probably be made up by using local DNS caching in the router (e.g., dnsmasq).