Baby, I swear it's déjà vu: TalkTalk customers unable to opt out of ISP's ad-jacking DNS – just like six years ago TalkTalk broadband users are complaining they can't opt out of its Error Replacement Service, which swaps NXDomain DNS results with an IP address. And if that sounds familiar, it should. Users of the budget ISP complained about the very same issue back in 2014. The Error Replacement Service redirects links to DNS addresses …
My VM connection is (usually) brilliant.
VM customer service is variable and some aspects are grim to the point of hostility. Generally if you speak to someone sensible they will get problems sorted out. But at the policy level ugh. There's is the web site with a Help page that has a "Contact us" link that takes you to a FAQ page that directs you to the Help page.
Theirs s is the web mail page that won't let you mark several emails together as "Spam" saying that they are "newsletters" and you can only mark them as spam one at a time. There's are the filter rules that won't accept partial addresses, so that you can block bitcoin@spammerxyz.com but not b1tc0in@spammerxyz etc.(and by the way theirs is the service that is totally unable or unwilling to filter this shit)
"Anyone whose access to email is conditional on continuing to be a customer of the ISP is asking for trouble."
Anyone whose access to email is conditional on continuing to be a customer of the ISP is locking themselves into the vendor
Which is why ISPs continue to provide email (back in the old days it was the only reason to sign up, but in these days of ISPs being pipe providers, there's NO point in being reliant on anything else they offer
setting up your own independent namesevers behind your firewall isn't hard either. That way you're not beholden to google or others playing games - however some ISPs used to intercept/redirect port 53 queries to their local nameservers anyway. They may still do so.
> There's are the filter rules that won't accept partial addresses, so that you can block bitcoin@spammerxyz.com but not b1tc0in@spammerxyz
Shit - even the Outlook mail client won't let you kill a domain when marking an email as spam - although I agree you can define your own custom rule but it would be nice if there's a shortcut to this in the "junk email" menu. Oddly it allows you to whitelist a domain. I frequently get shit from some arsewipe hopping multiple domains and emails attempting to sell me silicon wafers.
Make sure you have a good supply of books, coffee, and all other refreshment facilities before locking into a wait position for Talk-Talk to come back. Probably your message will take till after the Coronavirus is a distant memory to get through. It is perhaps a shame they do not really know how to run the technical side of the business. Though the rest has not always been that hot either!
Start up Age of Empires... By the time you get a reply, you'll have already taken over the world with water powered nuclear generators.
They'll probably reply just as you are about to go for a leak, so make sure the PFY's briefcase is within easy reach...
Yes, I'm going through the BOFH chronicles. That was 2003 episode 23.
if you can. That is what they listen to. Written complaint about what is wrong, what issues it causes, and therefore allowing instant-termination of their service no matter what is written in the contract. Including refusal to pay.
At least that is what works in Germany, does it work on the other side of the tunnel?
Depends. You can get to their cancellations department. Then after the cancellation fee/termincation confirm your are going to trading standards/financial ombudsman about it. Sometimes you may have to pay up front then get it back later.
If a company is in the wrong, and willing to charge you the cancellation fee, they obviously have something very wrong with their service because they need the cash more than you do! So must be desperate.
This does not include the fee for the hardware and postage though, but you can offer to send that back to them.
I got a 30 day no quibbles option to cancel when I set up one ISP, cancelled with no charge and saved £££s at 29 days as the service was dire, and the promises to improve were mute as going on for 12 months on their forums.
I did not do the same with a mobile operator, as it did turn out to be occasional signal loss during the 5g upgrade, and thankfully is sorted now.
Don't be silly! There's a whole game to be played here, especially if there is a genuine fault caused by Talk Talk.
Register your complaint. Register the failure of the resolutions.
Demonstrate the effect as unreasonable. Waste their time as much as possible.
If company is ISO9001 certified, ask for the quality managers details, raise a complaint and demand a copy of your ISO9001 complaint reference number. Make constant requests for updates. Register any lack of resolution and communication. Politely waste as much time as possible and eventually, when they see it as a "cost saving" to get rid of you, voila! Success.
Just pissing off the quality manager enough to force technical meetings about registered ISO9001 complaints is surprisingly effective in all industry sectors.
"...companies that could fill in ISO 9001 docunentation"
Operating as a business risk consultant, I've seldom seen an ISO 9001 or ISO/IEC 27001 implementation that existed other than entirely on paper, in any size of organisation. Certification is sought because it opens doors to lucrative contracts, and the basic principle of compliance is "what's the least we can get away with doing to [pass the audit] [keep the regulator of our backs]?
The concept of a certificate being indicative of performance is culturally dead, not just in these contexts. Practically every educational qualification is now merely considered as a pathway to non-relevant employment, so nobody studies the subject more than minimally to qualify - witness the dramatic rise in the proportion of "first class" degrees over the last couple of decades. The downside of all this is a population suffering from Dunning Kruger - it's long term at least as dangerous as Covid.
I'd have to agree. Once a test of proficiency becomes a gateway it ceases to serve its function, because all effort will be directed at the test, not the learning.. This starts at age 6 with early years settings required to reach various "early learning goals" irrespective of where the kids start from. Schools with lots of kids from deprived backgrounds/poor English skills ( which is mostly native English speakers with poor language models btw) etc. need to be brought up to the test level. And the only way to do that is to teach to the test. Then there's tests at 7 and so it goes. SATS at 11, GCSE, A level, even degrees. And driving tests of course. You learn to pass, not to drive.
Agreed re driving tests. I recently (for reasons of emigration and bureaucracy) had to sit a local driving test. I walked into the driving school, said "I've been driving for 30 years but I need to learn to pass the test", and did exactly what I was told until I did pass. (The instructor said I was a much easier student than the younger learner-drivers, who don't listen.)
It kinda depends on the type of company.
It's best for less consumer-y companies. Basically one of the 9001 requirements is a controlled official complaint tracker. Which must be reviewed by the quality manager (or equivalent). Even better, it will regularly be monitored by the external auditor, so companies are more likely to act to close the complaint.
Doesn't always work. But as a former quality engineer who has had 3 customers pull this stunt on me, it was pretty effective.
There was a small booklet you could buy back in the 1970's that gave yo udetailed information on how to bamboozle and waste the time of various government departments. For example, many forms back then contained areas marked DO NOT WRITE HERE or FOR OFFICIAL USE ONLY, the booklet advised going over these areas with a candle to make them unwriteable with a ball point pen or pencil. It also pointed out (at the time) there was no compulsion to fill in forms in english (it recommended russian ), nor to perform maths or numerics in english (latin numerals were sufficient).
My mum's bank stopped payments to talk talk after she passed away; repeated calls to customer 'service' did nothing to stop the tide of threatening letters.
We wrote "return to sender - deceased" on various correspondence and popped in the post back to them. Not sure whether that did the trick or not as we're no longer getting post forwarded.
My mum's bank stopped payments to talk talk after she passed away; repeated calls to customer 'service' did nothing to stop the tide of threatening letters.
You quite possibly have a chance of getting them charged with harassment under those circumstances. See the Citizens Advice page here and remember you're not even a debtor.
A few years back friend of mine was being hassled by carrion eating debt collectors over a debt that was more than 6 years old and no longer enforceable. One snottagram to them threatening to take the matter to the police made them vanish.
we moved to Spain two and a half years ago. At that point i cancelled my AA membership. despite cancelling it i got charged £280 for another years membership 6 months later. I rang them , they refunded the money an cancelled the membership again. last month i checked my bank statements, lo and behold the AA had charged me for another years membership.. I rang them again, and again they have refunded my money , and claim the last person DIDNT cancel the membership, but now they have, allegedly. We'll see next year.
In the United States this is not unusual, Spectrum-TimeWarner has been doing the sane thing for years (mistype a URL, get a Spectrum search results page). Although Spectrum is certainly a company that pretty much doesn't give a damn about its customers (taking cues from Verizon, trust me), I'm just surprised that it took TalkTalk customers this long to complain.
I filed an FCC complaint (this was in the pre-Pai days) and actually got someone to call me back.
He argued with me for over an hour with the "everybody does it" argument, and I responded just as strongly "that doesn't make it right... if everyone jumps off a roof, I'm not just going to blindly follow"
I went to Google DNS after that.
I eventually ended up as a TalkTalk customer after they bought Tiscali, after that bought WorldOnline. I never really noticed this because I always used Google's Public DNS. Mainly because, at the time I did it, the DNS servers of whatever-it-was-called-at-the-time was up and down more often than a drunken fiddler's elbow during a lockin.
That said, I can't really say I'm surprised by TalkTalk being shady. I seem to recall this DNS hijacking was actually inherited, probably from Tiscali, which was very fond of doing shady things like that.
TalkTalk are the same knobs that decide to, by default, block Teamviewer on their routers because "The bad guys use it" yes, and they use other fucking apps as well. And us good support people also use Teamviewer so now everyone is staying at home, we're having to try and talk people through logging onto their router to unblock Teamviewer so we can then connect to them.
I hate TalkTalk, the dicks.
These crappy consumer services seem to introduce things that break stuff with regular monotony. Virgin break VPNs, BT break SMTP, Sky break being able to use your own router. They all seem to have one thing or another than they do, and none of them actually offer just a 'pure' internet service
You can use your own router on Sky. I did it when I was with them.
Details you need are:
Protocol/Encapsulation :- PPPoA (PPP over ATM)
Multiplexing method: VC-BASED or VC-Mux
(On some routers the above 2 settings may be combined as "PPPoA VC-Mux".)
VPI = 0
VCI = 38
Username: install@o2broadband.co.uk
Password: install
I was an ex O2 customer, but as far as I'm aware, anyone can use those details.
easiest fix: Hard code PC's DNS and DISABLE DNS Service. (1.1.1.1, 1.1.1.3, 1.0.0.3 [Cloudflare]; 4.4.4.4 [Level 3]; 208.67.222.222, 208.67.220.220 [OpenDNS]; 8.8.8.8, et. al.)
best fix: Pi-Hole (a self-contained personal DNS server) which is well worth the investment to setup the Raspberry Pi and Pi-Hole! Blocks WAY more crap then you know was even there,...
Not if its dnssec, you will know. That said I would think that if Talk Talk decided on intercepting and then hijacking plain UDP port 53 dns, the remidy would come under section three of the 1990 computer misuse act.
"Unauthorised acts with intent to impair, or with recklessness as to impairing, operation of computer, etc."
best fix: Pi-Hole (a self-contained personal DNS server) which is well worth the investment to setup the Raspberry Pi and Pi-Hole! Blocks WAY more crap then you know was even there,...
And just to prevent ISPs from pulling that hijacking trick, also use an Unbound server on that Raspberry Pi, the Pi-Hole by itself won't protect you from hijacked typing errors.
“best fix: Pi-Hole (a self-contained personal DNS server) which is well worth the investment to setup the Raspberry Pi and Pi-Hole! Blocks WAY more crap then you know was even there,...“
Bonus points for also setting up a DNS over HTTPS proxy to minimise your ISP eavesdropping on where your going to (minimise as some sites like that pirate bay are still dropped but apparently resolving it to another Cloudflare ip gets around that)
"best fix: Pi-Hole"
As others have said you don't need a RaspberryPi to run Pi-Hole. In addition to the ways already suggested, you can achieve the same functionality on a pfsense firewall by installing pfblockerNG and configuring it with the same publicly available lists that are used by pihole.
I designed and implemented a system to do this for <well known cableco> in 2006.
Optout is a doddle to do, and doesn't need to require users reboot anything at all.
Worked with TT in 2015-17 - on DNS related stuff.
If only they had asked. The optout method was pretty much public domain by then.
I have a TalkTalk Sagem router, and found it is a bit confusing. There are two DNS settings, the one to alter is TalkTalk Wifi Hub" -> "Static DNS Server Configuration" which actually sets the DNS addresses sent by DHCP to connected devices. Set those to your preferred provider. Leave the "Internet Connectivity" DNS settings on 79.79.79.79 / 79.79.79.80 so the router itself gets DNS from TalkTalk,while your devices get it from elsewhere.
Oh the sweet innocence...
I caught Sky engaging in deep packet manipulation to change the IP in DNS replies from the authoritative servers to my local servers. The only reason I can’t see TalkTalk doing similar is their technical incompetence.
I am no longer a Sky customer, obviously.
That does not need "deep packet". It is simply the same type of setup used for split-DNS. Quite often used in company setups to avoid unneeded traffic going outside when not needed since you are in the LAN. In some companies it is used to block well known bad countries, like adding the evil country domani to your local DNS and make it answer with 127.0.0.1. Quite effective.
As for your case: It is evil, but I wouldn't call it "deep inspection", that type of setup is known and used since the beginning of DNS.
Based on previous experience of the incompetent customer indifference halfwits* at WankWank, they will tell you they can't help over the problem with your email service. After a pause if about 6 months you will get a call from some nebulous twat "following up" about your "problem with email" and asking how WankWank did.
*Sorry, but I am bigging WankWank up to an unreasonable degree with that choice of words however a proper expression of my real contempt would damage your screen.
Some years ago, my then provider decided to try that one too.
Broke some scripts testing for a negative response.
I called their "service department" and lodged a "service is broken complaint". After some time they confessed and would not turn it of.
As I now had written proof, I complained to the regulator. At first they tried to say "that is a contract problem".
A called them and gave them arguments to reasses their stance.
A negative response is also a response and valid communcation so this is tampering with telecommunications and that is a criminal act here (at that time up to 10 years). They were not only the regulator but the agency tasked bringing violations against that telco act to prosecution and that officials knowing of criminal acts within their remit are required to bring them to prosecution, unless they were trying to aid and abet. So try to change the mind of the telco stat or face a criminal complaint.
4 days later these shennigans were stopped. I cannot explain why ....
Even i the UK this must fall under unlawful interception and possible tampering.
No one has mentioned that some browsers and Windows file explorer do the same, type either an invalid url or a non existent folder path and a Bing search is launched. Thus revealing your url or private folder names to Bing. And making a small typo correction impossible. Of course you can configure to prevent this but I don't recall being offered the option of opting in or out of this during Windows setup.
While this is true, there is a difference: When everything in your system which uses DNS gets f* up by your provider your can be in deep s*, VPN not working as expected, mail not working etc etc etc. The browser method, even though I hate it from the deepest bottom of my heart, is only when you actually surf around.
The better browsers have a regex in place to distinguish between typical domain typos and things you actually search. "googpe.coom" results in DNS fail, while "googpe coom" is sent to your search engine since it not a possible domain.
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