Re: updated iceweasel firefox now hijacked from homepage to ads!

[Håkon Alstadheim <hakon@alstadheim.priv.no>]

Michael Marsh wrote:
> On 2/27/07, Nyizsnyik Ferenc <nyizsa@bluebottle.com> wrote:
>> http://firefox/ redirects to http://www.mozilla.com/en-US/ .
>> (Using Firefox 1.0.4 in Sarge.) This feature may be (likely) missing
>> from Iceweasel.
>
> No, it's a DNS issue.  If "firefox" isn't found, the browser will
> generally try "firefox.com", which sends you to the appropriate
> mozilla server.  It's possible that some ISPs are responding to all
> lookups with a "valid" address, which just happens to be an
> advertising site if there's no actual resolution.
>
I recently stumbled over a partial work-around if you are running your
own cacheing named, don't remember where I saw it. Set up bind as usual,
forwarding requests to the (broken) DNS-server at your ISP, then put the
following in named.conf:
zone "COM" { type delegation-only; };
zone "NET" { type delegation-only; };
This will make named not accept resource-records directly in top-level
zones ".com" and ".net", i.e. if there is no forwarded authority, named
will not accept the greedy ISPs suggestion that their advertising-server
is the correct address of your mistyped-url.

Now, zone "FIREFOX" is not mentioned there in my snippet above, so the
erroneous "domain" firefox would still slip through. I don't know if
`zone "." { type delegation-only }' would mess you up and/or give you
the desired NXDOMAIN (i.e non-existent-domain) reply. There are maybe
some legitimate records served directly by the root name servers that
you would loose access to. I believe it is worth a try though. Try
googling on the snippet, that should give you more info such as which
version of bind is required for this to work.

-- 
Håkon Alstadheim