{"id":1924,"date":"2003-11-07T09:23:55","date_gmt":"2003-11-08T01:23:55","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/michaelhans.com\/eclecticism\/2003\/11\/07\/belkin-routers-hijacking-websurfing\/"},"modified":"2019-12-06T10:33:27","modified_gmt":"2019-12-06T18:33:27","slug":"belkin-routers-hijacking-websurfing","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/michaelhans.com\/eclecticism\/2003\/11\/07\/belkin-routers-hijacking-websurfing\/","title":{"rendered":"Belkin routers hijacking websurfing"},"content":{"rendered":"

Belkin<\/a> just lost any chance of getting business from me in the future.<\/p>\n

It seems that with the latest firmware update to their routers, they have implemented a “feature” enabling unexpected, intrusive, unwanted advertising. Every eight hours, one http request (the information your browser sends when requesting a particular web page) is hijacked and redirected to an advertising page<\/a> for a new parental control feature.<\/p>\n

\n After the upgrade, on all our systems (wired or wireless), valid<\/em> http requests are, for certain values of occasionally, redirected to a Belkin ad page!!!!\n<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

><\/p>\n

\n […]\n<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

><\/p>\n

\n It seems the router now supports a parental control and the market droids at Belkin got the bright idea of equipping the router with intrusive nagware. Of course, I have this strange notion that routers should pass data unmolested by marketeers! There is a “No Thanks” link on the page. Now I have to opt-out from commercials from my router??!!\n<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

This behavior was later confirmed by Eric Deming<\/del><\/a>, from Belkin.<\/p>\n

Update:<\/ins> Eric Deming’s post has mysteriously disappeared from Google Groups. Damn, I knew I should have quoted from it as well.<\/p>\n

Update 2:<\/ins> There is another post from Eric apologizing and claiming that there will be a patch soon<\/a>. I’m still curious about the earlier post that suddenly went missing.<\/p>\n

Update 3:<\/ins> Bingo. One of the posts in the \/. thread<\/a> about this contains the full text of Eric’s first message<\/a>.<\/p>\n

This is nasty. At best, it’s low-down, slimy, intrusive, annoying marketing. At worst, it could cause everything from difficulties with web-based systems (imagine having the redirect kick in in the middle of a transaction on your bank’s website) to possible security holes (such as hackers taking control of the redirect [through affecting the routers, Belkin’s server, or DNS servers in between] and including a trojan or virus in the new target page).<\/p>\n

Bye-bye, Belkin.<\/p>\n

(via The Register<\/a><\/em>, via the usual suspects)

Belkin’s routers hijack one http request every eight hours and redirect the user’s browser to an advertising page. Not good.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2038],"tags":[65],"class_list":["post-1924","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-tech","tag-technology"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/michaelhans.com\/eclecticism\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1924","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/michaelhans.com\/eclecticism\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/michaelhans.com\/eclecticism\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/michaelhans.com\/eclecticism\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/michaelhans.com\/eclecticism\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1924"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/michaelhans.com\/eclecticism\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1924\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/michaelhans.com\/eclecticism\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1924"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/michaelhans.com\/eclecticism\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1924"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/michaelhans.com\/eclecticism\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1924"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}