1. Their 'search' redirection was bad enough. I make sure to tell all my friends (the few that don't know any better) to set manual DNS on their routers to OpenDNS.

Posted at 11:16PM on May 12th 2008 by AndrewNeo

2. No news to me, I noticed this roughly six months ago here in mid Michigan. Soon as a saw the first redirect, I changed my router's DNS servers. Problem solved.

Posted at 11:18PM on May 12th 2008 by Tuckie

3. I'm on charter. I actually talked to one of there tech people once, and they said DHCP servers on my trunk where faulty. It took them a day to fix it.

I've had problems with them a lot over the years, but they're the cheapest provider here over 1Mbps. I get digital phone, 5Mbps internet, and a decent TV(which I never watch) channel selection for a low price I won't solicit. They also have 10Mbps internet.

Posted at 11:47PM on May 12th 2008 by TJHooker

4. i cant **STAND** charter!!! I have charter and it's been a pain in the rear since day one. flaky connection, slooow, screwy customer support (half their representatives don't know the DNS server numbers). I wish we could just get DSL here, but, for some strange reason, we're "out of range"...even though we're **right in the middle of the friggin city** !!! and what's worse is they neglected to tell us that until *AFTER* we signed a one year contract. we had to PAY to CANCEL our service and switch back to clumsy ol' charter!! i **HATE** ISPs! with a PASSION!!!

Posted at 12:00AM on May 13th 2008 by andrew

5. color picture!! burns teh eyes.

Posted at 12:05AM on May 13th 2008 by tjhow

6. simple solution is to go OpenDNS and then turn off the typo correction. This knocks out their "Guide" page and should give you back your non resolution errors.

NOTE: Have not tried this. I use OpenDNS but have left the typo correction on. Stupid clumsy "cmo" goes back to "com" which is nice.

Posted at 12:11AM on May 13th 2008 by Hal Hockersmith

7. I actually like charter. I have the 10Mbps connection and its one of the fastest around here. No matter who is my ISP I always use OpenDNS.

Posted at 1:09AM on May 13th 2008 by Stephen

8. Charter is an evil company. They have the worst service of any company with which I've ever had to do business; even worse than fast food restaurants. When I cancel my service with them, they sent my account to collections for not returning a cable box. The thing is: I never had a cable box. Ever. This kind of crap coming from them does not surprise me in the least.

Posted at 1:13AM on May 13th 2008 by Matthew

9. As a painfully honest charter field service tech, I can honestly say I'm not surprised by this. In fact, I've seen and dealt with it for months in our area, and routinely suggested/shown customers how to use opendns instead. Upper management is know for making less than intelligent decisions, usually only affecting us poor saps internally though. Customer support is painful even to us field techs sometimes, but thankfully there are the select that know what's going on.

Posted at 1:59AM on May 13th 2008 by cabler_elf

10. And why not use the root nameservers?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/root_nameserver

Posted at 3:33AM on May 13th 2008 by akejoda_868

11. This is nothing new; Time-Warner Cable does exactly the same thing.

Posted at 7:57AM on May 13th 2008 by MooglyGuy

12. @akejoda_868

1. Because you lose the benefit of cached entires that are less hops away. So lookups are slower.
2. It would not be polite to the root servers for everyone to start doing that. It would be like asking the CEO of a company every dumb little question you have when some low level supervisor could do it for you. There is a chain of command you should follow. If everyone starts wasting the time of the CEO (maybe board of directors would be better since its distributed) there starts to be a break down farther down the chain.

Just use OpenDNS.

Posted at 8:25AM on May 13th 2008 by ryan

13. This has come up in the past on other sites too. Verizon has been doing it for a while it seems (link below to a discussion on the matter) and Time Warner has been doing it for at least the last year. Time Warner also offers an opt out that at least works for web browsing and ping, but I haven't explored past that much really. Their response when I wrote them regarding the "broken" nature of the DNS was (as I recall) more or less "We offer an opt out, so deal with it". I'd really love to have a viable option to switch to for internet, but I'm not seeing much out there and bullshit like this is quickly getting to me.

Link to discussion on Verizon's actions.
http://blogs.msdn.com/oldnewthing/archive/2008/02/20/7806912.aspx

Posted at 10:04AM on May 13th 2008 by Blind

14. I'm glad I've got Qwest ISP!!!

Posted at 10:40AM on May 13th 2008 by Mike

15. I don't mind Charter, since they do have one of the most open and insecure networks. I love modem hacking :-)

Posted at 10:40AM on May 13th 2008 by longbow486

16. The opt-out is absolutely useless. If you're using anything but a web browser, it doesn't do anything. Their f-ed up system screwed up our VPN. We have internal (web and non-web) servers that suddenly became unreachable for our users because their primary DNS was resolving to the damn search page instead of falling back to the VPNs DNS and finding the internal server. It broke mail, internal web sites, etc all broke. It took about 2 days to figure out why. F you charter.

Posted at 10:52AM on May 13th 2008 by Empty Jay

17. @ryan, re: #2

Yeah, it's like that, except that the root servers actually know the answer. ;)

Posted at 11:03AM on May 13th 2008 by ivan256

18. Charter "communications" sucks azz. They have been pulling this **** for quite some time in my area. And it only is worse with windows if you are trying to VPN to work because of the farked up retarded way that windows does dns resolution order. So when I am trying to resolve a machine at work, charter intercepts the farcking request and gives their dumb freakin "I think you are lost, child. Come into my gingerbread house of paid for advertisers so I can pillage your pockets" instead of simply saying, "umm .. I don't know" so the DNS res can move on to the next interface so I can get my FREAKIN WORK DONE so I have more time to read Hack-A-Day!!!

Posted at 11:16AM on May 13th 2008 by buzzkill

19. Good call on OpenDNS, I don't why I didn't think of that before.

Posted at 12:01PM on May 13th 2008 by DietFig

20. http://www.opendns.com/features/guide/

Since open DNS does the same thing, does it's op out work across the board or no?

Posted at 1:07PM on May 13th 2008 by Blind