Ah love threads like these. BenMcr does his moonlighting as VM PR man on the forum, a couple of people say they don't see the issue, others bring out the usual 'tin foil hat' related stuff.
It's a pain in the arse in that it breaks VPNs, and it can be very inconvenient when one is actually looking to see if something resolves, some applications rely on NXDomain being returned. With your 8 years of experience and various bits of paper webcrawler I would have thought you'd appreciate the importance of adhering to standards, especially when applications, quite rightly, make assumptions that these will be adhered to and function in certain ways.
It's a money grab by VM, nothing else. If frustrated a swift opt-out is the way to go. Several ISPs have done it throughout the world, to the huge annoyance of some customers. That said they've every right to be annoyed, in a perfect world we really should be asked before VM set about breaking some applications deploying non-standard configurations.
I
seriously doubt there are privacy implications here though, but it is a pain in the backside in that one could waste a not inconsiderable amount of time troubleshooting to eventually find the cause is Virgin's fiddling with DNS.
Mercifully doesn't affect me as I use OpenDNS, opted out from the automagic search naturally but it really could have been handled so much better - some notice would have been nice.
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*Cracks knuckles*
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Originally Posted by BenMcr
Unsurprisingly the two are linked.
VM will want to make a certain amout of profit - they do this either through increasing subscription fees or through other means
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Such as reducing subscription fees for 50Mbit? They make as much profit as the market and their costs permit, not what they 'want to'. They set targets of course, but these are required to be realistic in the context of the operating market. If companies could just decide on their profit and then make it by one means or another they would have total market power. It's an attempt to increase indirect revenues same as everyone else who has deployed this gack because the market won't tolerate price increases and indeed in the case of 50Mbit evidently requires a price reduction.
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Yet when VM do offer an opt-in for Value Added servce - like the BB M uplift - everyone complains because they aren't doing it automatically!
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Don't be so obtuse. This isn't a value add, it's a money grab. If Phorm were fully deployed on an opt-out basis you'd presumably be criticising people for complaining about that not being opt-in as well. The 2-10 upgrade was purely value add and had no negative implications for customers receiving it, this can. As I said before people working from home on a large number of VPN clients absolutely require that their 'public' DNS gives an NXDomain response so that Windows will fail over to their company-specific internal DNS to resolve internal names.
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That was a requirement of PHORM not this redirect. The two are not the same. There is no storing of user information
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How exactly do you know what the third party are doing with the information?
Seriously Ben leave the PR to Alex B and Asam A.