Mar 15 2008

Road Runner DNS hijack causing slow web pages

Are you a Road Runner customer and noticed that it takes forever to load web pages lately?

If so, you can thank Time Warner for enabling a new feature on your internet service, without your permission, that automatically hijacks your internet traffic in order for them to try to make more money from you.

Road Runner is hijacking failed DNS requests — when you accidentally type “googlec.om” instead of “google.com”, for example — and sending their own content back down to your web browser, unsolicited.

It’s essentially spam. Road Runner is spamming their customers. Worse, it’s a violation of trust between an ISP and its customers.

But the much bigger problem here, and one that really illustrates why Road Runner shouldn’t be screwing around with stuff like this, is this little feature has completely hosed their DNS, and is causing delays, in my house at least, of anywhere between 1 and 5 seconds in loading new pages.

After some quick searching I found this guy’s post on how to opt-out of their DNS hijack:

The opt out feature is “hidden” behind the rather metaphysical sounding “Why am I here?” link that shows up after Road Runner redirects your initial web query.

And viola, pages are loading in no time again. So if you’ve been having problems, give that a shot.

Verizon and their FiOS service can’t get here soon enough.

  • Jason Rakowski | Mar 15 2008

    Good Layout and design. I like your blog. I just added your RSS feed to my Google News Reader. .

    Jason Rakowski

  • MT.Net | Mar 16 2008

    Earthlink started doing this months ago. I put up with it for a few weeks, then discovered a pair of Earthlink DNS servers I could use that acted normally.

    I don’t think there’s any excuse for this. They can say “we’re saving you from phishing sites,” but then they turn around and phish you themselves.

    Bah.

  • Grayson Shuler | Mar 18 2008

    I can’t say how awesome it is I came across your website. My internet through Roadrunner (I’m on the Greensboro, NC TWC system) all of a sudden last Thursday became excruciating slow. It would just sit at the status of “Looking up yahoo.com…” or whatever website and half the time it would load, half the time it would just timeout. Also as of Thursday, it started the whole mess of forwarding me to a RoadRunner website when I mistyped the URL. I had a friend in Burlington, NC who said they were having the same problem.

    So I spent 2 1/2 hours on the phone with Time Warner on Sunday trying to figure out what was going on. Of course, I told them over and over it was something with the DNS, I could just tell. But they refused to say that and said their DNS servers had not changed and everything was fine. Then towards the end, they started saying that I had an actual computer problem and I needed to contact my computer manufacturer. I told them that I had tried 2 computers, 1 Mac and an iPod Touch and they were all doing the same thing, it had nothing to do with my computer or my wireless router. They refused to listen to me and I, out of frustration, just hung up.

    I was beginning to give up on finding a solution, when I came across your website and the link you provided. So not only did I opt out of the RoadRunner redirect, I also changed my DNS to OpenDNS. WOW, what a huge difference! It’s back to *real* high-speed internet again. So I go to bed happy tonight. Thanks for posting and helping others like me find a solution to this VERY annoying problem from TWC Roadrunner.

  • jeff | Mar 20 2008

    @Grayson glad I could help! It certainly has been frustrating. And actually today it seems I’m having more DNS slowness.

  • Buck | Mar 29 2008

    Jeff,

    You are amazing. I’ve been really disappointed with the slowness of DNS lookups with my “Turbo” service since it was installed a week ago — now it’s acting like it should! I knew it was a DNS problem because downloading files, etc. went very quickly — but the whole system would just sit there and sleep everytime I tried something new — now that I’ve “opted out” I’ll see how it goes, but it already seems faster. If it’s still not satisfactory, I’ll use the OpenDNS stuff.

    Thanks again for getting the word out — this is a real major lifesaver and I bet half the phone techs have no idea what a DNS server is anyway!

    Way to go.

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