Qwest has started redirecting DNS queries to their own servers. Not because I asked them to, they did it to start pushing their own search results page when DNS queries failed (like so many others have and some still do). This new “service” is called Web.Help. In order to do this they reset my DSL line this morning (which was irritating), but they did at least provide some links on what this.
After reading through some of their information on their new “service” I found a link indicating that I could opt out (not that I ever opted in). I’m not sure what they were thinking here though, instead of the “opt out” taking me to a page where I could opt out, it took me to another documentation page on their new service. I had to dig through three or four layers of “opt out” links before I got to a page that would actually turn this off. Which of course reset my DSL connection again about 5 minutes later. We’ll see where this ends up.
The search results they were showing for failed DNS queries were from Yahoo. I wonder if Yahoo is paying Qwest to do this.
13 replies on “Qwest Redirecting DNS lookups”
Where is the opt out page?
@Kevin –
Hmmm, I failed to note which page actually had the link that worked 🙁
I was going to ask the same question. When we moved into our new home, they hit us with this redirect issue upon sign up. The announcement said basically that if we bypassed their message, within a short time they would automatically redirect our searches to their “wonderful new search” without giving me a way to opt-out.
Since the message went away, I forgot about it. Thanks for the reminder. I just checked and the opt out of Qwest Help service is the link.
From insiders, I was told that this allows them to monitor our searches, thus create profiles…and you know where that will lead. A direction I don’t want.
Thanks for the reminder!
OMG I am REALLY p.o.’d. How DARE they set me up with this sucky service that I don’t want anyway. It says on the bottom of their page “powered by yahoo”, yet the only page, so far, that I could not access was my yahoo page. I cannot access my email at all cus this stupid thing redirects me “cannot locate website” everytime. I had no problem finding the “opt out” however… hopefully, it will work, cus it hasn’t yet, it’s still “processing”. What a bunch of crap.
yay! It worked! I hope they don’t try to pull some mandatory – tough luck you are stuck with it – thing on us in the future….
Geez, I’ve been using Qwest for years and just today, I noticed this new DNS redirecting crap. Thankfully, you “beta testers” helped work out the kinks because it was only a 2 click process to opt out instead of 4 layers.
Who is your ISP? Is it qwest.net or MSN?
[…] guess this may have started a few months ago, but I just noticed today that Qwest.net, my ISP and DSL provider, has started hijacking incorrect […]
Thanks for this. This has caused many problems with users in my office and not being able to connect to Outlook while connected to the VPN. We’ve had 2 people test it so far and so far so good. Funny thing is that none of these users got an e-mail from Qwest notifying them of this. Anyway, thanks again. I think this may have resolved our problem. Freakin Qwest!!!
Here in Missouri, we have a choice between 2 major ISPs that offer DSL service. I decied to gowith Centurytel, after a very simialr service issue with SBCGlobal.
They weren’t redirecting us or anyting like that. But they were doing some shady practices and then providing the infamous “opt-out” when we never opted in to begin with.
Thanks a lot for this post. I have been experiencing a lot of issues with the VPN at work in the past few weeks because of strange DNS issues. We even tried to hard-code all the DNS entires and that didn’t help us at all. I went ahead with the opt-out and after about 3 minutes I lost all internet connection, so I rebooted the router/modem and when it came back up I was finally able to access our internal network resources over the VPN without having to use the IP addresses to gain access. The strangest thing with this experience was that the VPN used to work just fine, but then all of a sudden I wasn’t able to get any internal work address to resove to anything but a qwest ip address (63.226.162.129).
Thanks again,
Matt
Thank you for this. I just started to experience very slow page lookup. Very odd because I have the Moto 3347 modem set for opendns. I run scutil –dns and get this: Mac OS X 10.5 setup
DNS configuration
resolver #1
nameserver[0] : 208.67.222.222
nameserver[1] : 208.67.220.220
nameserver[2] : 205.171.3.26
nameserver[3] : 205.171.2.26
4 dns servers? Really. I opted out of this, lets see what happens.
When I clicked on the opt out link, it either didn’t work or it took me to an error page. I was so livid I posted a complaint on http://www.complaints.com.