Eircom Hijacking my Browser!!

egan007

Originally posted by Moojuice
Hey Guys,

Forgive me if this is in the wrong forum, but everytime I load up my web browser I am presented with an advertisment for Eircom broadband and I have to click a button to continue to my desired site. I cannot stand eircom and their rip-off ****ty products so this is the last straw. Is there something on my machine causing this os is it something on their end? Either wayhow do I get rid of it?

Thanks guys,

hi just download spybot search and destroy
search for it in google and install
it will get rid of your problem - it's free

mickeyboymel

Your web surfing must be pretty limited then!! Most web sites have some or all of the above.

I only get popups on the eircom.net homepage, on the rare occassion I visit it,never any other site. I have cookies, popups etc blocked during normal web browsing, and only allow cookies from forums or shopping sites that require them to remember your basket, login details etc.

This only restricts my browising on a small amount of sites where every single image tries to load a cookie.

I use Norton Internet Security, which you can "train" by rejecting all cookies and then deciding which ones you want to allow.It can be a bit tedious when you first install it,trying to identify which cookies to allow, but once set up. it is great. I never allow site counter or advertising cookies through at all.It is also set to block all adverts on webpages, including google ads on this site which I found a little harder to get round. You can also specify restrictions on any webpage such as popups,adverts,information about your browser and last site visited, flash,java,animation etc etc

I also have Internet Explorer and Firefox configured in a similar way to only allow through thru cookies I want, or allow in the first place.

It rarely effects my browsing, and makes my Spybot and Adaware programs nearly obselete.

I find the pages load much quicker with no ads, especially as I am on dialup.

mickeyboymel

I found a way around it :

Set your eircomnet homepage to http://home.eircom.net/?refresh=1 and it will bypass the popup, and lead you directly to the normal homepage.

god's toy

Originally posted by ElNino
I use the Google toolbar which has a pop-up blocker built in

The Google toolbar is filled to the brim with spyware, it’s associated with Gater for god's sake!
I’d uninstall that one ASAP.

Moojuice

cheers for al your replies guys. My home page is not set to Eircom but to google and the pop ups still happen (te whole browser is taken over by an eircom advertisment) although they seem to have stopped now. I hope that is the end of it.

QBall

Originally posted by Moojuice
dont bother ringing Techsupport to complain they dont care, trust me I know this first hand (experience and all that).

I would say don't bother ringing technical support unless you have a technical problem. If you are ringing to complain, ring the customer service/complaints dept/whatever they call it these days.

Before you ring, it's a very good idea to read the terms and conditions that govern the service. If the popups are covered by it (which I suspect they would be) then you probably won't get anywhere. If you feel the need to vent your anger at them, a well written letter to someone senior will have more of an effect than an angry phone call. (Hint: If someone is junior enough to be answering the phone then they won't be able to do much for you.) If you feel you don't get an adequate response from them, go to ComReg, although I'd say ComReg will probably do nothing if the ads are covered in the T&Cs.

The bottom line is: Unless they're breaking the terms and conditions of the service, your best (only?) option is to move to another provider. Before you sign up with an[other] operator read the terms and conditions of their service. Then read them again. Only when you are completely sure you understand what the service entails should you actually sign up.

If you buy apples that come in a box saying "GREEN APPLES" on the outside you look very stupid saying "But I wanted red apples!".

Some day I'm going to write a Complaining HOWTO...

Disclosure: I did tech support for Indigo back in the day, and was assimilated by Eircom before I left.

Moojuice

Q, as did I, oh the shame

Nietzschean

Originally posted by god's toy
The Google toolbar is filled to the brim with spyware, it’s associated with Gater for god's sake!
I’d uninstall that one ASAP.

http://www.free-web-browsers.com/browser_extensions.shtml

hrmmmmm unless you select googlebar to send back data it wont...i don't see where your getting that info from.........

god's toy

Form a friend who works for Symantec.

Nietzschean

The spyware is optional, and as such like its yer own fault if u turn it on

BrianD

I didn't think that the notorious Gator product range and Google were connected? Is this true?

I emailed them asking them to stop spamming me everytime

I don't think you can class a pop-up as spam in the true meaning of the word. Spam generally refers to unsolicited e-mail.

vibe666

would the muppet's who keep telling people not to set their homepage to eircom's stop for one second and read some of the fvcking posts please. better yet I'll make it nice and simple.

this is not a pop-up, it's eircom re-directing DNS requests and it doesn't matter what spyware removing you do, it doesn't matter what your homepage is set to, what browser you use, what pop-up blockers you use and it doesn't matter how clever you think you are. if you use eircom's flatrate service and consequentially their DNS servers you will get these ads whether you like it or not.

FFS just read more than one damn post before you give everyone one of your little pearls of infinite wisdom.

on a slightly lighter note, I recieved this on friday afternoon:

Dear xxxxxxxxxxx,

I refer to your recent email dated May 26th 2004 on the eircom net customer
service announcement.

In line with Eircom net's contact policy as outlined in the Terms and
Conditions of our Flat Rate Internet Access product at paragraph 11 which
was made available to you when you registered for the service, Eircom net
reserves the right to contact all customers with information on subjects
such as service announcements and service enhancements on the products
provided to its customers.

This particular customer announcement relates to a specific free service
enhancement, which is available to you at no additional cost for a limited
time only.

Following your request we will be glad to remove this particular customer
announcement from your account. Please note however, that under our terms
and conditions of service, we may contact you in the future with service
announcements which we understand may be of relevance and interest to you.

For further information on our customer contact policy please click
http://home.eircom.net/products/flatrate/terms

Kind Regards,

eircom.net customer service

Abuse Department
eircom net

so at least if you give out to the right people about it you'll get somewhere.

send emails of complaint and requests to be removed to janet DOT hand AT eircom DOT net (wouldn't want her to get spammed would I?);)

mickeyboymel

What a lovely attitude vibe666,must be great to be God Almighty and know everything, did you take that attitude with Eircom in your Email?

I was responding to a queston regarding my internet browsing when I discussed firewalls and the like.

Yes,I realise now on further research that it is not related to the homepage,but there is a similar pop up advertising broadband,appearing there which happened to coincide with the DNS problem,and it is easy to confuse the two,however,I do not feel I deserve such an attack.

Abuse department of Eircom? I think I might contact the abuse department of boards.ie

stereo_steve

Mickeyboymel, its not vibe's fault your slow. Stop taking it out on him. He explained numerous times.

This eircom spamming really irritates me and I am off to write an email of complaint now as well. I'll let you know how it goes.

Gavin

Originally posted by vibe666
would the muppet's who keep telling people not to set their homepage to eircom's stop for one second and read some of the fvcking posts please. better yet I'll make it nice and simple.

You presented the information and the facts. You don't need to do any more, leave off the insults. I don't want any replies to this comment, or any other replies in the same vein.

Gav

Fabritzo

It seems to me that whoever put up the auto-refresh idea was on the right track.
For example if one has their homepage as www.boards.ie, change it to http://www.boards.ie/?refresh=1

It obviously takes a couple of seconds longer to load up the page but no more mr. annoying free broadband ad....who in their right mind would sign up for free broadband like :rolleyes:

The above will not work if you click a link that opens a new window or if you type in the url yourself. Perhaps try typing in the url hit enter and hit F5. For the noobs out there F5 will refresh the browser window.

Vibe's route seems more rewarding though.

Congratulations on getting some feedback from them.

Tenshot

While I haven't been plagued by these pop-ups yet (DSL user), a friend of mine was complaining about them two days ago. I didn't understand what they were on about until I came across this thread.

One misnomer though: people are describing it as DNS hijacking. This is pretty unlikely - Windows caches DNS entries locally, so if a DNS entry was temporarily hijacked, it would remain hijacked for the duration of the user's session, which would prevent the original web page ever loading at all.

More likely, it's being handled by Eircom's transparent web proxy. Incredibly obnoxious behaviour for a subscription service.

vibe666

Originally posted by Fabritzo
It seems to me that whoever put up the auto-refresh idea was on the right track.
For example if one has their homepage as www.boards.ie, change it to http://www.boards.ie/?refresh=1

That's not going to make a difference I'm afraid. it's not just when you open your browser, it can happen on any page you visit, and has been popping up in most new browser windows.

also, sorry for the earlier outburst, but it really gets on my nerves when people comment on something without reading what the thread is about in the first place, and this eircom thing has been getting on my tits.

apologies anyway.

Gavin

Originally posted by Tenshot

One misnomer though: people are describing it as DNS hijacking. This is pretty unlikely - Windows caches DNS entries locally, so if a DNS entry was temporarily hijacked, it would remain hijacked for the duration of the user's session, which would prevent the original web page ever loading at all.

That's not exactly correct, to be pedantic about it. By using a very low TTL on the DNS entry when returned to the client, the entry will not be stored long in the cache, if at all. The same method is used by load-balancing networks like Akamai, so as to shift traffic from server to server seamlessly.

I've heard from a mate on the connection that he was having troubles with different services, whilst on eircom, since they started advertising. Using ssh was one, which would be in keeping with DNS hi-jacking being used.

Mind you, it could still be a transparent proxy alright.

Either way, to all the confused folks as stated already, it is not dependant whatsoever on what software you may or may not have installed on your pc.

Is is not spyware, adware, eircom homepage or anything like that and it seems that the only way to get it to stop is to ask, eircom to stop. An alternative, if it is DNS hi-jacking, would be to use a different DNS server.

Gav

Tenshot

Hmm ... good point, Verb. I'm not sure that Windows XP respects the TTL for its local cache (see 'ipconfig /displaydns') but if it did, it could certainly work as you say.

Re problems with other local services, a friend was seeing issues with POP3 polling, around about the time this all started. More info in this thread.

vibe666

i've been having similar problems with recieving emails in outlook since it started. admittedly it wasn't straight away, but over the weekend i couldn't recieve mail at all.

although there was some network traffic while the send/recv was in progress (about 15kbps down) so it's definately trying to do something. sending messages is still fine, it's just recieving thats the problem.


I've been over the usual virus scanner, firewall etc. and as i can send it's not a complete lack of connectivity as far as I can tell, but some sort of timeout, but not in the usual form. I'm well accustomed to the 0x800CCCOC, D & E errors you normally get with Outlook and OE, but this is new to me.

Initially I thought it might be due to some virii in my POP mailbox but I've since removed them (several 68k mails in the last 2 or 3 days) and even though they are all gone I'm still having the same problems.

I might just delete and recreate the account in Outlook, but it's a pain in the hole cos there's 200 odd mails there (I keep copies of important mails on the server for when I'm out and about) which on dialup will take some time to download. might just bite the bullet and do it.

thinking about it I might change the mail server details to the IP address of the server and see if that makes a difference, it's been known to help occasionally.

159.134.198.135 if anyone else is having trouble recieving their eircom mail.

I might well just tell them to feck off and sign up with IOLBB and be done with it, especially given the current offer. only problem is, I'm going to be working in Limerick for the next couple of months, so I'm not going to get much use out of it. Not sure if they'll still be offering good incentives to sign up by then though. oh well.

vibe666

OK, after a little bit of wangling and chatting to some people in the know (a couple of the smarter people in eircom.net support [yes there are still some left]) you should be able to fix the email problems by flushing the dns cache and manually assigning the dns server ip addresses in tcp/ip settings.

quick guide:

make sure your internet conection is not active.

open a dos window by clicking start > run and typing 'cmd' and clicking OK.

type in 'ipconfig /flushdns' and hit enter.

close the dos window and go into network & dialup connections. right click on your eircom flatrate connection and choose 'properties'.

go to the networking tab and double click tcp/ip. leave the top option set to 'obtain an IP address automatically', but in the bottom option change the setting to 'use the following DNS server addresses'. in the two white boxes put the numbers 159.134.237.6 (in the top one) and 159.134.248.17 (in the bottom).

reboot for good measure (not strictly necessary, but can't hurt) and try your connection/email.

it won't stop you getting the broadband adverts, but it should fix any mail problems, and it didn't cost you 74c per minute for me to tell you.

Oh, and apparently it's been happening to bucket loads of people since they started doing it, so anyone at eircom who told you they didn't know anything about it is either stupid, lazy or lying.