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[PLUG] Re: Don't buy Belkin.
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On Fri, 7 Nov 2003, Eugene Smiley wrote:
> gabriel rosenkoetter wrote:
> > Their IP routers are carefully designed to exactly NOT route IP
> > traffic under certain circumstances. And produce advertising
> > instead.
> >
> > http://tinyurl.com/u4ea [1]
>
> That's just downright scary. It's not scary enough to make me take a
> hammer to my Belkin USB hubs or USB switch, but it will keep me from
> buying any new Belkin gear.
Looks like they got the message. This was on nanog:
Date: Fri, 7 Nov 2003 22:32:25 -0800 (PST)
From: william@elan.net
To: nanog@merit.edu
Subject: Re: Web hijacking by router - a new method of advertisement by Belkin
On Fri, 7 Nov 2003, Bradley Dunn wrote:
> Peter Galbavy wrote:
> > I hope that the US - the largest single market for technology products I
> > assume - has a similar bunch of useful [consumer] law.
>
> I don't. Who needs a bunch of laws (and accompanying bureaucrats and
> lawyers) when market pressure dealt with the issue quickly and forcefully.
No doubt. But still it should have been clear to them this is not allowed
in the first place... And besides that haven't we just seen how "market
pressure" works in case of Verisign where there were getting millions of
dollars of extra income and did not care what others say!
Btw - here is Belkin's apology posted on usenet:
"From: Eric Deming (ericd@belkin.com)
Subject: Re: [OT-evil marketing] Belkin does Verislime one better - router spam!
Newsgroups: news.admin.net-abuse.email
Date: 2003-11-07 20:00:08 PST
All,
We at Belkin apologize for the recent trouble our customers have
experienced with the wireless router/browser redirect issue. We
unintentionally overlooked the effect this feature would have. We
never intended to compromise the trust of our customers, and we never
intend to do so in the future.
We are taking responsibility for this, and we will be offering
firmware fixes early next week. We do not have exact details yet as we
are still working on them, and will continue to work on them over the
weekend. What we can tell you now is that each Router's firmware that
incorporates Parental Control as an option will be changed.
I'll keep posting as things develop. Stay tuned..."
I have to note that first email post by the same person from Belkin has
been removed from google (the post where he revealed why the did it in
the first place). This was surprising as it would seem belkin did not
know usenet is not google-only service so if it appeared at google groups,
many many others would have had copy locally at thousands of places. And
for those who did not, somebody made sure an extra copy was available on
the web at:
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=85076&threshold=1&commentsort=0&tid=153&mode=thread&cid=7419497
I'm not sure if its the hundreds of people saying they will never buy from
belkin again or if its the actual legal problems (what they did probably
broke laws and if it did not it would make them liable in certain cases
of redirection happen at very inconvient moment) that forced belkin to react
so quickly, but I'm happy they are doing it and taking responsibilityh and
hopefully this will establish good precident in case somebody else was
considering something similar (i.e. don't you dare imitate verisign!)
Would be interesting to see if their current advertisement (every 8 hours)
page would now be replaced with "We're so sorry that you're seeing this
page, please make sure to download our latest patch so your router never
bother you again and would keep us out of legal trouble" message...
--
William Leibzon
Elan Networks
william@elan.net
___________________________________________________________________________
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