On Wed, Jul 14, 2010 at 10:23 PM,  <[email protected]> wrote:
>
>> while the sensible thing would be to implement it using dnses, this is
>> not how they've done it. The magic is in the proxy. And just for the
>> record, it wouldnt be just typos that would end up getting caught. If
>> you thought a company had a ".com.sg" (not exactly a typo in the sense
>> of somebody "never" doing it!) but they didnt, you would get the page
>> too.
>
> That can't be (wholly) right. Starhub operates a transparent proxy.  If you
> can't resolve the invalid hostname to an IP address, you wouldn't even be
> able to connect to the website's IP and the transparent proxy never comes
> into play.
>

oh yeah u're right! That would sound logical. Except what happened
that led me to my conclusion. Basically, I could not resolve the ip at
the command line - but if i i tried keying in that same address in the
browser, I would get to the "helpful" page??? some funkiness there
indeed.

So finally decided to do some sniffing, and yes, there is "magic" in the dns...

Goes like this:

=============
cat /etc/resolv.conf
# Generated by NetworkManager
domain local
search local
nameserver 218.186.1.38
nameserver 202.156.1.48
========


3 tries of (in my case) 'samsung.com.sg' before going for 'samsung.com.sg.local'

21:10:23.183582 IP x.x.x.x.46328 > 218.186.1.38.53: 19239+ A?
samsung.com.sg. (32)
21:10:23.198872 IP 218.186.1.38.53 > x.x.x.x.46328: 19239 ServFail 0/0/0 (32)
21:10:23.199158 IP x.x.x.x.38995 > 202.156.1.48.53: 19239+ A?
samsung.com.sg. (32)
21:10:23.226096 IP 202.156.1.48.53 > x.x.x.x.38995: 19239 ServFail 0/0/0 (32)
21:10:23.236542 IP x.x.x.x.36645 > 218.186.1.38.53: 19239+ A?
samsung.com.sg. (32)
21:10:23.258488 IP 218.186.1.38.53 > x.x.x.x.36645: 19239 ServFail 0/0/0 (32)
21:10:23.265708 IP x.x.x.x.57413 > 202.156.1.48.53: 19239+ A?
samsung.com.sg. (32)
21:10:23.297979 IP 202.156.1.48.53 > x.x.x.x.57413: 19239 ServFail 0/0/0 (32)
21:10:23.300742 IP x.x.x.x.33393 > 218.186.1.38.53: 11158+ A?
samsung.com.sg.local. (38)
21:10:23.606917 IP 218.186.1.38.53 > x.x.x.x.33393: 11158 1/0/0 (74)

Get an ip of our "magic server" (204.232.231.43). Browser connects
with hostname 'samsung.com.sg', and is 302 redirected to Location:
http://search.maxonline.com.sg/index.php?origURL=http://samsung.com.sg/

-jf


--
"Every nonfree program has a lord, a master --
and if you use the program, he is your master."
    --Richard Stallman

"It's so hard to write a graphics driver that open-sourcing it would not help."
    -- Andrew Fear, Software Product Manager, NVIDIA Corporation
http://kerneltrap.org/node/7228

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