[AktiviX-discuss] UK ISP's transparently proxy and censor wikipedia - How to tell ?

[Paul M]

On Sun, 2008-12-07 at 20:41 +0000, Alan Dawson wrote:

> "Interestingly, Virgin Media (well, the part that used to be NTL)
> simplifies this for themselves by hijacking DNS requests; by which I
> mean it doesn't matter what you set your DNS to (such as OpenDNS) - all
> DNS requests go to the ISP DNS servers.
> 
> I ran into this a few years back when I was using NTL, which I now do not."

They claim not to be doing this anymore:
http://blog.opendns.com/2006/08/03/isps-limit-dns-changes-talk/

in this case only 1 page was blocked so I'm not sure how DNS would come
into this particular picture -- it was done with HTTP proxying.

> 
> I'm aware that AOL used to ( still do ? ) transparently proxy port 25 (
> smtp ) to their own SMTP servers ( ie no SMTP auth or STARTTLS was
> available to people from aol dialup/broadband )


Some email providers have multi-port proxies to get around this
i.e. http://www.fastmail.fm/docs/faqparts/ExternalMail.htm
proxying on port 443 (https) is particularly useful as it's almost never
proxied .
> 
> How can I tell if my ISP is fiddling with my packets ?

tcptraceroute (http://michael.toren.net/code/tcptraceroute/)
or tracetcp (http://tracetcp.sourceforge.net/) on windows should do the
job. The latter has a good page on detecting proxies.
http://tracetcp.sourceforge.net/usage_proxy.html

Paul M


-- 
      "There are no innocent bystanders,
what were they doing there in the first place?"
             William S. Burroughs