Re: Micro$oft wants to dominate the world!??

[Matt Hite <mh_vulndev () ibexa com>]

Not too far off topic, but a bit:

I spoke with a porn site operator a few months ago whose scam wasn't
the porn he was peddling, but rather convincing unsuspecting 
surfers to download a "porn viewer" from his site.  This "viewer" did
nothing more than replace the IE auto.search.msn.com functionality
with a redirect to a search engine on which he received referrer 
compensation.  The end result was that he made money every time
someone made a typo when pulling up a page in IE.

--Matt

On Mon, Aug 27, 2001 at 10:15:36PM +0200, Syzop wrote:
> When you type a non-existing domain name in internet explorer
> you get redirected to some auto.search.msn.com thing....
> I don't know when this was introduced, but AFAIK this was in
> IE5 and not in IE4... Anyway, normally you get some (stupid)
> general error page (from your local hd?).. but now you really get a
> page online:
> == <snip> ==
> "We can't find "<domain>".
> Click Go to try your address again.
> [<domain>                       ] [Go]
> Or, correct the spelling of your address above and click Go.
>
> See more results for "<domain>" at MSN Search.
> -----------
> Get help
> See technical details
>
> Powered by: <%$&#$ logo> MSN Search
> == </snip> ==
>
> I think this time micro$oft has really gone way too far...
> They can see every non-existing domain lookup from IE users...
> They can redirect every user to some stupid site of them (actually
> they are doing that right now) if somebody types an non-existing name.
> I also noticed (when searching in the registry) the domain is added
> to safe zone's or something.. mmm!
>
> My question is: is it possible to edit some dll/exe/whatever to remove
> this behavior (so apart from methods like adding your own auto.search.msn.com
> record in your dns server [or hosts] and firewalling the whole msn stuff).
>
>     Syzop.
>
> PS: Note: this message was written in just a few minutes, it's very likely
>       some things are incorrect
> PSS: Some users (including me) are panicing and switching (back) to NS.