Friday, November 07, 2003

Belkin Router Redirects Browser to Advertisement A Belkin wireless router now redirects an HTTP request once every eight hours to an advertisement. The ad promotes a six month free trial for Belkin's parental control service. A Belkin customer who has discussed the issue with the company writes: Here's the scenario. You click a link on your browser to go to site X. Your Belkin router doesn't take you to X. Instead, it takes you to a Belkin advertising page. It will intercept your port 80 request and do this every eight hours for as long as you own the router. There are only two ways to turn this off. One is to click on a specific link on the advertising page. The other is to go into the router config and go to the "Parental Controls" and turn off the "feature". This behavior has been confirmed by Belkin (to the news.admin.net-abuse.email newsgroup), though Belkin calls it a "feature" and not an advertisement. They're trying to sell a paid subscription parental control by offering you 6 months free. Apparently, though, the site doesn't mention the actual price you'll be charged after those 6 months. I don't know about anyone else, but a company that thinks it's okay to violate trust and hijack my browser to push an advertisement will no longer be on my "acceptable supplier" list. 2:52:36 PM    comment []