Advertising platform = provider?

Introduction

For a long time I have been a happy customer of one local provider. And not only because until recently, in fact, he was actually a de facto monopolist in my city. A couple of years ago, he was absorbed in the now fairly promoted Domolink brand. This, in general, did not cause alarm, because tariffs were falling, and speeds were growing. But at the beginning of March this year, something strange happened.

Banners?

One user at a local forum complained that during surfing, an advertisement for the DomolinkTV internal service began to crawl out. According to him, it was like a virus attack: when clicking on a completely clean link, instead of the requested site, a flash banner
popped up with an advertisement on the whole window, which only after a few seconds was transferred to the requested site.



Many were skeptical of the message, saying that they were checked for a virus (although why should virus writers advertise the provider’s services?). But then the ads began to creep out at everyone, even on obviously clean resources like google services.

The first popular thought was hacking a DNS provider. However, users of alternative DNS like OpenDNS also received ads. Most of all, it looked like the user’s HTTP traffic was wrapped in a kind of transparent proxy, from where the redirect to the banner page occurs, and the requested URL is passed as a parameter.

Owners of well-tuned firewalls and banner cutters were doubly unlucky. Indeed, instead of the banner and the requested site, they received just a white page.

A little later, the character softened somewhat: now the banner was much smaller and simply hung in the corner of the page.



Attempts to storm those issues. the support was unsuccessful: no response has yet been received from officials. Topics with questions on the official Domolink forums also remained unanswered or were immediately closed.

www.domolink.ru/forum/showthread.php?t=22583
www.domolink.ru/forum/showthread.php?p=309347#post309347
www.domolink.ru/forum/showthread.php?p=309346#post309346

People I was indignant, some spoke out that this was just a break-in of new technologies, and the offensive itself was still ahead. And it seems they were right when third-party advertising began to appear.

The final?

At the moment, the bombardment of advertising has been stopped. But who knows, forever? It seems that soon the communication channel itself may become an advertising platform. What do you think about this, haberman?