OpenDNS Says Google-Dell Browser Tool is Spyware

PetManimal writes "David Ulevitch, the founder of OpenDNS, claims that Google and Dell have placed 'spyware' on Dell computers. Ulevitch made the claim based on his observation of the behavior of the Google Toolbar and homepage that comes preinstalled on IE in new Dell machines. He says that a browser redirector sends users who enter nonexistent URLs to a Dell-branded page loaded with Google ads. Another observer, Danny Sullivan, says that this is a different result than what happens on PCs without the redirector. However, the original article notes that Ulevitch has a vested interest in the results of mistyped URLs."

Instructions to Remove

[eldavojohn]

Anyone who's looking for a way to remove this, Dell's support site [dell.com] gives these instructions:

To uninstall the Google URL Assistant, perform the following steps:

1. Click Start and select Control Panel.
The Control Panel window appears.
2. Select Add or Remove Programs.
The Add or Remove Programs window appears.
3. Select Remove a Program.
The Add or Remove Programs utility window appears.
4. Click to highlight the URL Assistant program and click Remove.
5. Follow the instructions on the screen to complete the removal process.

However, a user on the bottom of one of the links reports a way to disable it (but leave it on your machine) if you want to keep it:

In Internet Explorer, click on Tools,Internet Options,Programs, Manage Add-ons. Look for the CBrowserHelperObject published by Dell, then disable it.

Personally, I've bought two computers from Dell a long time ago and the first thing I did, like a good little Slashdotter, was format it and install a real operating system. When my friend bought a Dell, I brought a case of beer over and we took his Windows install disc and we re-installed Windows. Why? Well, just because of all the crap software like this that somehow magically is installed on a new box. If I recall, he had a 30 day trial version of Norton Antivirus, a trial version of Nero, quicktime crap, one of the most heinous media applications I've ever witnessed (due to his sound card) & to top it all off they had some 30 startup entries in msconfig--over half of which I couldn't tell what they were!

Now I work for a fortune 500 company and guess what we do with every box we get from Dell? Re-image it.

Now, for the 99% other Dell customers, this is just purely unfortunate because I'm not so naive to expect everyone to know how or why they should take the above actions. I hope that all the virus scanning apps (HiJackThis, Lavasoft's Adaware, etc) get this thing because Adaware is about the most useful thing I can show my family how to use frequently enough to keep the computer protected.

This sounds a lot like something the old Gateways would do. Huh, I never would have thought Dell would reach that level but, well, here we are. The important thing is to factor this in when you're thinking about a new computer. Hopefully some competition will spring up for Dell and, you know, quality of the software (not just the hardware) will start to matter for Dell.

This has nothing to do with Google toolbar...

[LLKrisJ]

... Or at least _not only_ The same behaviour happens on my company issued Dell D820. It comes loaded with IE6 and NO Google toolbar and yet when I mistype a URL I do not end up at the MSN search page like on any other IE installation! Instead IE redirects me to a Dell branded Google search page full of Google commercials.

Claim is complete FUD

[Odiumjunkie]

The gist of the 'Spyware' claim comes from OpenDNS claiming the error redirecting service from Google

has no clear name and is very hard to uninstall

Complete FUD. The service is called "Browser Address Error Redirector" - which is a completely accurate and clear name for the service, and to remove it, you uninstall it from the Add/Remove Programs dialogue, as you would any regular peice of software.

I'm sure slashdot denizens will have a good time discussing how useless the bundled software and trialware that comes with Dell computers is, and how the sensible thing to do is reinstall from scratch, but that's been the case for a while. There is zero story here.

Re:Instructions to Remove

[daeg]

That goes double, or triple, for Dell laptops. I've never seen so much sh*t installed on them. It started appearing about 2 months ago, and despite contacting various account reps, they have no idea what I'm bitching about. Very few of the programs uninstall cleanly, either.

Of course, nothing can come even close to the pile of crap called "ConfigFree" on Toshiba laptops. Dear God that software is awful! Remember kids, when you are looking for badly written, badly tested software to hijack network connections, think ConfigFree!

Decrapifier

[astrogirl2900]

Lifehacker recently had an article on a piece of software called the PC Decrapifier [lifehacker.com]. I haven't tried it, but it seems relevant to this thread.

a way to test

[DaMattster]

This claim may very well be FUD but there is a way for people to test. Just download a network packet capture program and look at the traffic being sent. I did this myself and didn't see anything untoward being sent nor did I see any gibberish traffic to indicate encryption. But, that isn't to say that I didn't miss anything when scanning the log of the output. Basically, anything offered by a for profit company for free, really is not. If the service were entirely gifted, the company would rapidly drift into the red. Also, read the EULA. I get scared by long convoluted statements which can be subjected to interpretation. I do like Dell hardware but the first thing I do when I get my dell is to delete the partitions, re-partition, and format the HDD. I recommend everyone doing the same.

Decrapify it

[spectrokid]

If you don't want to reinstal: http://www.pcdecrapifier.com/ [pcdecrapifier.com] My mother in law bought one. Now I am used to your anti-virus no longer getting updated if you don't pay. But when her spamkiller expired, her email stopped working . And I can assure you there is NO WAY she would have been able to fix that herself without paying.

They're not

[mithras invictus]

AFAICT Google is just used by Dell on the Dell search page, thats all.
This wouldn't have anything to do with opendns being powered by Yahoo, right?

Re:Claim is complete FUD

[Anonymous Coward]

The story is that one mistyped-url-redirector service complains about another service doing the same... wait, you're right, there is no story.

Re:Claim is complete FUD

[hclyff]

Are you being sarcastic?

Browser - "What's a browser? You mean, like, the internet?"

Address - You are telling me that people who can't tell difference between a search bar and an address bar know what an internet address is?

Error - Sounds scary...

Redirector - "Redi-what?" (I very much doubt average user knows what's a redirect, you can as well tell them it polynormificalizes their antroendoretarterons, it does the same effect)

Re:This has nothing to do with Google toolbar...

[cerberusss]

Dell uses the Internet Explorer SDK to adjust IE on a number of points. Lots of big companies do this as well, it's noticeable in the title bar of IE, which will say something along the lines of Internet Explorer presented to you by MegaCorp or something. At which point I start FireFox.

OpenDNS uses javascript for its spyware

[Anonymous Coward]

they track everything you do on their "guide" from what links you click on, when you exit the page, uses hidden iframes, the list goes on all 50+kb of script to help you just like Verisigns sitefinder helped,
what they do deserve credit for is convincing people clever enough to change their DNS settings that somehow breaking DNS in exchange for seeing adverts is a worthwhile tradeoff, just like spyware/adware convinces a user that viewing adverts for getting weather is somehow a good thing.

perhaps they should team up with new.net as they do the same just using a binary to help change those pesky dns settings

here's how to stop their crap

add this to your hosts file
127.0.0.1 guide.opendns.com

Re:Can you really blame google

[Mountaineer1024]

As I understand it, Mozilla DO do something like this with firefox.

When you perform a search with the default firefox screen (with it's Firefox customised Google) Google is notified of this fact and kick back some money to Mozilla.

When you perform a search from Firefox's search box you'll also notice that it's identifying you as a Firefox user, here take a look:
http://www.google.com.au/search?q=test&le=en&sourc eid=mozilla-search&start=0 [google.com.au]

Note the sourceid in the querystring.
Nefarious? That's for you to decide.

Re:Instructions to Remove

[MobyDisk]

I can give multiple examples of this kind of stuff. I know of 2 Dell PC's purchased a year apart, and both of them came with 3 CD burning programs, all of which ran in the background, and none of them worked because they conflicted with each other. So right out of the box you could not burn CDs. That's unacceptable.

Hi, I wrote that post...

[davidu]

Hi guys,

Yesterday I got a lot of feedback from people who just assumed I was biased and an underdog out to complain about Google. This is not what it's about!

Here's what I mean:

Use the smell test. Does what Google is doing smell bad? Is it giving users a good experience?
Compare:

• http://www.google.com/hws/dell/afe?hl=en&s=http:// microsoft.xom [google.com]
• http://www.google.com/hws/gateway/afe?hl=en&s=http ://microsoft.xom [google.com]
• http://www.google.com/hws/sony/afe?hl=en&s=http:// microsoft.xom [google.com]
• http://www.google.com/hws/emachines/afe?hl=en&s=ht tp://microsoft.xom [google.com]
• 
  with
  
• http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=microsoft.xom &btnG=Google+Search [google.com]

(and if you want to see ours)

• http://guide.opendns.com/?url=microsoft.xom [opendns.com]

If you just compare what google is doing to their own users you'll see that they are showing a terrible experience to the users who are Locked-In versus the users who have the choice to use any search service.

Thanks,

davidu

Re:David Ulevitch is a hipocrite

[Anonymous Coward]

Their product seems to use e.g. resolver1.opendns.com (208.67.222.222).
If I use that as my DNS, and do a lookup for www.google.com, I get
redirected to a CNAME of google.navigation.opendns.com.
What's up with that? DNS hijacking, anyone?

Re:Obligatory Google Reality Check

[medlefsen]

Google is not a "normal" publicly traded company. The power structure where insiders hold the special class B stock that has 10 times the voting power of the public class A stock means that they're aren't subject to the whims of public investors. Brin and Page have 30% of the power alone. Here's a quote from Google:

"We anticipate that our founders, executive officers, directors (and their affiliates) and employees will together own approximately 84.8 percent of our Class B common stock, representing approximately 83.6 percent of the voting power of our outstanding capital stock,"

On the flip side it's also true that a couple VC's have over 20% of the total power, but they were old investors of google and have always had a lot of power in the company.

Re:Decrapifier

[Mr. Droopy Drawers]

Ran this on my Father-in-Laws spanky new Dell. Clean as a baby's bottom after doing so. Dunno if this specific piece of software was on this system tho (did this over Christmas). But, a VERY good piece of software whether it's a Dell, HP, Sony or other manufacturer to take your system back to the way it was before they got their hands on it :-)

Re:OpenDNS is bummed

[Pollardito]

no, a toolbar is just a place to locate lots of tools and usually a nice visible logo for the company that made it, nothing more is implied. in some cases using browser tools causes interaction with the hosting site, but this is not the same as saying that the toolbar should necessarily be involved in other web browser functions such as intercepting bad domains. the old google toolbar only connected to home base if you did a google search with it or if you turned on the pagerank display

Re:OpenDNS is bummed

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes, you can. (The following explanation is simplified but good enough for resolving purposes.) DNS is a hierarchy. The root servers know the IP addresses of the domains servers for the top level domains. The top level domain servers know the IP addresses of all second level domain servers in their TLD. Almost all of these servers don't do recursive lookups, which means they will only respond to queries for the information in their own domain. That's why you need a recursive resolver. When you ask a recursive resolver for www.slashdot.org, it asks one of the root servers for the address of the .org nameserver. Then it asks the .org nameserver for the address of the slashdot.org nameserver, then it asks the slashdot.org nameserver for the www.slashdot.org address. BTW, all of these responses get cached, so you rarely need to contact the root servers. These lookups each take some time, which is longer if there is a high latency link between the resolver and the nameserver, which is why people on dialup like to use better connected computers to do these lookups for them and return only the final result. But there's no technical reason why you can't request these lookups yourself and with today's networks it is not slow at all. Try it yourself: MaraDNS windows binary. [maradns.org] Run the resolver with run_maradns.bat and set your DNS to 127.0.0.1. That's all there is to it.

Re:Instructions to Remove

[TheLink]

"Now I work for a fortune 500 company and guess what we do with every box we get from Dell? Re-image it. "

If you are buying a bunch of boxes I heard you can send Dell your preferred image, and they'll image all of them for you.

Re:earthlink takes it to another level...

[HeroreV]

This Google+Dell spyware comes preinstalled and is purposely more difficult to uninstall than it should be.

OpenDNS provides DNS service (duh!) which is often much better than users' default DNS service. OpenDNS doesn't come preinstalled. Users have to willing chose to set it up and can just as easily disable it. The pages it shows for malformed URLs can even be turned off if you have a static IP address.

It makes absolutely no sense for you to say "bravo to Dell" for "using the leader in search relevance to give users something relevant", yet describe OpenDNS as a "cyber-squatter of typo-domains".

Way too many typosquatters

[Animats]

Way too many people are into typosquatting now. From OpenDNS to the "toolbar" guys to the guy who paid off the government of Cameroon (try anything in ".cm"), there can now be several layers of typosquatting between the user and the actual domain. At least we got Network Solutions to back off from their attempt.

Search may be coming apart. There are too many people trying to "game" the search systems now. "Search engine optimization" used to be viewed as evil and was done by low-rent operations. Now we have publicly held companies (Marchex [marchex.com], ticker symbol MCHX) formed just to create dummy domains. Collactive [collactive.com], the Digg spammer, just got venture capital from Sequoia Ventures. Computer vendors load up their preinstalled machines with unwanted "toolbars", which, as this article mentions, produce mostly user-hostile information. All the sources of information which drive search engines, from inbound links to user ratings, are now being spammed by sizable companies. It's a big change from the situation two years ago, when the troublemakers were all little guys with limited resources.

It's going to get worse before it gets better.