1 and 1 to force display of their portal on first request after connection

[pne]

Article here (in German).

Basically, the first connection to port 80 (http) or 443 (https) after opening a connection gets redirected to their portal instead—as "customer service". Woohoo.

They're testing this in a couple of regions in Germany and will then consider rolling it out nationwide.

That's something that makes me happy. If I type in http://www.example.com/ I want to be taken to http://www.example.com/ and not to http://portal.1und1.de/ or whereever, even if it's my first connect after "dialling up". Plus what will happen with things such as DynDNS scripts or antivirus updates trying to retrieve legitimate data automatically and being fed the portal page instead?

People in the comments page say, "Oh that's easy, just put lynx -dump http://randompage.com/ in your ip-up script" but (a) not everyone has Linux and (b) we shouldn't have to do that!

Meh. Maybe it's good that I didn't buy their flatrate yet (which would mean I'd have to give 12 months' notice again IIRC)... if they start doing funny tricks like that, I may think about switching providers, and my existing domain they host be darned.

Comments

[denial-land.livejournal.com]

Yeah.. after dumping that terrible "freenet" we almost switched to 1&1 at the apartment -- would have been much like "out of the frying pan into the fire", it appears.

I am a very happy customer of Arcor now, and have been so for quite a while.

[denial-land.livejournal.com]

Oh, they do host my dad's doimain though, and I have had no problems there.

[pne.livejournal.com]

after dumping that terrible "freenet"

Apparently they had such a compulsory thing, too? Or so I gather from some of the comments on the Heise article.

would have been much like "out of the frying pan into the fire", it appears.

If they do decide to introduce it nationwide, yes. I still hope not...

I am a very happy customer of Arcor now, and have been so for quite a while.

I'll keep that in mind for when (if?) I need to start looking around for alternative connectivity providers.

Do you use T-DSL or did you get a DSL connection directly from Arcor? I ask since I had T-DSL with 1&1 and now have a resale T-DSL connection "directly" with 1&1 and am not sure whether it would be expensive to change the "underlying" connection to someone else, rather than merely whom I pay for IP traffic.

[denial-land.livejournal.com]

I didn't noptice anything compulsory about freenet, but we had a "volumentarif" and they were charging more traffic than my roomie and I could have possibly had; over 600MB per day sometimes, which is ridiculous because we weren't downloading anything.
Now I know, wireless, danger, d00m, but I am about the most paranoid home admin you can think of (well, I guess you know a LOT of technie people, but you know what I mean ;) and there was absolutely NO way someone else could have used that router too. I checked the logs hourly, had MAC filters, encryption of course, traffic reports and all that jazz. We complained; no response, etc. Their customer service is nonexistant and/or extremely expensive. It was seriouels horrible (and needlessly expensive), even cancelling the contract was a drama by itself because they ignored the notices we sent them.

Anyways, we are truly glad it's over (even though we must have been persistent enough for them to decide that the mistake was indeed on their side, and we eventually got the money back they charged us for their traffic mistakes.)

So, Arcor. My parents have switched to Arcor completely over three years ago, back when I was still living at home, so back then already I basically only had good experiences with them. Their hotline is free (even though to be fair you have to wait about 20 or 30 minutes until you can talk to somebody, but when you do they are most friendly and helpful). The "worst" that happened to me in my time with Arcor was a 5-day offline time, but that was years ago, keep in mind, and never happened again. What can I say? Their telephone prices are cheaper (we switched completely) and calling Arcor-Arcor is almost free. We have the whole ISDN/DSL3000/flatrate ackage which is STILL cheaper than T-Com ISDN & DSL1000/freenet(with limit!) we had before, but now it's unlimited. And faster.

We had to wait almost two more weeks longer than expected until everything was set up on their side, which I hear happens often, but if it takes longer they charge you less with your first invoice. Generally, the transition went very smooth, though, they even cancelled the T-Com contract for us, all we had to do was battle freenet for a confitmation.

You could think I work for them, bust expecially after the horribly Freenet experience, I do feel like a satisfied customer.

[denial-land.livejournal.com]

Apparently I forgot how to reply to a comment O_O

[schnurble.livejournal.com]

Seems like a lot of people have trouble with freenet. When we ordered freenet DSL, we didn't get anything. Everytime we called them, they couldn't even say when it would finally be done. After three months we cancelled the contract and got DSL from Lycos.

A colleague of mine is currently also contemplating to cancel his contract with freenet because after three months he still got no DSL connection.

During our wait time, we went online by dial up to call-by-call providers, and they did the rerouting too - the first site we went to was always replaced by the provider's own site.

[denial-land.livejournal.com]

Yeah, during our bad experience with their refusal to send us a cancellation confirmation I googled around and saw that tons of people had the same problem; they tried to forcefully prolong the contracts for a whole additional year by pretending people didn't cancel in time.

I am so fed up with those idiots, seriouely. Especially when they overcharged us, and made up an excuse about how "routers sometimes do that, and cause so much traffic" .. right.