Bresnan Cable is Stealing Your Ad Revenue
Over the holidays I spent some time with my parents up in Grand Junction, CO, where the only cable provider is Bresnan Communications. I had never used Bresnan before, and my parents had just got service with them a month before this. So one morning I get up to get some work done, read up on some news and see whats new in the twitterverse. As I'm reading I find a few different interesting links I want to read, I open those links up and am greeted not with the website I wanted, but instead with this site.
Instead of taking me to the requested website, Bresnan redirected me back to their search results for 'bit.ly' (Which is the TLD of the site I was going to, the full link was http://bit.ly/sMeo). Notice that the first 5 links are SPONSORED links. This means Bresnan gets money when you click on one of their sponsored ads. I would also like to note that 5 of first the 6 results on the page are sponsored. At first I didn't really think too much of this, it was the first time it happened. Maybe their DNS servers failed.
As I'm working a little later I pull up another site, and instead of the site I wanted I am again greeted with Bresnan's sponsored search results for the TLD of the website I wanted to be at in the first place.
Now they're starting to get my attention, so I go check out another stats monitoring website I use for a few of my personal sites, and again instead of the site, I am taken to Bresnans sponsored results for the site I requested
Now this is getting a little annoying, but I am eventually able to get to the sites that I had originally requested. Doing a Google Search for the website I wanted to visit usually worked to get around the DNS hijack.
What I started seeing next was more than a little annoying, it is illegal. As I was browsing some big websites (amazon.com, reddit.com, zenhabits.net and tvguide.com) I noticed that the ads put there by the website owners to make money were being replaced by Bresnan with Bresnan's own ads. So now even if a Bresnan customer was to click on an ad for say zenhabits, zenhanits would NOT get the money for that users click, since Bresnan replaced that ad with their own, and the customer is (usually) none-the-wiser.
Just visit any of these sites above to see what the ads on the website are suppose to be, then compare with that ads show up for Bresnan customers. These are clearly deceptive and illegal practices Bresnan is conducting. As an ISP you cannot hijack content from a website, and altering the content your customers see on a copywritten website is copyright infringment by Bresnan. I'm sure amazon.com, zenhabits.net and the rest would be very upset to know that their websites copywrights are being infringed upon, and they are also losing advertising money becuase Bresnan is trying to make a quick buck from their customers.
Its sad a company has to result to illigal activities to ensure their existance instead of doing good things and providing a decent product. Not only are the major sites the victims, but the customers aswell.
My 2 bits..
As well, they seem to have some bizarre security thing going on where I was able to log on to a shared, private blog that I administer, and could change settings, layout, permissions, etc - but could never actually VIEW the blog myself. Each time I tried, I was informed that I hadn't been invited to this private blog - although I was clearly logged in as an admin. When I switched to a friend's computer using a different provider, I had no troubles at all; and when I plugged my computer into my friend's cable, everything worked correctly also.
Did I mention how I'd like to cut their cables? I'm starting to lean towards boiling oil...