A few months ago, I bought a Belkin wireless router and wireless PC
card for our home school laptop.  (CompUSA had them for a ludicrous
rebate.)  The router has worked fairly well, but sometimes dropped
the connection to the laptop with the Belkin PC card in it.  (Bad
news when the connection crashes in the middle of a quiz!)  I finally
got around to calling Belkin tech support.  They walked me through
updating the  router and the PC card.  (The router shipped with
version 1.00.000 software - the bits couldn't have possibly been dry
when it shipped.) All went smoothly for the update, but then,
marketing reared its ugly head.

After the upgrade, on all our systems (wired or wireless), *valid*
http requests are, for certain values of occasionally, redirected
to a Belkin ad page!!!!:

<http://filter.belkin.com/setup.asp?SN=serNum&RP=5digits&IP=myip&FV=rev>

The above will not work without valid data, but you can view the ad
page (big image) here:

<http://filter.belkin.com/images/Epage2.jpg>

It seems the router now supports a parental control and the market
droids at Belkin got the bright idea of equipping the router with
intrusive nagware.  Of course, I have this strange notion that
routers should pass data unmolested by marketeers!  There is a
"No Thanks" link on the page.  Now I have to opt-out from commercials
from my router??!!

I first thought Belkin had messed with browser settings on the machine
which downloaded the router binary.  But then other machines started
putting up the ad.  I thought they might be doing it when a DHCP lease
is negotiated, but I got the ad twice today on a machine which has
been up all day, so perhaps the redirect is simply on a timer set
to fire after 8 hours or so...  I can always make the redirect happen
on a web request after I reset the router.  I need to download
something like Ethereal and document what these SOBs are really doing.
I haven't tried the "no thanks" link.  I certainly want to see what's
up with that!  How much phone-homing is this product doing??

Q: Has anyone else heard of this??  (I could not Google anything.
   The software revision was dated 9/15/2003.)

Q: Could someone suggest the most on-topic forum(s) to post a
   full details to??

One thing's for sure, I'm never going to buy another Belkin product!

--
Clem
"If you push something hard enough, it will fall over."
             - Fudd's first law of opposition