MTNL Broadband is injecting ads on your computer pretending it's a feature

I can confirm I saw this ad on my iOS device running Mobile Safari. This was while connected to Wifi powered by MTNL ADSL connection.

I switched off the Wifi and reloaded the same page on Vodafone's 3G network and the ad disappeared.

On desktop, AdBlock Plus takes care of the ads. But on mobiles, it eats out of the already small screen space.

FU MTNL Mumbai!!!!!
 
I have not seen ads on MTNL Mumbai

I use mobile too frequently. But not noticed any ad
 
I been noticing them on desktop a lot. Especially on surprisingly when loading/ reading wsj and nyt pages.

Finally found out the IP and blocked it from the router to make sure it won't load. When I blocked it I noticed, when you load a webpage it first tries to connect to that ad/pop-up server first, retries 2-3 times and then loads the webapge. It won't necessarily load ads all the time but it surely does want to first go through it and then connect.

You can mainly understand this because the webpage would load a bit slow than it should.

The IP I blocked

Code:
203.94.227.140

P.S. : Many are saying they aren't seeing the ads yet, but add the IP in the filter list & block it and then try to load a page you might see this in the status 'Waiting for <ip>' and then after few seconds it connects to the website you want.
 
Last edited:
Unfortunately, yes I guess. Mumbai too is being infected by that.

The only good part of this so far is from all my experiments is, it would only try on loading on http sites aka unencrypted connects. So all SSL connections are secure so far.

This also means soon these ads would stop or rather load on less number of sites as recently SSL/HTTPS/secure/encrypted connections is being the norm for all sites.
Mainly because Google is going to rank sites higher with HTTPS encryption by default.
That will force sites to adapt to secure sites.
And secondly most sites now a days run on CloudFlare CDN network and even their free account users can enable SSL for free.

But till then I am going to block every ad serving IP MTNL injects. For now thats the only one I found.
This hasn't affected loading any website for me so far, so pretty sure connecting to that IP every fcking time is just to load ads so I'll keep blocking it till it causes any trouble. I am okay with a minor delay in loading websites as long as I am not being snooped by ad server.
 


If your router supports REJECT instead of DROP then page loading will be faster.

With DROP, browser does not know that site is blocked and keeps trying till timeout occurs.

With REJECT, browser will immediately know that connection is rejected and will not wait.

Please share more IPs as you keep on finding.
 
Not using custom firmware so no option to manually edit the iptables nor any way to how it should be filtered. Just allow or deny. :(

About IPs, Will do that.
I hope everyone in this thread does the same. We all can pool in the and block the hell out of that ad server.
 
So, the issue is very present it would seem. Sucks. I'm thinking of getting rid of mtnl now, service notwithstanding.
 
Issue does not seem to be that serious.

It seems to have started from June 7 and then last occurred on June 10. (4:20PM)

So it has not happened in last 2 days.

Probably they disabled it? God knows, will check logs on Sunday again.
 

Back