Paxfire
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Paxfire, Inc. is a startup based in Reston, VA founded by Mark Lewyn, a former USA Today tech reporter, and Alan Sullivan.
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[edit] Technology
Paxfire provides an appliance called the Paxfire Lookup Engines (PLE) to internet service providers (ISPs) as a method of generating additional revenue through advertising based on mistyped URLs. By using the Paxfire service, an ISP can redirect mistyped web queries from its clients to navigation pages that may contain paid advertising sources. If a user clicks on a sponsored link, Paxfire and the ISP share the revenue.
[edit] Partners
Paxfire is under Non-Disclosure Agreements(NDAs) that prohibit Paxfire from releasing a list of all participating ISPs.
[edit] Controversy
Paxfire's approach to providing navigation pages to web browser users is very similar to what most people experience when they use Microsoft's Internet Explorer browser, however this is done at the DNS resolver level. This approach therefore affects all of the end-user's transactions involving the Domain name system (essentially all Internet application transactions) rather than just an end-user's web browser. The default behavior will automatically redirect mistyped web URLs to MSN Search. It is possible to configure Explorer to use a different search engine, even Google, MSN's largest competitor. Paxfire's provides 2 methods to opt out of the service. The first method employs an HTTP Cookie and the second method employs IP address filtering at the Paxfire appliance. An ISP is free to make use of these methodologies to ensure that users can opt out, though the cookie method is irrelevant for non-web transactions like email. Security research Dan Kaminsky found serious vulnerabilties related to how Paxfire was handling DNS resolution.[1]
