You’re right that there are technical work-arounds to defeat Rogers new heavy-handed tactics, but there comes a point where it is important for technically-minded people to help others stand up for themselves, and to stand up to an organization like Rogers.

Mike van Lammerens last blog post..Rogers is now Hijacking invalid DNS requests

the problem here though is that other website owners not on Rogers should be more aware of how their DNS is handled.

for example the majority of shared web hosting companies do not check for invalid subdomains. Using your domain name in this example if you were selling products online, sdfasf.kobrascorner.com would result in a rogers redirection to all rogers users who are not aware of how to opt-out or hard code their hosts file thus resulting in a possible lost customer to a competitor. Website owners need to inquire about catch-all subdomains so that *.kobrascorner.com gets mapped to something on your host’s server to protect your own site.

Most people wouldn’t think to inquire about this type of feature but if Rogers is able to get away with this it is only a matter of time before more ISP’s utilize the same dirty practice and it becomes mainstream.

Thank you for your input. While this information is definitely useful for preventing some types of URL redirection, Rogers is doing something completely different.

I do not use Internet Explorer therefore the Live Search function should never come into play when I use Firefox on my PC or Safari on my Mac.

What Rogers is doing right now is taking any non-existent addresses and serving sponsored ad pages if the domain or subdomain you entered does not exist. If this was only a URL redirection related to Internet Explorer then performing a ping from the command line on a non-existent domain should not be returning a ROGERS IP address

The redirections in this case are going through a link similar to www20.search.rogers.com/?q=searchrsults.

Even the error pages are displaying Internet Explorer errors when you browse with a MAC using safari.

There a number of forum discussions going on about this such as http://www.digitalhome.ca/forum/showthread.php?p=771150#post771150 .

I dont imagine this type of behaviour will last very long. If it does Rogers will be losing a nice chunk of business. We pay to use the internet so why are we being forced to see ad plastered search pages?

A feature of Internet Explorer is “Address Bar Searching”. This feature can actually be configured using Tools/Internet Options, then under the Search area, select Settings. This option allows you to select a search provider. By default Microsoft’s live.com service is selected, however you can install additional providers such as Google. This is an open service and any provider, including Rogers are capable of creating and distributing providers.

What Rogers has done is review the URL structure used by this feature when using the Microsoft Live.com search provider. This particular provider takes what is typed into the address bar, when DNS name resolution fails redirects your entry too:

http://search.live.com/results.aspx?q=yoursearch&src=IE-Address

The important aspect of this URL is the src=IE-Address component. This particular component is what Rogers is using to decide if they should steal the request and redirect it to their own service. If you browse to the link I provided directly your request will be stolen and sent to Rogers.

If you change your search provider to something other than Live.com, Roger’s manipulation will not take into effect, unless they decide to steal this traffic as well.

This is disturbing because Rogers has made the decision for all Internet Explorer users to prevent you from using the Address Bar searching feature for Live.com. They are preventing individuals from accessing a public search engine as intended. This is not only something to be reported to the various sites already mentioned, but to Microsoft and Live.com themselves.