When I mistype a url, I like to be able to, you know, correct the url and try again. Rogers’ “feature” prevents me from doing that. Disabling their useless search page just leads to a fake 404 page which looks so out of place using a non-IE browser on Linux.

So I decided to filter the ‘www20.search.rogers.com’ url out by firewall rules. Well that didn’t stop them… oh no no no. They have another: ‘wwww20.search.rogers.com’ (4 ‘w’s). And when you filter that out they have another still: ‘ww20.search.rogers.com’.

The IPs for those URLs are:

8.15.7.107 – www20.search.rogers.com
63.251.179.17 – wwww20.search.rogers.com
65.200.200.47 – ww20.search.rogers.com

Basically you have to set your firewall to block any incoming and outgoing http and https traffic involving those addresses.

After that, you get your browser error page back and you can set about retyping your mistyped urls.

The Rogers search box angered me greatly, with about an hour of switching from Aliant. Shortly thereafter I found this site. Shortly after that I replaced my DNS servers.

They tried something very similar to this with their cable TV service a few years back by giving their cable subsribers extra TV channels and adding them to the monthly bills. The cable customers were forced to contact Rogers and opt out to get the new channels removed and the charges removed from their bills. This tactic was later deemed illegal. At least with this sleaze ball cable trick, they gave us an out by allowing us to cancel and get rid of it!!

This browser hijacking is just a loop holed version of the above. Instead of charging us ISP subscribers for this service, they are getting money from advertisers. Who do you think is paying for the advertising budgets? WE ARE when we buy those products. In other words, we are indirectly paying Rogers for this service!!

Make no bones about it. They have installed software on your computer, or modified your computer.

Their opt-out solution is fake and the 404 message you receive after you opt-out is fake. Rogers has duplicated the real 404 page and pop it on your screen from the website that they are still hijacking you to. THAT IN ITSELF IS FRAUD (as far as I’m concerned). They are inferring that the 404 message is the coming from IE, when in fact it is not. As noted, you still get the IE 404 message from other browsers like FireFox. How stupid do they think we are? That is soooo insulting.

I had my browser set to “search from the address bar” and had tweaked it to give me Google results automatically if I typed in a non valid website address. Even after you use Rogers’ feature to turn off the hijacking, you can never search from your address bar again. They still hijack you. THEY HAVE DISABLED A FEATURE ON A BROWSER THAT I BOUGHT AND PAID FOR!!!

What slime!

Micro$oft and Rogers have already slept together so I doubt if we will get any help from Micro$oft, but perhaps Google will kick up some dust. Let’s hope so.

In my complaint, I demanded that they stop this hijacking immediately.

Kind regards,
Frank Sheffield

127.0.0.1 rogers.com

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