At home, our ISP is Rogers. Judging from the analytics I receive for this site, many of you are also Rogers customers. It appears Bell and Rogers dominate the residential internet access space in the Greater Toronto Area.
When you put a term like "cnn" in the address bar, your browser typically adds on the .com for you. When you put a term like "torontomike" in the address bar, your browser typically treats it like a search and renders the results for that keyword in your default search engine. This is how the browsers work because it makes for the best user experience.
Rogers has decided to hijack that practice. Rogers customers who now put a term like "torontomike" in the address bar are automatically redirected by default to a Rogers-branded Yahoo search for that keyword, complete with obtrusive graphical advertisements at the top and right hand side, not to mention the textual sponsored links beneath that Rogers logo. Below is a screen cap of what you see with Rogers.
If you're a Rogers customer, here's how you stop the hijacking. At the very bottom click "Learn More About This Page" and agree to opt out of this madness. The opt-out is cookie-based, so if you clear your cookies you'll need to do it again.
What pisses me off is that I pay Rogers for access to the Internet, not for messing with the content. Take my money and give me a pipeline to the net where I can use whatever browser I choose and visit whatever sites I choose. I'm not paying for jerkware.
