So now if I click on a link to a site that doesn’t exist, instead of the usual generic Windows “Page not found” error I was getting (by choice) before, Rogers has decided to force its branded Yahoo search engine on me.
If I wanted the damn thing, I’d’ve set it up that way. I didn’t like my Yahoo email pages being taken over so that their all branded with Rogers Yahoo — I just want plain old vanilla Yahoo, please — and I don’t like being forced to visit the pages they’ve decided I should see, regardless of my settings. I Googled to see if I can stop this, and came across Toronto Mike’s blog and his post from July 21.
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.
It’s nice that there’s a solution of some kind, but “opt out”? Are you kidding me? It’s like the City of Ottawa forcing your car to drive to City Hall so you can ask for directions, forget that spiffy GPS system or that you might want to just wing it. And this isn’t actually opting out — it just changes the type of page Rogers displays when it can’t find what you’re looking for so that Search.rogers.com (rather than my browser) serves a “simple error page” instead of their search page. So it’s still hijacking the Web browser.
Someone needs to be slapped. Hard.
(PS: thanks for introducing me to the term “jerkware”, Mike)
Life Begins at 41...or maybe 43 