As a new Charter customer, I quickly became frustrated with Charter’s automatic search page. What happens is, if you type something like “google” into your browser’s URL bar, you get redirected to a Charter branded search page. This is extremely frustrating, and the best that Charter offers is an opt-out cookie that you have to set on every browser on every machine and virtual machine you have. This is not good enough.
The real solution, besides Charter giving up on this practice, is to switch your router settings to use the free service from OpenDNS. I just signed up for the service after reading about how they’re blocking the Conficker worm for their users by making the domains the worm uses not resolve. Also, all of these features can be turned on or off if you create a free account.
Time Warner does this too, and it annoyed the heck out of me. Fortunatley, they have a link you can go to and turn it off.
Try out opendns.com Great DNS service thats free. Mediacom does the same thing.
my problem is that (aside from hijacking) their stupid software often times screws up, and returns a bogus IP for a perfectly good dns name. (smtp.gmail.com, for instance.) it’s crazy making…
luckily i didn’t actually sign-up for their service before making this discovery.