Reason #303 Charter Cable Sucks - Browser Hijack
Lately when I’ve been entering a plain old search query in the address bar of any browser on my mac, I get a useless search page from Charter Cable (my provider) instead of the normal google results:
Apparently Charter does a 302 redirect for any hit that would normally go to the default search page. They do provide an “opt out” option, which is ridiculous because I never opted in to let them do this in the first place:
So I have to set and save a cookie in all the browsers I use, or else Charter will provide their own ad-filled search results by default. It seems this is at the DNS level, so either i have to set this cookie continuously (I clear cookies often), or find a different DNS server to use. Thanks a lot, Charter, way to piss off a customer who has been with you for years.
update: this story even made Slashdot a little while ago..I wonder why it just started happening to me in the past week or so?