I think if you open an account with them, you can control how agressive that hijacking is.

In the end, the best advice I can give you is to just opt out of your ISP’s service, and set the cookie, then stop clearing your cookies, as they are not hurting anything to have them.

if you really want to clear the cookies, you will have to set the DNS error page one time again every time you clear the cookies.

is it safe to use open dns please let me know

vic

When you enter anything into your browser, the first thing is does is a DNS lookup. This will take for example, osxhelp.com, and translate it into a number, such as 64.84.37.54, your browser then looks for the website at that internet address. The “pretty” name of osxhelp.com is just there to make your internet usage easier, as numbers are just too hard to remember.

All this is asked of a DNS server. In most cases, unless you have set something specific, you will be asking your ISP’s DNS server to do this name to number translation.

In your case, your ISP is watching that request, and hijacking it. They say it is in effort to help, some say they just want the advertising dollars that they get from whoever they plaster on the page you end up seeing.

When you do not enter in the .com portion of a domain in safari, the first thing it does is ask your ISP’s DNS server for the IP address of that name. So if we enter in “osxhelp” with no .com, it will ask your ISP to translate that to a number.

In this case, there is no such host as “osxhelp”. A non hijacking server will send back to Safari a DNS response called NXDOMAIN, which basically says, sorry, I can not translate what you have asked.

Safari then looks at what you entered, and given that it sees the NXDOMAIN response, starts trying to fix it for you, first by adding a .com to the end, and if that does not work, it will add a http://www. to the front.

Your ISP, instead of sending back the NXDOMAIN response, decides to do something else. Any time you enter in something into your browser, and your ISP’s DNS server determines it is NXDOMAIN, it does not reply with NXDOMAIN, but instead, replies with a redirection to the “Search” page you are seeing.

In order to fix this, you have a few options. First, I would call your ISP and see if they can turn this off for you.

If not, you could locate a new ISP if it really bothers you that much.

You can also simply set the cookie they request of you, and be done with it. There is a lot of unfounded fear about cookies, and people go deleting all of them. I never do, I leave them as they are. There is nothing bad about a cookie. A cookie can only be set by the site you are visiting, and can only be read by the site that set that cookie. As long as no major flaws happen with your browser, your cookies are more or less safe.

I have a feeling it is a throwback to how many Windows users seem to cure issues by deleting cookies, and this advice has tricked down to the Mac. I am yet to have a cookie cleaning session that did anything but make me have to enter in all my username and password data all over again, as well as reset preferences on the sites I visit.

A final solution, is to use a different DNS server than your ISP, which you would change in your network preferences. It is listed as “DNS Server”, and you can change them to use a DNS server that does not hijack. OpenDNS is a free service that will help in this regard, you do not need an account, you can simply follow these steps: https://www.opendns.com/start?device=apple-osx-leopard

They will also hijack your request just as your ISP does, but if you do decide to create an account with them, you can control in a more granular way how that hijacking works. Their DNS servers tend to be speedy fast and work better than most ISP’s DNS servers as well.

Finally, you can look for free or paid public DNS services, google for “public DNS” and you should get some good hits. The steps are the same as openDNS, you just enter in a new set of IP addresses.

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Note: In order for opt-out to work properly, you need to accept a “cookie” indicating that you have opted out of this service. If you use a program that removes cookies, you will have to repeat this opt-out process when the cookie is deleted. The cookie placed on your computer will contain the site name: “.not-found-entry.org”.

I get above message SCOTT if youcan help me please it will be a great help, the last thing i could feel may be my service provider has this feature disable
let me know what you think or i have lots of browser security software like internet cleanup, leaopard cach cleaner, spring cleaning etc, scott you think these products has something to do with this

please let me know
thank you very much

Just go to the Keyboard and Mouse System Preferences, and select Keyboard Shortcuts. Click the “+” button and select the application (e.g. Safari.app), or “All Applications”.

Type in the name of the menu item you want to change the shortcut for (e.g. “Select Previous Tab” as it shows up in Safari’s Window menu). Then just enter a shortcut - I set mine to Cmd-[, so it’s the same as Firefox. Repeat for “Select Next Tab”.

Something like Firefox control+tab would be great.

One quick way to do it is to enter in ‘about:blank’ in the URL bar and press return. This will just load a blank page. Then drag that URL into your bookmarks bar, and give it a name like ‘New Tab’, then just command-click on that bookmark button.

I also can not see to get a new tab to open my home page. If I have some more time, I will research this and report back.

If you have a multi button mouse you could program one of the buttons, to open a new tab, which would probably be the most convenient.

Just to clarify if I may: This function is not just for OS X 10.5. It also works in 10.4, if you have Safari 3. Also, the ability to pull a tab down and create a new window with it also exists in Safari 3 on Tiger.

This allows you to quit your browser while some windows are populated, and get them back when you reopen Safari.