I've been trying to avoid any Tiscali related news for some time, for
a while Tiscali's numerous failings were somewhat dominating the site. However the latest spate of failings cannot be omitted. Tiscali have once again decided to make a few extra pennies at their customers expense.
Their latest escapade is to highjack all dead traffic and redirect it to an ad supported page. So if you type in gogggle.com instead of google.com then (assuming you are a Tiscali customer) then you will find yourself confronted with an ad supported page with links to online dating and suchlike.
This comes not long after Tiscali's latest debacle with its email services. The company claims that it was blacklisted for Spam. The result was that a large number of emails got lost. It has been pointed out by a large number of users however that the emails did not even seem to be leaving Tiscali's system, and so in all likelihood it was a Tiscali issue. Despite a large number of complaints, Tiscali has told its customers that despite the issues all contracts are still valid and that any customers wishing to leave must 'make their case to the company.'
The current issues with DNS hijacking have been covered by The Register although to keep up-to date it is probably best to read the related thread on Tiscali's forum.
Tiscali are not the first company to try these tactics, sometime ago Verisign tried something very similar and incurred the wrath of ICANN.
The issue with this hijacking is that it can cause some major issues for users, incorrect urls will be added to your history, as well as to the drop down menu in your address bar. The reason for this is that the browser is not informed that the page does not exist, and so presumes that it does. A great number of other services are also affected.
Tiscali have touted this service as an 'improvement' but have now supplied an opt out option. Of course to do this you have to telephone the customer service number at 8p a minute whilst you sit on hold indefinitely. This service should almost certainly be optin, however as Tiscali are clearly too aware, it is not a service that many users are actually going to want. It would be far better if Tiscali put their funds into improving their infrastructure and their customer service.
Before long the appeal of their low prices will not be enough to keep Tiscali in business, especially as each piece of monkey business hightens the risk that Ofcom may step in and give Tiscali a nice large fine.
I await that day with baited breath.
Their latest escapade is to highjack all dead traffic and redirect it to an ad supported page. So if you type in gogggle.com instead of google.com then (assuming you are a Tiscali customer) then you will find yourself confronted with an ad supported page with links to online dating and suchlike.
This comes not long after Tiscali's latest debacle with its email services. The company claims that it was blacklisted for Spam. The result was that a large number of emails got lost. It has been pointed out by a large number of users however that the emails did not even seem to be leaving Tiscali's system, and so in all likelihood it was a Tiscali issue. Despite a large number of complaints, Tiscali has told its customers that despite the issues all contracts are still valid and that any customers wishing to leave must 'make their case to the company.'
The current issues with DNS hijacking have been covered by The Register although to keep up-to date it is probably best to read the related thread on Tiscali's forum.
Tiscali are not the first company to try these tactics, sometime ago Verisign tried something very similar and incurred the wrath of ICANN.
The issue with this hijacking is that it can cause some major issues for users, incorrect urls will be added to your history, as well as to the drop down menu in your address bar. The reason for this is that the browser is not informed that the page does not exist, and so presumes that it does. A great number of other services are also affected.
Tiscali have touted this service as an 'improvement' but have now supplied an opt out option. Of course to do this you have to telephone the customer service number at 8p a minute whilst you sit on hold indefinitely. This service should almost certainly be optin, however as Tiscali are clearly too aware, it is not a service that many users are actually going to want. It would be far better if Tiscali put their funds into improving their infrastructure and their customer service.
Before long the appeal of their low prices will not be enough to keep Tiscali in business, especially as each piece of monkey business hightens the risk that Ofcom may step in and give Tiscali a nice large fine.
I await that day with baited breath.
