Você conhece as paginas 404. Aquelas que aparecem quando existe um erro de acesso a um determinado site. Pois bem, a ultima actualização do Google Toolbar, faz hijack nestas paginas e abonita-as.

Hijack: Tecnica conhecida como tomar posse duma sessao, ou duma operação.

... Lunarpages a few days ago turned the default 404 pages for all sites they host (who haven’t specifically customized them already) to one of those ultra-sleazy “domain parking”-style setups.

For websites, traffic is everything. Stealing a site’s traffic is nothing less than web homicide!

You see, anybody who got a default 404 error before this change, probably just backed up to the site they were on and continued. But now, it seems probable they’ll end up clicking one of the links they see there, or possibly use the “search this site” form, which does nothing of the sort! It searches “http://searchportal.information.com/” instead and Lunarpages gets a kickback!

Of course, Go Daddy has been doing stuff like this for ages.. if you register a domain with them and don’t set anything up on it you’re going to get a lame page filled with lame affiliate links. But at least with parked domains, it’s not like there’s an actual site up that you’re injecting content into! Not to mention, they’re Go Daddy. We’d expect nothing less from them!

Well gosh Darn!!

I suppose, I dont really have anything against a company extracting as much dollars from there customer base.  But heck, they should've been smarter about it.

I would've:

• Asked existing users to "Opt-In"
• Offered a Rev-Share so my company makes money and the customers makes money
• I would change my TOS and signup process so that new customers are automatically "Opted-IN" and automatically got a cash for it.  (Or free service)

Bottom line is that LunarPages got greedy.  LunarPages has been losing ground in the ultra-competitive budget web hosting industry.  - I suppose, its there way of making a few bucks to weather the down turn.

*sigh, its companies like these that sorta gives the web hosting industry a seedy feel.  Though, blunders like these do help my clients (lunarpages competitors) - I gotta tell ya, 95% of the web hosting companies out there do not know how to monetize there customer base.  *SIGH*