Nope, there was no 404 hijacker involved. Here’s why and how I know (some techie stuff on the way):

1. A hijacker would have done just that…hijacked my browser redirecting to another site showing some type of returns. But you will see in the video I’m still on the lans.screensaver.com domain.

2. I would have seen server calls going out at some point to the 404 hijackers servers. I didn’t.

3. I would have gotten a 404 server response in my sniffer logs for the lans.screensaver.com request. I didn’t. I got a 200 response, which is an everything’s a-OK response.

4. I reviewed the source code of all the activity that occurred on the screensaver.com domain. While the contents of the screensaver page were transmitted in gzip, my sniffer program both reassembles and decodes such transmissions so I can view in text. I did review. A form GET command is used to bring up the listings, but still from the lans.screensaver.com page.

5. Screensaver.com cookies were both read and dropped from that page. Couldn’t do that if the page had been hijacked away.

6. I did it from more than one computer and got the same results.

7. Going to the nonexistent Google page you linked to on the same cmputer I made the video on, I get the expected 404 page on Google.

Now taking your word that you arrive at screensavers as you should from going to the URL in the video…

If the page was a 404 for some reason (which is when a 404 hijacker would take over), why are you able to access the page correctly?

That aside, from the source code of the page I know that they also are capturing the end user’s IP address. It’s actually displayed in the source code of the page. So a more likely explanation is that Freeze.com is doing some type of geo-targeting for when the parked domain listings and when proper access to their site occurs. If you notice in the final URL destination, ASP coding is being used which allows for such dynamic delivery of pages.

Now that final landing page is handed off to Akamia servers (not uncommon for high traffic sites), so I suppose there could have been an issue with Screensaver.com and their Akamai account and Akamai was responsible for that page. But then you wouldn’t have gotten to the correct page. And even if that was the case, the point is still valid that Freeze.com affiliate traffic isn’t ending up where it should.

If they’re so stupid that they choose, in the first place, to promote the spread of crapware that steals from them, they probaly don’t “mind”.