If my occasional fits of Web-surfing fumble fingers began dumping me summarily on pages of ads and self-proclaimed "search options," I would't put up with it.

Those pages are an imposition. The Domain Name System disruption they involve breaks some Internet services because it returns a live URL when it should return " NXDOMAIN." And they can be dangerous. To protect myself, I would:

First, find the opt out button for that ads&searches page, if there were one, and opt out.

Second, make a reasonable effort to learn whose page it was. Those pages are usually a "service" your Internet Services Provider misnames "typo correction," and clearly identified in some way as theirs.

Third, complain to my ISP. If they were identifiably the sponsor of the misservice, I would protest. Otherwise, I would report it as an error. It may be worse than that. As noted by Danny McPherson, director of security research for Arbor Networks, there several ways DNS can be used against you. Whatever the cause, be sure your ISP knows network kidnapping is unacceptable to you.

Fourth, having lost confidence in the Domain Name System provider who blighted my day, I would surf to OpenDNS, create an account, register my network and turn off typo correction. "Typo correction" is one name for that browser-kidnapping misservice, and at OpenDNS you can quite reliably turn it off.

As I write, I find no evidence that Time Warner is still disrupting the network in this way, although they did experiment with it and could still be doing so in areas I have not probed.

Earthlink, Comcast, Verizon and a long list of others apparently are, however, and OpenDNS is the most readily applied solution I have found to both stop the browser kidnapping and avoid the potential dangers it poses.

If you register and search among the users, you will find me there.