All your Web typos are belong to us

[Moogie]

Network administrators are fuming about changes made by domain registrar Verisign to the DNS system yesterday that they say violate longstanding Internet standards. <br><br><table width="90%" border="1" cellpadding="5" cellspacing="1" bordercolor="#63635A" bgcolor="#E7E7E2" align="center"><tr><td style="font-size: 12px; font-style: italic;">Verisign yesterday added wildcard DNS records to all .com and .net domains - redirecting surfers who get lost on the Net to a search page, called Site Finder, run by the company. Those who type in non-existent addresses will also be served up Site Finder, instead of an error message.</td></tr></table><br><br>This article can be seen in full <a href="http://www.theregister.co.uk/content/6/32852.html"><b>here</b></a>. <br><br><br>

[rsbriggs]

And, as a side effect, make it nearly impossible to distinguish spam (spoofed so that it appears to originate at a non-valid domain) from email that at least originates from a valid domain.

All of this for no other purpose than greed - so they could make money re-directing the 20 million typos a day to a site they sell advertising on. And this isn't the first time they've pulled low-life stuff like this. Does anyone remember all the furor they caused back when they started sending out domain renewal notices to all expiring domains, whether they were the original registrar or not, attempting to rake in all the domain renewal fees, too?

They have already proven themselves to have corporate morals down somewhere around the "none-at-all / SCO" level. So, the bad news is, they probably really don't care about the uproar, and will simply continue to do whatever low-life things they think will make them a buck.

The good news is, the bind program authors already have a patch in place.

All your typos belong to 404, not verisign...

[FoBoT]

gack! :whip:

i put in "nonexistentaddresses.com" (http://nonexistentaddresses.com) and got redirected to sitefinder! :|punch|:

[rsbriggs]

It's likely to take several months for the patches to make the rounds....

[Chinasaur]

Power corrupts...

:mad:

[UncleFluffy]

And absolute power corrupts absolutely.:trash:

[Moogie]

Well, putting a up list of possible alternatives to a mis-typed URL, and
calling it "Site Finder" is probably OK.

I think what everybody is bitching about is the ads on the "Site Finder"
page. I haven't decided if VeriSign is sleazy, or just trying to generate
some revenue.

In fact, since I use the Google Toolbar for IE, which has a "typo
corrector", when I did a botched mcirosoft.com (Microsoft.com), I got
directed to a Google page with the correct "microsoft.com" link as an
alternative on it. "Hoogle.com" and "ayhoo.com" didn't result in any
suggestions (for Google and Yahoo, respectively).

I personally don't feel about it either way, since I ignore advertising
completely anyway

[pointwood]

What everyone complains about is that this neat little trick breaks a lot of stuff.

My ISP (the biggest in DK) blocked their site right away.

This has the potential to create chaos on the net :(

The latest news is that they'll not remove their site as requested by ICANN: http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=03/09/22/2255202&mode=thread&tid=126&tid=95&tid=99

[Darkness Productions]

This has other ramifications as well. Go to the sitefinder, and do a "search" for KFC. One of the links returned will be to KFCCruelty.com (a PETA driven site). This is bad for business, as you don't want a competitor's link to show up when searching for you, do you?