Verisign have today added "wildcard DNS" records to the .com and .net TLD's.

 

Yesterday and since DNS has been around, if you looked up a domain that doesn't exist (For example, sceinceforums.net) you'd get a handy error message telling you the domain didn't exist. Thanks to the stupidity of verisign, this is no longer the case. Now, you get the IP address of a verisign webserver, advertising the domain registration services of Network Solutions - a Verisign company.

 

The problem with this isn't just the obvious abuse of the monopoly handed to them by ICANN, it will break things.

 

As an example, by mailserver rejects email if the domain used by the sender doesn't exist. Lots of mailservers do this as an anti-spam measure. Now, since all .com and .net domains exist this is measure is completely useless.

 

I'm quite sure Verisign are going to have to back down on this, and i'm betting it'll be within 72 hours.

"lollyroffle" would seem to fit in quite nicely under that post.

I plugged in a made-up domain and got taken to google:

 

http://www.google.com/search?q=www.fzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzblat.com

Sayonara³ said in post #3 :

I plugged in a made-up domain and got taken to google

There is something wrong with your proxy/dns/IE, then. Try it at home later...

It may be because of the Google tool bar. I will try it in a different browser if I get the same effect at home.

I tried that in netscape and I got:

 

Gateway Timeout

The following error occurred:

 

Server unreachable

Please contact the administrator.

I'm using Mozilla (Redhat 9) and I got a timeout. I can't imagine Verisign could have it set up world-wide to do this. Maybe they have agreements with certain ISP's to route unregistered domain names to them?

No, they have done this.

 

The only reason you're getting timeouts at the moment is because the website these requests are redirected to is getting swamped by all the people that can't spell.

 

They have no agreements with anyone to do this, it's just a pure abuse of the US.gov-sanctioned monopoly.

If you want a few more links: -

 

http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=03/09/16/0034210&mode=thread&tid=126&tid=95&tid=98&tid=99