VeriSign Looks At Earning Money on Domain Typos

Harald Paulsen writes "In a recent article Computer Business Review uncovers how VeriSign Inc is testing a service that would return a webpage if a user mistypes an URL. Basically all nonexistant domain queries could return an IP address and if the user was trying to access a page with a webbrowser they could get redirected to a search-engine, or worse: a page asking them to buy a domain. This is most certainly breaking the DNS standard and could be compared to cybersquatting (Hey Ford, want to have a banner ad whenever someone mistypes Toyota?). This is interesting in relation to an earlier story about register.com and holding-pages."

Comments

Re:And people trust Verisign?

[Chmarr]

IT could very well be that they're saying that queries for www.sometyponame.com will return an IP address, but sometyponame.com will return a negative result.

Did you expect anything less...

[Bloodmoon1]

From the same company that not all to long ago tried a scam to steal away domain names from their initial registrars, and is now being sued class-action style and being investigated by the FTC?

Re:This is already done

[puck71]

You change change that screen. See http://www.google.com/options/defaults.html for details.

AT&T cable -- they already did this

[Anonymous Coward]

AT&T did this for a while with all unrecognized DNS queries on their cable modem service, about a year ago. You got some junky portal.

Re:I'm confused

[MegaFur]

Corporations* are always evil to some degree or another. (Yes, that includes you, IBM--and you too, Redhat (et. al.).) Your mistake was in seeing things as a contest in which you root for some team to win. They're all evil. The only way that we win is to have the really, really evil ones take each other out (if we're very lucky), and try to somehow prevent the other ones from becoming as bad as the most evil ones. It pays to be cynical.

* echo Corporations | sed -e s/pora/rup/ and you will see why.

Oh, and never believe anything you read on slashdot... including this.

It breaks no standard

[FunkyMarcus]

This is most certainly breaking the DNS standard

No, it's most certainly not.

It uses DNS as the means to some questionable ends, but it doesn't break anything.

As a matter of fact, the master file format (which is not the DNS standard as we care about it in this context anyway) explicitly provides for wildcard records.

Watch your location (URL, address, URI, whatever) bar:

See?
Again?
One more time?

Now, what standards have we broken? What's to prevent the web server from deciding what content to give us based on the Host header field we send?

Mark

Diminishing returns

[indros13]

This will seem a little offtopic, but I think the market for misspelling is declining. After all, features like auto-complete in browsers mean that for repeated visits, it's a lot harder to end up at the wrong place.

Unless, of course, you are like me and your incorrect spelling is saved in the auto-complete: damn http://slsahdot.org!

VeriSign is "Innovating"

[joenobody]

The .cx registrar domains.cx already does this. Try any random thing ending in .cx and you'll get their signup page.

Re:This is already done

[stratjakt]

It's different because if I go to a command prompt, type ping www.domainthatdoesntexist.com, I'll get a DNS error.

Now I'll get a ping from some verisign server?

There's more to the internet than the web.

Re:Because the Internet is not just 'The Web'

[Richardsonke1]

How about the .cc TLD? http://jlkdfjlasdkf.cc/