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VeriSign Looks At Earning Money on Domain Typos

Posted by CowboyNeal on from the seemingly-good-ideas dept.

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."

4 of 288 comments (clear)

  1. Did you expect anything less... by Bloodmoon1 · · Score: 5, Informative

    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?

    --

    Request: ECM unit, 1000 km fullerene cable, 1 tactical nuclear weapon. Reason: Birthday party for foreign dignitary.
  2. Re:This is already done by puck71 · · Score: 4, Informative

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

  3. AT&T cable -- they already did this by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Informative

    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.

  4. It breaks no standard by FunkyMarcus · · Score: 5, Informative

    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