Slashdot Mirror
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."
So not only do they spam us, reserve weird rights to our domain names, and cybersquat, but now they are doing this. It is really too bad there is not some kind of ICANN policy against this type of thing... Then again, ICANN is made up of a bunch of organizations like them anyway, so the whole thing is corrupt.
Code and Other Laws of Cyberspace
This is also done when .org, .net, .com, .ca, etc. are confused. For example, Gnome and Gnome
VeriSign is evil... Microsoft is evil... AOL is evil... WHO DO I ROOT FOR? I don't know what to say... Um... um... Uh, San Dimas Open Source ROCKS!
Bush: He's Liberal in all the wrong ways.
...they'd create a service that sends you to the page you wanted when you mistype the name. Instead, they're out for a fast buck that annoys us. Feh.
"A great democracy must be progressive or it will soon cease to be a great democracy." --Theodore Roosevelt
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Hasn't that happened already? A while ago, I could've sworn http://www.gogle.com pointed to one of those all-in-one search pages usually in place for dot-com busts.
Robert Bindler
A Computer Science student's views on technology.
http://slsahdot.org
of a position of trust.
They should maintain the registry from a technical perspective, period.
Hm, how much would it be to make Versisign redirect typos of volkswagen.com on my porn site?
The issue is that all unused domains to come to a versign ad basically. What about the other registrars that you could register through. This seems like a mis-use of power.
Only two things are infinite, the universe and human stupidity, and I'm not sure about the former.
EXACTLY!
As soon as someone registers the page and points it somewhere, the DNS listing for that address would take over from the typo-redirection.
Dark Nexus
"Sanity is calming, but madness is more interesting."
"Paxfire's Sullivan said his company's service is set up so that only web traffic returns an IP address. Domain queries for non-web applications such as email or FTP are dropped or return error messages, he said."
Bullshit. He's lying or clueless, or both. It's not like DNS requests have a flag saying "I'm sending this query for a web page!" My take? They're lying to hide the side-effects of this blatant violation of internet standards from the general public.
and I'll say it again, 'this internet is stuffed'.
Anyone else have the dream whereby us computer people create a new internet and leave this heap of crap behind for corporate and marketing types to die in?
And whilst we are at it, lets do away with the ISP's and telcos so information doesn't cost anything anymore. Surely we can work something out?
I've always hated that, especially because it lets MS log every single incorrect URL typed.
If precedent is already set as per online advertising through a competitor (think Gator, where it was deemed legal to show pop-ups of a competing company when visiting certain sites, or sites with certain keywords), how would something like this hold up, where it is the user's fault for mis-spelling the intended domain?
If it's legal to pop up competing websites without consent, then surely it's legal to redirect to a competing website when there is indirect consent (e.g. the user types in the erronous address).
Not that it's a desireable thing, just based on past precedent it seems the direction the legal system is heading.
I just thank my lucky stars I don't get redirected to some obscure/spyware infested search engine when I misspell slashdot- just a simple page informing me I've misspelled it, with a convenient number of how many others are afflicted with the same travesty.
At least it's better than that frightening site that was/is (I'm not looking) at anazon.com. They had bestiality pictures on the main page!
What I'm listening to now on Pandora...
What is really interesting is the fact that between the months of March and April, the number of errors increase at least ten fold, for only one moment. Maybe this page was linked to before? http://cricket.asimov.net/index.cgi?target=%2Fslas hdot-misspellers%2Fslsahdot-org;ranges=y
I've tried a couple of variations like slashdto.org and slashodt.org - seems to go to just the types of pages the article is describing.
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.
With IPv6 on the verge of being implemented, how will this affect domain names? There will be a plethora of IPs but less and less usable domain names to bind to. Unless of course people want to start using stuff like y4h00.com! or 47t4v15t4.com; registering unused domains for comerical purposes is a detriment to the world wide web, and also, forces developing groups to use awkward domain names.
-illumina+us "I put on my robe and wizard hat..."
If they did it for simple mistypes, fine, I can deal with that. But if they non existant domains, it makes network testing a hell of a lot harder. For example, say im connecting to an IRC network thats having DNS problems, I dont want it trying to connect to verisigns webservers. And why let one company have a monopoly on that anyway even if it was going ahead, yea sure the .cx and .tk TLD's have crap like that, but not for .com please
Gnome wasnt built in a day.
Root for companies that no one has heard of; it makes you sound cool.
(San Dimas Operations...)
You can't judge a book by the way it wears its hair.
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.
You all should stop complaining it's obvious versign is trying to _help_ you: "Like many registries, we're continually exploring ideas on how to enhance the user experience,"
Oh, I already DID configure it to do that. So I don't need this alleged 'service', thankyouverymuch.
[100% ISO 646 Compliant]
SVM, ERGO MONSTRO.
I can't think of a better way to exponentially increase the number of domains registered. Currently, FooBar company knows that nobody has registered any typo names, and that if anybody does, they can probably get rid of the type names through a lawsuit. Therefore, FooBar registers only foobar.com.
If this takes effect, the story changes. FooBar knows that if any customer makes a typo, Verisign will get to show an ad for Widget.com. The only way to make this go away is to register all of the possible typo names. So FooBar registers every single possible domain name that could possibly be considered close to FooBar. Bad for FooBar. Bad for anybody who wants a domain name (now they will ALL be taken), but good for Verisign.
Time flies like an arrow. Fruit flies like a banana.
You know, this is just going to place a good bit more load on everyone's nameserver, not just the roots. Every request that used to be discarded from NS caches because it didn't exist will now be cached normally as a "good" request. 10-12% more data load might not be much for small DNS uses, but for companies like AOHell and other large ISPs, VeriSign is just screwing them over.
On another note, this would have to be some form of nameserver hack, not a root file hack(correct me if I'm wrong). But not all of the root servers are controlled by Verisign. Are those independant roots going to go along with this? Why should they?
R-r-r-r-regulation! Jesus, when are we going to wake out of the ideological stupor that holds that there's no place for government in a utopia? Despite what your Republican and Libertarian friends tell you, regulation can be a good thing.
<a href="http://www.joblessjimmy.com">Work is dumb and so is Jobless Jimmy.</a>
On one hand, Verisign wants us to believe they are sufficiently trustworthy to extort as much as USD1595.00 from us for a handful of 1's and 0's (SSL Certificates), and on the other they expect to be able to get away with the dispicable, annoying business practice of hijacking users' web requests? This is annoying enough as it is with opportunistic larrikins buying up misspelt domains, without the custodian of the database abusing its' position by returning effectively forged replies to queries for domains which do not exist. Reminds me of their recent foray into the domain 'Back-Order Domain Acquisition Service business.
I guess with competitors closing the gap by offering virtually the same thing for a fraction of the price, they must be getting desparate.
How many times do I have to say this? Posters, please verify your links before including them in your posts. I was promised bestiality--Instead, I go a link to a "Verisign is a bad company" protest site. At least it's on topic.
hmmmmm...
salsadot.org
Now, I just need to invent a few recipes for hot sauce with caffeine.
134340: I am not a number. I am a free planet!
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
Unless, of course, you are like me and your incorrect spelling is saved in the auto-complete: damn http://slsahdot.org!
Under capitalism man exploits man. Under communism it's the other way around.
Is Veirsign or Verising taken yet? :)
The .cx registrar domains.cx already does this. Try any random thing ending in .cx and you'll get their signup page.
.. but why would they only forward "misspelled" domain names.. why not EVERY SINGLE combination of letters and numbers that is not being used?? I mean, why not just register a bunch of domain names that might be popular and forward them to advertising pages? That's essentially what they are coming close to doing.
Not to give them any ideas mind you, but it just screams ILLEGAL that they are trying to steal traffic from people's mistakes. That has to have some implications, if not completely violating the notion of standards.
Remember, standards are what made the Internet in the first place, and standards are what keep it ALIVE!
I wrote the following letter to ICANN when it first cropped up:
Hello,
We already have the example of WLS in Verisign abusing its monopoly (and ICANN not stopping this abuse -- see www.stopwls.com).
Planning to monetize all typos by rewriting DNS error codes to instead point to itself (i.e. instead of returning error codes, it will no longer return errors, but instead bring the surfer to Verisign money-making pages) is yet another example of an abusive monopolist. See here:
Given the huge technical standards that Verisign would be violating, as well as the Intellectual Property and economic issues (e.g. a typo of one letter of your domain name could send a client to a search engine listing your competitor as #1, or worse; John Zuccarini is in JAIL for his typo-squatting!), can someone in the Names Council, or the ICANN Board that has a spinal column please pre-empt this Verisign move by forbidding unilateral action of such a nature by means of a vote of some kind, through the introduction of a motion?
From the comments at ICANNWatch when this abuse last came up, perhaps the way to frame the motion is "gTLD Registry operators WILL return NXDOMAIN for ALL DNS queries for which where there is not a REGISTERED domain name." Period.
Once you start tampering with things at the DNS level, as Verisign is intending to do, you threaten the security and stability of the internet, as I think Vint Cerf properly recognizes (being right at least half of the time; bad call on WLS, but the courts and the US governmet will take care of that one eventually). For a company whose slogan is "The Value of Trust", Verisign makes a mockery of the caretaker role it has been given as guardian of the com/net registries. I trust them as much as I trust John Zuccarini.
If the US government had a problem with Microsoft embedding the Internet Explorer browser into its operating system, what will they think given Verisign has an even greater monopoly when it comes to DNS resolution? The power should belong to the users, who should have the choice (through their own software) how to resolve errors. That's why we have technical standards. Making that decision for them, by BREAKING technical standards and the applications that rely on those standards, as Verisign plans to do, and making loads of $$$$ while doing it, smacks of an abusive father-knows-best monopolist. Verisign is the father you wish you never had! Calling it a "service" adds insult to injury, as they did with WLS, especially when it's a MONOPOLY service, for which one has no choice. When you make a typo for a telephone call, does the 1-800 operator (AT&T, MCI, Neustar?) start playing paid jingles for your competitors, instead of telling you that you misdialled via a message?
Ultimately, folks know Verisign wants to milk every last penny out of its monopolies, and doesn't care who they have to step on to do so. Take a look at Games.TV which shows:
to understand what Verisign's goals are (Verisign runs .tv). Do you think you really own your .com domains? What price would Verisign like to charge you for your domains?? Once they wipe out some registrars through WLS, and other monopoly abuses, who will be left to stop them?
If Verisign is permitted to g
... neither misspelling seems to be actually registered (no WHOIS information), yet both do indeed resolve. Curiously enough, the first resolves to a Sprint netblock (which in turn is subdevided) and the second to a Verio netblock. What's more is they both resolve consistantly over multiple name lookups. Kinda interesting, if this is an unknown wildcard redirect, that different typos would end up different places. Perhaps this is part of the strategy?
From the client side, Microsoft is already collecting every mistyped URL and substituting their own search engine!
In MSIE, a hostname that is not found will be sent to Microsoft. A page will be auto-generated, containing links to similar hostnames, and the Microsoft MSN search engine.
Microsoft is already receiving this information. I'm sure that there is a high commercial value in knowing the exact data on which domains are mistyped the most often! I would be surprised if Microsoft doesn't use this information internally, or resell it to the highest bidder.
Since MSIE is 90% of the installed browser base, I would be very surprised if server-side information on mistyped domains (as Verisign is logging) is very different from client-side information. The client-side information might even be more accurate, due to intermediary DNS servers doing caching of negative results!
Does anybody know for sure what Microsoft is doing with their large database of mistyped domains?
Dr. Demento On The 'Net!
From the perspective of a DNS server or client, what's the difference between a subdomain and a domain? Isn't "slashdot.org" a subdomain of "org"?
These are subdomains: sub 1 sub 2 sub 3
Will I retire or break 10K?
I say if they go ahead with this, ICANN should yank their registrar status. This is in blatant disregard of Internet standard (RFC, good practice, etc.) and should not be tolerated in any way.
Hasn't this been going on for a LONG time now? Example: oogle.com and friends. Typically I've seen them go to that god-awful mp3search or whoever that throws up about 20 popups. >|-[ Makes me mad.
I installed ad-aware, and it did find a lot of junk (mostly cookies, but one odd IE extension), but it didn't fix the problem, so I dug a little deeper. Unfortunately, the cause turned out to be even more sinister than spyware: my own stupidity.
Whenever I setup a machine at home, I always set the domain name to home.net (or, in this case, option domain-name "home.net"; in dhcpd.conf) but I forgot to make the local dns server authoritative for the home.net domain. So what happens when windows can't find a host X? It searches again with X.localdom. So ilikekittens.com turns into ilikekittens.com.home.net, which ds1.domainspa.com is happy to tell me is located at 67.96.63.112.
I didn't have the problem under linux because nslookup there will only retry X.localdom if X contains no periods. (and konqueror seems to ignore localdom altogether)
The interesting question is, why is IE totally unable to lookup hosts sans domain name even if no domain name is set on the local machine? If I strip home.net from dhcpd.conf and the dns host list, nslookup on win has no problem telling me tivo is 10.0.0.7, but IE cannot find http://tivo/ui ??
At least I don't have to see that damn search page ever again.
Best mac commercial ever(mirror)
I'm sure there are a lot more possibilities. Oooh let them try and do this.
I'd be willing to help add a patch to Bind 9 to check for DNS responses that are "from verisign's redirection" and respond with an empty response.
This is REALLY quite annoying for a 3 pinky typist like me !
.nu does this already, try www.gfrgdfg.nu
/Fred
Hehehe.... ALL YOUR... what was that again?
Can't any name server do this?
For example, couldn't my ISP return its web page instead of a broken link (since my nameserver is assigned to theirs via DHCP)?
Maybe this is good --- maybe we will choose our nameserver based on who does the most useful thing with mistypes. For example, I'll bet Google could do something very useful with a mistype, and figure out a way to make money without pissing me off.
Of course, if Verisign is returning bogus entries, a nameserver has an additional, but mostly trivial (probably as simple as IP address filtering), job of filtering BS Verisign links to identify mistyped urls.
Offensive corporate behaviour is the easiest thing in the world to stop. Don't support them. If Ford is buying ads from VeriSign on mistyped Toyota domains and you feel that it's wrong, then don't buy from Ford! People toss around the word boycott as if it's a special act, but unless it's done as an organised, concerted effort, then boycotting is just personal choice in action.
Every time we spend money (or not), we are making a choice. When we buy something, we are buying a product based on our needs, wants, perceptions, and beliefs. When you buy something from a company, you are supporting that company and their actions. When you decide against buying something from a company which you would like to have, you are making a statement that you will NOT support them, based on...whatever you're not supporting, be it sleazy advertising (spam, or the Ford example), bad corporate behaviour (Microsoft, the major RIAA members), or unethical products (Tobacco companies).
PERSONAL ACTION is an easy easy easy easy easy way to prevent most corporate excess. Unfortunately, it's also nearly impossible, because not enough people are willing to implement it. "Yeah, I've heard about the problems with the RIAA, but I want the new (x) album." Even such things as, "my old stereo is fantastic, but this year's model is NEWER (with less features, poorer specs, etc.)" defeat a big chunk of personal action.
Can you imagine what would happen to companies like VeriSign if EVERYONE actually made all of their decisions consciously, and let the companies know about it? Why, we might have corporate responsibility.
"People who do stupid things with hazardous materials often die." -- Jim Davidson on alt.folklore.urban
No, I doubt folks would stop registering typo-domains. I would wish folks would realize how scummy they are if they require lying (or at a bare minimum misdirecting) someone just to get a hit on their page.
Norris/Palin 2012
Fact: We deserve leaders who can kick your ass and field dress your carcass.