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CentralNic Enables uk.com Wildcard DNS
JamesS writes "It appears that CentralNic has
enabled wildcard DNS matching.
Many Slashdot readers will remember the backlash aimed at Verisign the last time it did this nearly two years ago to the day, introducing SiteFinder to the world at large."
How about starting something useful Instead of wildcarding DNS why doesn't one of these venders wildcard TDLAs making them optional. What's that - you get more money by selling N domain names where N = TDLAs. Yeah it would be hard to wildcard TDLAs but after a few years it wouldn't matter, as the DNS names would become the selling point more than TDLAs. I guess the system could default to .com then .org or it could just show you the possible combination and learn which is the most popular based on your country or something. Regardless of the grainy details but I just would like to see the \.[.]{2-3}$ go away.
It's a private company which does this with private subdomains. Verisign manages GTLDs, which is quite a difference, both impact-wise and policy-wise.
For a minute I thought this was about the .co.uk domain, a real TLD, but this is just like slashdot deciding to sell joesblog.slashdot.org to someone. What they do with their own domain is up to them.
I, for one, will not buy any products/services from Verisign. They have been involved in too many shady dealings like the wildcard DNS fiasco. I hope that IT people in the UK do the same with CentralNic.
Bradley Holt
It's the same as me offering subdomains on my privately-held domain, but having a catchall as well. Why is this even an issue?
Rex is 09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0
[Disclaimer: Vested interest]
I don't see why it's such a big deal for CentralNic to do it, really. UK.com is their domain for them to do with as they wish.
I worked for CentralNic day-to-day for a few years, and the company last enabled this in, er, 2000 I think. It lasted 3 days, during which we were subjected to a barrage of emails from people saying 'wah wah what have you done you've stolen my site' because they'd forgotten to put the 'co' in 'co.uk', and IE had attempted to be clever and autocomplete with '.com'.
I think the change now is probably because they're doing a bit more with portals, and it makes sense for them to increase the eyeball level by doing this.
But, er... doesn't seem such a big deal.
Smegma.
I say, let the registrars wildcard the domains. Just make them pay for the domains in the same way WE would - force them to pay US$15 (or whatever they charge) a year to a non-profit organization for the advancement of the Internet.
Let's see - they are wildcarding the domains, so what is the maximum length of any domain element, times the maximum number of domain elements in a domain request - then take the number of valid characters in a domain name to that power, and multiply by $15.
DaY-UM! We could buy a REALLY NICE next generation for that!
www.eFax.com are spammers
"What website to get the Win xp CD keys? My hard drive crashed and I don't have the original cd :("
:-D
enjoy your comment being modded into oblivion
(seriously just use google, or MSN if you want to be funny)
wildcard DNS's are very common in subdomains, CentralNIc are just re-selling subdomains (for 37 quid !) of course some people have been giving away subdomains for years
this company are nothing more than scam artists, charging 10 times what a real domain would cost but with none of the responsibility of a genuine NIC
So they are squatting on their own domain? Interesting concept, and people even buy those extra domains, which they have for free and in abundance for GBP 32,50 a year? 100,000 of them? Great! Lets put it in the gallery next to the Nigerian scam artist.
My wife's sketchblog Blob[p]: Gastrono-me
Don't tell anyone I told you.
Some domain owner points his subdomains to his main domain and this is news?!??!
Do I get my domain to slashdot if I do the same? Just tell me and I'll set up the DNS entries!
My quality social news site.com.
CentralNIC is a second-level domain owner. They can do whatever their customers will let them do with *.uk.com.
The outrage at Verisign was over their misappropriation of a root-level domain space where they were merely the custodian.
Moderating "-1, Disagree" is simple censorship. Have the guts to post your opinion.
Basically, they own the domains uk.com and several others in that form and are selling out subdomains. If someone accesses a subdomain not purchased, it would go to thier sales page.
In America we are imprisoned by our fear of them.
These registrars were handed a giant chunk of value, ownership registration on our 21st Century language - Internet names - along with the trust of the public that their answers to queries would be "objective", not reflecting some local vested interest. Like which company paid them to return their link. They're "leveraging synergies" between DNS queries and advertising customers. But one person's "synergy" is another person's "conflict of interest".
Real wildcard queries return all of the matching items, not just the one preferred by the database. These registrars do have a synergic value to offer, as they have info about "close matches". Wildcard queries should offer "disambiguation" replies of all matches, DNS-wide, not just those in the local registrar. And even if they make money placing "sponsored" responses, they should have to actually match the query criteria, not just an arbitrary association bought for money. Sponsored links should appear in a column alongside "real" links, like Google adWords, so they're not in the way of retrieving the real responses. And some proceeds from the sponsorship should be returned to the community from which the system derives most of its value: registrants and queriers. Probably just fund the IETF or IANA, which serves the community equitably. The whole system should be optional, leaving queries to default to the original "failure mode", where null responses return only an error message, not a list of "maybe you wanted" responses.
These servics are probably inevitable. And they're probably useful, in returning some financing to the organizations that keep the Internet running. And letting them put what amounts to advertising into the error responses gives a revenue stream to DNS servers. That offers incentive for more servers, which would make the system more reliable, more distributed - competition might even produce inherently valuable innovations, not just these capitalist innovations. But we've got to demand they do it right. If the Internet DNS layer becomes just a smartass "TV Guide", as "brought to you by" takes over our seamless navigation, we might as well all go back to watching TV.
--
make install -not war
I treat anyone whose web site is a sub-domain of uk.com with the same contempt as I do .biz and .info.
This is a particularly clueless article, and TheReg ought to have known better than to publish it.
It's interesting, fdsagfdwagdsa.uk.com leads me to the uk.com website. But fuckyou.uk.com and fuckoff.uk.com can not be found? They're not just banning fuck*.uk.com though, cause fuckmeintheass.uk.com goes right to the uk.com site.
It seems they know this is going to be an unpopular move.
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
I think you meant TLD :)
...sometimes, in order to hurt someone very badly, you have to tell that person terrible lies. - PA
I am with you there! TLDs only serve to cause confusion. Was that website .com, .org, .co.uk, or .org.uk? And some people will happily exploit that confusion by setting up their website on the same domain with a different TLD. So then you'll have to buy your domain on all likely other TLDs, too. Yech!
.com names, for-profits with .org names, Dutch sites with .nu names, etc. etc. The supposed relation between TLD and function doesn't hold, nor does the supposed relation between TLD and country. And nor could it, what with country TLDs and function TLDs in the same namespace...
.com anyway. You'll have to solve the load problem for the .com TLD, and once you've done that it's not that much harder to throw the rest of the TLDs on that same system.
/less/to/more/specific/all/the/way!
And what's it all good for? I've seen non-profit organizations with
People have told me that TLDs help the system to function, because the hierarchy allows better load distribution. I call bull on that one. Almost everybody wants the
So, eliminate the confusion and buy my pure names today! How does "theregister" sound as the name of your website, instead of "theregister.co.uk"? Only drawback is that nobody's browser actually supports these new names.
And while we're at it, lets also do away with the inverted order crap. What's with the more specific name going in front of the less specific ones in the DNS name, and the more specific name going _after_ the less specific name in the rest of the URL? And what's with the dot as a separator?
Please correct me if I got my facts wrong.
Brown told us "Since CentralNic does not run an email server on the main domains it owns either, email and spam problems have also not been the issue they were with VeriSign's SiteFinder."
.uk.com domains for the past month)
Nuh, the reason spam isn't the same problem like it was with the Verisign wildcarding is that spammers dont seem to use anydomain.uk.com in their forged addresses so who cares if the domain resolves or not? (I guess someone *must* get spam from somedomain.uk.com but my logs dont show any mail from any
I guess I now need to setup a rule so that any mail from a domain that resolves to 213.146.149.160 is rejected as spammers will most likely jump on this.
Proof that slashdot has enabled whildcard DNS for slashdot.org. Slay the infidels.
A well thought out technically and detailed proposal such as this is bound to be well received by they people who actually have a faint idea of how the DNS system works.
Wait, we could put all the names into a big text file and email it around, that would be even simpler, no?
Deleted
I just hope it dosent have too much of an effect on SPAM, because any spammers can now send emails from anything@wegfwegwegwegweg.uk.com, and mailservers that check for existing domains will pass it, unlike without wildcards where that domain wont exist and the SPAM will be rejected.
Wildcarding even subdomains become a problem for some email admins who do things like check that the from address is really an address that can be replied to. Until there are better checks in place making sure that foo@foobar5.uk.com is a really domain that can recieve mail is a problem with wildcarding.
Look http://asdfasfdasfasfasfdasfd.sourceforge.net/ or http://qwerqwerqwerqwer.sourceforge.net/
uk.com isn't a TLD, so who cares. Why do you want a ?.uk.com domain anyway?
Whois Server Version 1.3
Domain names in the .com and .net domains can now be registered
with many different competing registrars. Go to http://www.internic.net/
for detailed information.
No match for "WAREZ.UK.COM".
Hey, where's the entry "warez A 127.0.0.1"? Everyone doing 2LDs has to have a 127.0.0.1 entry for warez!
--
"Open source is good." - Steve Jobs
"Open source is evil." - Microsoft
There difference here is that CnetralNic is not a registry. They bought a domain name from Verisign, just like slashdot did, and then started selling the 3rd level domains off. Ones that people don't buy, they're basically showing adds for their subdomains. No different than what http://co.com/ has been doing for a couple years now. Check out http://co.com/ http://something.co.com/ and http://another.co.com./
This is not a huge potential problem like it was in the verisign script. The domain is registered (register a domain and you get all the sub domains, duh). Very few people are writing software to deal with making custom scripts / programs to treat uk.com as a TLD (which is not). The program with verisign was they wanted to take any unregistered domain and redirect. There are LOTS of programs written for TLD's to check all sorts of things, from your web browser letting you know that the page is not registered, letting the mail system know the domain does not exists, spam checking valid domains, etc.
slashdot.org - News for Nerds. Stuff that matters.
And a private subdomain is a very very big matter!
Grundgesetz * 23. Mai 1949 - 30. November 2007 - http://www.vorratsdatenspeicherung.de/
The problem isn't TLDs, the problem is that they're just suggestions. They should be enforced so that in order to get a .com you should have to provide a business license, in order to get a .org you have to be a 503(c) or whatever, and in order to get a country code domain you have to actually be connected in that country.
.com, but the local burger joint would have to get a .com.us. Similarly, Mozilla could still be mozilla.org because it only exists on the Net, while the local charity would be .org.us.
.net and such would be.
Additionally, TLDs with no country code should be strictly limited to international or virtual organizations only. For example, McDonalds could qualify for a
Function TLDs other than com and org would work the same way, of course, although I don't know off the top of my head what the criteria for
"[Regarding the 'cloud,'] ownership was what made America different than Russia." -- Woz
It wouldn't be hard for a browser to support both directions, but browsers these daya are removing features if they believe the standard specification doesn't call for it.
1 7 7 .aspx
https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=3081
http://blogs.msdn.com/ie/archive/2005/08/29/45766
I've never actually visited a uk.com address. No-one gives a shit about anything other than .com or .co.uk other TLD's just arn't prestigious enough. Although you could make an exception for .ac.uk .gov.uk .org and .net that's pretty much it. .com really is _the_ TLD, everyone's first choice is a .com because no matter where you are in the world everyone recognises the phrase 'dot com' like coca-cola.
Anyway that was side-tracking, this thing is a pretty evil abuse of the system, although my hat goes off to them for their capitalist achievement.
This comment does not represent the views or opinions of the user.
It is common practice among ISPs to enable DNS wildcards for subdomains by default. hoststar.ch is doing that for instance.
I am sorry but if I own a domain, like myself.com, I have every right to do whatever I want with the third level subdomains unless I clearly declared somewhere in my terms of service that, I will abide and governed by the same rules that applies to tld dns providers like verisign.
typing fskjljg.com to your browser and typing fskjljg.myself.com are two different concepts. For the first one, no one claimed ownership by paying money and verisign in the recent past, decided, they can do anything they want. So they basically claimed rights to every unpublished domain name available.
Whereas uk.com in this example, claimed stake at this domain by paying anregistering this domain name. If you are hitting their server to access another and you have the wrong information, they can do whatever they wish, as you, the surfer, chose to visit a webserver (not a DNS server only) hosted by them.
I am not really thrilled how the two concepts put in the same category to ruffle feathers personally. Must be a slow news day at the register.
__________
The more I know people, the more I love animals
Who uses uk.com domains anyhow ? I can't recall seeing one - ever. The real question should be how did they get uk.com in the first place....
No matter what domain you type in your browser (i.e. foo.bar.slashdot.org), you will redirected to Slashdot's own webpage, featuring advertising and a ridiculous number of duplicate front-page stories.
The benefit to slashdot.org is clear - increased sales and advertising revenue - but the system by which the redirection is carried out, called wildcard, has been criticised by the Security and Stability Advisory Committee (SSAC) of Internet overseeing organisation ICANN as putting the stability of the Internet at risk.
I have a wildcarded 4th-level domain from my 3rd level domain provided by 2nd-level domain gotdns.com from dyndns.org.
Typing the same thing in Internet Explorer also leads me to google's search page, but doesn't automatically do the I'm feeling lucky search.
Not directly, but indirectly.
.com on all domains names that aren't found. If a person goes to http://notfound.co.uk/ and it is not a registered domain, the browser will then try http://notfound.co.uk.com/ which will resolve through the wildcard.
Browsers are now "smart," and (can be configured to) append
2nd level domain owners do this all the time. It is very useful if you are selling subdomains or providing free subdomains as part of a hosting service or are running an affiliate program off your e-commerce site or any of a dozen other applications.
Slashdot needs to upgrade its editorial staff or implement a story moderating system so we can browse stories at a point level.
I can see it now:
-1 Dupe
-1 Old
-1 Overrated (i.e. Dumb)
-1 Flamebait/Troll
+1 interesting
+1 insightful
howver the point rating should be an average rather than a total rating number.
This thing is dangerous. It's easy to promote mistyped name as #1 on Google and get users forwarded to fake site.
The official domains for the United Kingdom are .co.uk. Only the spammers us .uk.com.
Sigs. We don't need no steenking sigs.
see subject. not at all the same. move along.
cyn, free software and *nix operating systems enthusiast.
on your "Bind 9.2.x" server simply add to your conf file
:).
zone "uk.com" { type delegation-only; };
Your wild cards won't return a record then
has it really been TWO YEARS since SiteFinder? Say it isn't so! With time passing like that, I feel as if my life is already over. Is the post referring perhaps to some other 'sitefinder,' like maybe Yahoo or Google? Or even some event, perhaps an announcement, and not the actual activation of Verisign's service? :(
My company frequently goes to industry shows and conferences, where we typically have a booth to demonstrate our wares to prospective clients.
We can NEVER count on an Internet connection, even when using a cellular network card - so we have a used laptop set up with the same software as on our public servers, configured with Linux, HTTP, DHCP, PostgreSQL, and DNS, connected to a hotspot. Effectively, the "Internet" that the hotspot is connected to consists solely of the laptop server. This way our salesforce can connect with their laptops and demonstrate our wares easily, while the server and hotspot sit in the corner somewheres near a power outlet. The DNS is wild-carded to our website hosted on said server. Even the user's homepage is co-opted, so if their homepage is goole or yahoo, it redirects automatically to our website.
It's quite funny when, at conferences, we hear people two booths down swear after connecting to our hotspot and all they can get to is our website! People have gotten *MAD* at us for "taking over the Internet"!!!
I have no problem with your religion until you decide it's reason to deprive others of the truth.
still availible. But I am forced to reconsider registering it, I am not a Brit, that he's grown a backbone lately. Must be Stem Cells.
Sorry about the writing. Robot fingers, you know? Cliff Steele in DOOM PATROL #23
By default, IE is configured to "just go to the most likely site" when what's typed in the address bar doesn't resolve as a URL.
It just so happens that the most likely result (from MSN or wherever IE searches) is the search page from Google.
The fact is that there are plenty of domains using wildcard DNS - org.com for instance - has been using it for years - go to slashdot.org.com for instance, and you'll one of these typical PPC landing page feeds.
;)
What about gov.com ? he's got wildcard subdomains enabled too - whitehouse.gov.com - redirects to his home page. Surprisingly non-malicious - I wish I owned it
The fact that uk.com is going to use it is not going to disrupt anything - except possibly the internet clueless who are likely to type in guardian.uk.com (or whatever) into their browser.
This is a minor problem at worst - if the Register is worried about it, they should give free internet classes in community centers or something to educate peoplle on how to use the internet so they stop thinking every website on the internet has to end with dot com.
::.. check out some Cell Phone Reviews
It's just a country code registered under .com and abused for profit by reselling subdomains, I'm supprised they didn't wildcard there DNS a long time before this, everyone in the uk knows it's .co.uk and .uk.com is really just a rather pathetic I wish I had a real domain name place to go when your imagination isn't good enough to think up a alternative .co.uk...
.co.uk instead of having to remember if others have used wierd domains.. could be worse I guess :)
Ok it's a pet peve of mine, I'd rather everyone just used
This is probably as old as wildcard DNS in general, and browsers sticking '.com'/'.net'/'.org' (in that order, doesn't it look familliar?) onto unresolvable names, in particular.
I think it is a moronic way of capitalizing on peoples' typing mistakes.
The Hacker's Guide To The Kernel: Don't panic()!
``BTW: Rammstein Rules!''
:-)
;-)
I've actually not listened to any of their music for several months now. I only chose the nick, because I couldn't get inglorion or Inglorion, and RAMMS+EIN happened to be the first one I tried that did work.
About the hacker key in your sig: I recently spend a few hours thinking about the geek code (and made one myself; it's on my user page). My biggest gripe with it is that it's not extensible. So I drew up a concept akin to XML Schema that allows you to define your own elements. I've not completely worked it out yet, but I think it would be cool to have a very flexible grammar, so that people can make anything from sensible text to ASCII art, and it will all be programmatically decodable into information about the author. Maybe I should integrate the whole grammar definition system with my naming system and drive the whole world nuts?
Please correct me if I got my facts wrong.
its a short domain name someone happened to grab and sell names under.
as such afaict its basically unregulated and a fairly stupid place to put your site.
note: i'm known as plugwash most places but i screwd up registering that here somehow in the past and now can't register
I wrote a script to automate the detection of wildcard domains, go ahead and download it. It requires the djbdns tools in the path (dnsqr and dnsq). It generates a list of all wildcard domains suitable for the djbdns wildcard ignore patch.
Australia must be in the few if not the only country to not whore out their TLDs, in australia you actually have to have a business with a name thast related to the domain name that you want if you want a .com.au not to mention they are also over AU$200 for 2 years (as of last time i renewed one a few years ago)
The 2nd level domain is a perceived scarcity because of the scarcity of the top level + the effect of every registration being global at once. The non-scarcity is reflected in the pricing of the domains: $6 to 7 per year. The scarcity is in the resale price of a good domain name: >$1000.
So I agree: No real scarcity either on the second level
My wife's sketchblog Blob[p]: Gastrono-me