Slashdot Mirror
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."
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.
Get your own free personal location tracker
CentralNic have at least issued a statement that they don't run mail servers on that ip, so as long as admins are aware, they can happily work around this with a block on 213.146.149.160 as well.
Sure, it involves a few extra seconds work, but it isn't the end of the world.
"I Know You Are But What Am I?"
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.
I actually work for one, but I wouldn't recommend my company. We're overpriced. I'd say go to Tucows. On their reseller site, they have a "refer me to a reseller" feature at http://referrals.tucows.com/.
Firefox does a "I'm feeling lucky" search when it doesn't have a proper URL to go to. Very handy, and I wish other browsers would do it too.
cmd-q.co.uk - some sort of stupid fucking internet bullshit
I've always felt this should be the job of the default search engine. I usually disable it but some people who only type slashdot in the url will at least get a 'Did you mean slashdot.org?' at the top of the search results.
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I - I took the one the bus load of girls just went down.
Try reading the article. CentralNIC owns uk.com and sells third-level domains. It has the right to do whatever it wants to its third-level domains. CentralNIC's main asset is not a TLD; it's a second-level domain (uk.com) that it's wildcarding.
Plenty of companies do wildcarding to redirect users to a main page if they mistype a subdomain. Try http://nos.slashdot.org/ http://generic-man.slashdot.org/ http://p0rn.slashdot.org/ etc.
For more information, click here.
Yes, and typing 's' gives you McDonalds, 'd' gives you d-link, and "flubber nuts" (with the space) gives you a recipe site. Typing a non address into the address bar will load the first google search returned - just like google's "I'm feeling lucky" button.
This is configurable. go to about:config and filter on the phrase 'keyword'. I happen to not like this feature so much, so I disabled it.
It is common practice among ISPs to enable DNS wildcards for subdomains by default. hoststar.ch is doing that for instance.
How interesting...
I'm working in a company that provides that very service.
We catch NXDOMAIN answers on any domain and then try to redirect the user to the website he was looking for (mainly through a simple typo correction algorithm).
We loaded a database with 60% real domain names and 40% sponsored links (well, you know, we have got to make money from this) and plugged our system within the network of 2 small ISPs in France (our system works at the DNS level through a bind patch).
Looking at this slashdot story, I was wondering how long it would be until somebody else would think about it.
Seems like you just won.
Iraq: war to save the U
in order to get a .org you have to be a 503(c) or whatever
.org was for organizations that didn't fit in some other category, not for "non-profits" or some such mythical flamewar initiated nonsense.
.net and such would be.
Why? That's not even the spirit of the TLD. It's not some unenforced rule.
From RFC 1591: ORG - This domain is intended as the miscellaneous TLD for organizations that didn't fit anywhere else. Some non-government organizations may fit here.
I don't know off the top of my head what the criteria for
Perhaps you should read the RFC. After learining the original intentions for the TLDs, you may change your mind to something more sensible than shaking up well-established names to meet your whim.