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CentralNic Enables uk.com Wildcard DNS

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the bad-ideas-and-the-bottom-line dept.

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."

6 of 178 comments (clear)

  1. Lots of companies do that. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Informative

    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.

  2. Non-issue by heavy+snowfall · · Score: 4, Informative

    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.

  3. Difference is that CentralNic is not a registry by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Informative

    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.

  4. Re:TDLA wildcard by ben0207 · · Score: 4, Informative

    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.

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    cmd-q.co.uk - some sort of stupid fucking internet bullshit
  5. Re:Let them wildcard - just make them pay by generic-man · · Score: 4, Informative

    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.

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    For more information, click here.
  6. Re:Choose and Win by zeux · · Score: 3, Informative

    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.

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    Iraq: war to save the U