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."

Comments

Lots of companies do that.

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Non-issue

[heavy snowfall]

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.

Difference is that CentralNic is not a registry

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:TDLA wildcard

[ben0207]

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.

Re:Let them wildcard - just make them pay

[generic-man]

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.