Cameroon Typo-Squats all of .com

wayne writes "As reported on CircleID, the nation of Cameroon, which controls the .cm top level domain, has typo-squatted all of the .com domain space. They have placed a wildcard DNS record to redirect all traffic to an ad-based search page. Unlike the earlier case of Verisign putting a wildcard in the real .com domain, ICANN has very little direct control over what a nation can do with their own TLD. Will the owners of .co and .om follow?"

Comments

Re:There's typos, and then there's THAT

[FuturePastNow]

Uh, do you understand the point of the article?

Go to this site: http://www.cnn.com/

Now go here: http://www.cnn.cm/

That's typosquatting.

Re:There's typos, and then there's THAT

[Pantero Blanco]

No, they typo-squatted ".com", in the same way that "goggle.com" and the like typo-squatted "google.com". Domain-squatting is something else entirely, and involves registering the actual target address and sitting on it, then trying to sell it for an increased sum.

They typo-squatted .com by domain-squatting .cm.

Re:Smart move.

[Pantero Blanco]

It's too bad that none of that is likely to trickle down.

From what I understand, the government there controls (well, attempts to) the broadcast channels pretty damn strictly, and voicing an opposition political opinion is generally called "libel" and involves jail time. Hoarding the TLD isn't a surprising move for them.

Re:This story is complete bullshit

[interiot]

Root wildcarding considered harmful.

Ctrl+Enter

[IceCreamGuy]

I seriously don't think I've actually typed out "www." or ".com" in at least 4 years. Just type website then Ctrl+Enter and Firefox and IE add it for you. I don't think Safari, Nautilus, or Konqueror do it by default but I might be wrong. But if you're using Firefox, it's so much easier. There's also Shift+Enter for ".net" and Ctrl+Shift+Enter for ".org".

Company behind it

[rf0]

Looking at this is appears that a company called "NameView Inc" is supplying the ads from the IP block 72.51.27.0 - 72.51.27.255 http://www.nameview.com/

Prehaps calling them on +1 (309) 424-5497 might help to say what a bad idea this is or we can just block the IP range (which is now what I'm going to do)

Re:There's an easy fix for this...

[Ash-Fox]

Just edit your hosts file, and redirect *.cm to 127.0.0.1 in it. That way, even if you ever make that kind of typo on accident, you don't reward them for it.

Since when could the hosts file support wildcards?

BIND has a quick fix for this

[sa3]

;; QUESTION SECTION:
;google.cm. IN A
;; ->>HEADER<<- opcode: QUERY, status: NOERROR, id: 6369
;; ANSWER SECTION:
google.cm. 518 IN A 72.51.27.58
zone "cm" IN { type delegation-only; };
;; QUESTION SECTION:
;google.cm. IN A
;; ->>HEADER<<- opcode: QUERY, status: NXDOMAIN, id: 12264

Re:Not an issue.

[KiloByte]

Same reasons that Verisign's wildcard service was decried...

And, fortunately, the fix is exactly the same: Here's the default named.conf:

// From the release notes:
// Because many of our users are uncomfortable receiving undelegated answers
// from root or top level domains, other than a few for whom that behaviour
// has been trusted and expected for quite some length of time, we have now
// introduced the "root-delegations-only" feature which applies delegation-only
// logic to all top level domains, and to the root domain. An exception list
// should be specified, including "MUSEUM" and "DE", and any other top level
// domains from whom undelegated responses are expected and trusted.
// root-delegation-only exclude { "DE"; "MUSEUM"; };

So, this option will preemptively avoid all jerkwads like Verisign and Cameroon. The only question is, why this isn't enabled by default.

Bad Article Title - Bad Summary Title

[pjotrb123]

They did NOT typo-squat "all of .com".
They typo-squatted "all of .cm".

Quite a difference, if you ask me.
Unless you are a sensationalist, of course.

Re:Smart move.

[ergonal]

Funny thing is, there's a big flaw in their click script: http://www.slashdot.cm/click.php?b=zQmE%2BQ3Pc00%3 D&term=slashdot&position=1&to=aHR0cDovL3NsYXNoZG90 Lm9yZy8 Ability to redirect to any site you want? GNAA will have fun with this.

Re:Smart move.

[Necroman]

And to help the people that don't want to copy and paste.

SXQncyBiYXNlNjQgZW5jb2RpbmcuIE5leHQgcXVlc3Rpb24/
  =
http://www.slashdot.cm/It's%20base64%20encoding.%2 0Next%20question

Re:Smart move.

[operagost]

Claiming that because Jesus did not condone an act, he must have condemned it, is illogical rubbish. He didn't say "thou must post uninformed comments on Slashdot" either.

Jesus never suggested that nations should (or could) act in the way that individual believers act. We have many examples of this:

"Render unto Caesar what is Caesar's; and unto God what is God's."

"There is no nation upon this earth which God himself has not established."

It is also written in Ecclesiates that "to every thing there is a season", and one of these is "a time to kill, a time to heal"-- indicating that it is right to strike in the name of defense or justice but that amends must be made in the end. Jesus confirmed this in Luke 22:36-38 by advising his followers to sell their cloaks and buy a sword. Whether you believe a war is justified or not is up to you, but to make a blanket statement that a Christian president has to be a pacifist is baseless. His job is to protect his citizens.

Re:Smart move.

[fm6]

Very cute. Actually, Cameroon is an oil exporter, with an effective GDP of $40 billion. Of course, very little of this wealth has trickled down to the masses, but the country as a whole is hardly poor.