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:Not an issue.

[Maestro4k]

As long as the money made from this is going to the goverment of Cameroon and not some registrar, why is this an issue? The .cm ccTLD belongs to Cameroon. Why can't they decide what they want to do with it?

Same reasons that Verisign's wildcard service was decried, among other things this will cause every name.cm to resolve so it's going to at least screw with some spam blocking methods. If other countries follow suit then it gets even messier.

You're right that it belongs to them but there is such a thing as playing nicely. Also it's a bit of a spammy trick, so it's already making me associate Cameroon with spammers and their ilk. Was that their intention? Will they be happy with that? If you lived in Cameroon would you like the fact that your government (since the government assigns who runs the ccTLD) is making your country look like that?

correct solution (that will never fly)...

[smash]

From some dude's blog that was linked to TFA:

The lesson here is that something is fundamentally screwed up in the domain world when one server manager in Cameroon can enable this much confusion. But I still can't figure out what the right solution is.

(from here: http://weblog.johnlevine.com/ICANN/cameroon.html?s eemore=y)

... is to require that US based sites use a US-specific country suffix, just like the rest of the internet.

I.e., migrate all of .com, .net, etc to .com.us, .net.us (or whatever).

That way, typoing the .com or .net suffix won't take you to a different country unintentionally :D

Sure, the internet was originally created in the US, but it's bigger than that now, and having one country that just doesn't use country suffixes is non-standard. :)

Of course, typo-ing the country suffix will still either not work, or take you to a different country, but what can you do...

As a side-effect, this would no doubt deter other country's businesses etc from simply registering .com, .org or .net domains because the domain rego is cheaper and it's "country-ambiguous"... (yes, I own .net and .org domains and i'm in australia. if it was going to have to be .com.us or whateever, I probably wouldn't be using up your precious US namespace :D)

Re:Not an issue.

[Pantero Blanco]

Because the government of Cameroon is not Cameroon.

This isn't just an attempt to grab cash; that's a side effect. This is to hamper the ability of opposition parties to use the Internet as a voice. The government in Cameroon controls the TV stations, radio stations, and newspapers tightly; they don't want the Internet to be any different.

WWW/HTML is a minor problem

[Bjarne Bula]

While possibly the most visible effect, landing on a page full of ads when you wanted www.cnn.com is the least of your problems.

Remember, this is DNS, so this will affect not only your web browser, but all your Internet applications.

So, guess what happens if you try to send a mail to friend@gmail.cm? Yup, it also gets the Cameroon treatment:

$ telnet gmail.cm smtp
Trying 72.51.27.58...
Connected to gmail.cm (72.51.27.58).
Escape character is '^]'.
220 blackhole.gdei.com

Even though the server currently will bounce your mail with a 550 Domain does not exist, they now have your email address and, with a quick typo-fix, that of your friend.

Hey! Guess what country is next door to Cameroon? Yup, Nigeria. Now, who in Nigeria might want a fresh source of email addresses...?

And who is to say they bounce all mails? Or will continue to?