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: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.

If you think about it

[Koragnar]

.com is typo-squatting all the .cm sites for people who suck miserably at typing.

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)

Ah... time to crontab wget again

[MrPerfekt]

Once every 5 minutes I think I'll be hitting www.youcontributenothingtotheinternet.cm!

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.

Re:Smart move.

[ultranova]

Then we'd be right at home then. It's not hard to change "libel" to "trator". From reading a little about Cameroon, their government is as accountable as our own. Of course, we should just assume they are evil incarnate as they aren't white anglo-saxon Christians.

No, we should instead assume that they can do no wrong because they aren't anglo-saxon Christians.

The idea, implied in your post, that all anglo-saxon Christians are racists against all other people is racist in itself. But of course that is okay, since it is fashinable to bash anglo-saxon Christians right now, just as it was once fashionable to bash negros, judes, redskins, gooks, insert deragatory racial group term of your choice here.

After all, no one who isn't anglo-saxon Christian couldn't possibly do anything to deserve criticism. It's all just a plot of White Supremacists, fighting for control with the Elders of Zion and the Freemasons. Right ?

And for the record: I know nothing about Cameroon, besides a quick Wikipedia lookup, and can't say whether their government is dictatorial or not. I am simply commenting on your idiotic, racist assumption that any criticism is motivated by racism.