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Microsoft "SiteFinder" Quietly Raking It In
An anonymous reader writes in with the news, which isn't particularly new, that Microsoft's Internet Explorer sends typo domain names to a page of pay-per-click ads. In this endeavor Microsoft joins Charter and Earthlink in profiting from the dubious practice that Verisign pioneered but failed to make stick. The article is on a site whose audience is, among others, those who attempt to profit by typo-squatting, and its tone is just a bit petulant because individuals cannot hope to profit in this game on the scale Microsoft effortlessly achieves.
SiteFinder broke DNS for the purpose of making money. This is just a 'feature' similar to the one in Firefox that automatically performs a google search on things you enter into the URL bar if they aren't valid addresses; MS is just taking the idea further (and making money off it, because they love money). I can see people being miffed by the fact that there are ads on the search page, but it's not as if Google doesn't have ads on their search pages.
This is basically just a bunch of advertisers and domain squatters getting upset because Microsoft and Google are making money and they aren't.
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Going to http://www.lexus-financail.com/ site in IE 7 with no default search engine yields
So if you want to make untold millions as well, build (a) search engine and (b) popular web browser, and make (a) the default in (b).
Sitefinder is EVIL. While this is just fine.
Sitefinder was implemented with a wildcard DNS record. This means that any typo gets resolved anyway. So suppose there's a mail server running on that machine for some reason. Now all the mail you send to the wrong domain name gets sent to that server instead of failing directly.
In this case, two things may happen, both of them very undesirable:
If it bounces, then that will confuse many people as they won't realize they made a typo and think they got the account name wrong, or that the person cancelled their account. It also results in your probably private mail getting sent to some random server for absolutely no good reason.
The more evil possibility is that the server will accept your mail, which would be the exact same thing they do for websites. Then maybe it will reply with an ad, or perhaps just keep it. Anything can happen in this case really.
This is the problem with sitefinder: DNS isn't just for websites, and it would break quite a lot of things.
On the other hand, IE sending the user to some page with ads is perfectly fine. It's IE specific, it doesn't interfer with your mail or anything else, and it's probably a configuration option you can disable. And you certainly won't get it if you don't use MS software.
All IE7 does is go to the search page OF YOUR CHOICE if you misspell something. I have IE7 configured with Google as my default search engine, and when I type in lexus-financail.com I go to Google's search page, which I find is a very helpful feature.
Sheesh, it's like people don't even TRY with the FUD anymore.
I tried what the article said to do. I have Google set as my default IE search engine. It just did a Google search for the incorrect domain. This seems like a feature (albeit one that I dislike) rather than some money grabbing scam.
Come on, if we want to bash MS, and especially IE, we can do much better than this.
In the absence of an MX record e-mail gets delivered to the A record — MX records are optional. If none is found, the request is made for the A-record, and that gets used instead.
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.