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Google Mystery Domain Reroutes 3% of Net Surfers
An anonymous reader writes "A new Google domain — 1e100.net, a nod to the company's famously misspelled name — is now the net's 44th most visited site. Google says the domain is used to 'identify servers' on its internal network, hinting that reverse DNS plays a role. The domain was registered in September and launched in October, about the same time Google unveiled Spanner, a new addition to its backend infrastructure designed to shift loads automatically among its data centers."
"1e400.net, a nod to the company's famously misspelled name"
Could someone explain that one cause I really don't get it or see the nod.
a Quoogle?
TFA says 1e100 as in...a gogol.
No kitty, this is my pot pie!
Presumably that should be 1e100.net? And presumably it isn't actually "rerouting" anything. Hmmm.
Burns: We're building a casino!
McAllister: Arrr. Give me 5 minutes.
Is this on a qwerty board? How do you 1e400 trying to type google?
A new Google domain — 1e400.net, a nod to the company's famously misspelled name
Surely you mean 1e100.net, as the original report states.
(Note; summary will probably be corrected by the time most people see this)
rerouting traffic is only adware activity until google starts doing it
1e400 or 100?
Looks like googol grew by quite a few orders of magnitude.
Why not just call it 1e400.google.com? Screwy domain names with numbers in them make me think of ads, spam, or malware. I'd be a lot more likely to allow javascript/cookies and not put the site in Adblock or the hosts file if it was clearly a Google domain.
From TFA:As pointed out by Sebastian Stadil, founder of the Silicon Valley Cloud Computing Group, 1e100.net translates to "Google Network".
Tha would be the googol network. Why not: -o-o-o-.net? (That would be a goggle with an extra "o".)
Set your phasers on "funky"!
You realize that it's just infrastructure, right? You might as well block images.google.com for all the good it will do you. It's just a domain name.
Such an egregious spelling mistake, and nobody yet has snatched up the name and directed it to goatse.fr? Come on guys, you can do better than that!
Of my lettrs were routed by 1e100.net.
Really, what google has done is change their reverse information for a LOT of their stuff to point to 1e100.net rather than google, since Google these days is so much more than google: you have youtube, blogger, analytics, doubleclick, and a host of others.
The 1e100.net name is nice because it allows admins etc to go "this is GOOGLE" rather than "this is X" (which got assimilated by google).
Test your net with Netalyzr
I'm sure being listed on the front page of Slashdot will help push that domain up a few spots.
W-U03B1.net ranks in the top 1e100 domains, according to Alexa.
Set your phasers on "funky"!
Google says the domain is used to 'identify servers' on its internal network, hinting that reverse DNS plays a role.
Some fucking mystery. Identifying servers is what reverse DNS does.
I imagine someone pointed out that a million bucks a year of bandwidth costs could be saved by using a shorter domain name. What a non-story.
And what's this about Google being "misspelled"? That's the stupidest thing I ever heard. "Google" is a great brand name loosely based on a word that would have been a terrible brand name.
I have seen the future, and it is inconvenient.
It's deceptive, which of course makes it look underhanded, even if it may not be. When I saw it appearing in my firewall logs, I blocked it immediately.
They could have easily used spanner.google.com, or loadshift.google.com, or balancer.google.com, or something else that isn't so suspicious.
Googol is the name of a number, Google is the name of a company. How could anyone claim that the company misspelled their own name?
Well, you really showed them. Next time they roll out a new domain name, I am sure they will check with you first to see if you approve.
And the domain name is actually the numerical equivalent of a googol, which makes it clever, not underhanded. Just because you didn't get it doesn't make it sneaky.
"But this one goes to 11!"
I did notice that I was seeing "Waiting for 1e100.net" on a few non-Google sites. I put it as 127.0.0.1 in hosts and noticed some of these sites started loading faster.
What's the significance of this? Why should I care? Article neglected to mention that.
"Oh wow, Google registered a domain name and now they're using it. THAT IS DEFINITELY NEWSWORTHY!!!"
Comment of the year
A mathematician mibht misspell 'google' as '1e100'.
And I hear tell some mathematicians have a sense of humor. But the rest mistake obsucrity for humor.
Just so you know (and you know who you are), obscurity is not inherently funny. And neither are you.
There are not 10 kinds of people in the world. There are only two. Your number base doesn't change that. Put them side by side and see.
So there.
deleting the extra space after periods so i can stay relevant, yeah.
...and 1 comment asking what the article means to all of us. Not a single comment on why are they redirecting things through this domain.
Yup, this is /.
Who are you? The new #2 Who is #1? You are #617565. I am not a number, I am a free man! Muhahaha.
I had to do some network analysis last year to try to track down the source of massive overload on our firewall. The domain 1e100.net came up a few times, and it took me a second before I figured out the clever naming choice.
I guess I never thought that the name was a big enough deal to be worthy of a whole Slashdot story.
coding is life
At home, I run a squid proxy and all port 80 requests must go through it.
I checked the logs, which go back 8 weeks, and there is not a single instance of 1e100.net in them. It might be on an alternate port, but my personal browser is explicitly set to use the proxy.
Clearly Alexa sees the requests to this domain, but, Alexa only has information from people who have installed the Alexa toolbar, so perhaps the 1e100.net domain is somehow only used by people who have the Alexa toolbar?
The real "Libtards" are the Libertarians!
I'm with you, brother. That's why I never run optimized executables - no symbol tables?? What are you hiding, son? Unrolled loops?? Kindly step the fuck back, thanks.
There are no karma whores, only moderation johns
Does that 79 comments include yours? We need accurate reporting on slashdot. Scientific principles are closely followed here! We obviously need a numerologist to pipe in to explain what's going on.
Who would win this election: Andrew Weiner vs Andrew Weiner's weiner.
I thought the same thing as parent, actually, and looked up the domain myself when I saw it on my netstat output.
Anyway, you don't want to DoS .com Spread the load around.
Or you could just give Google their own TLD.
Better yet, Google could register google.ht. The process of registering a host name for every molecule in the universe would bail that country out in no time at all.
Give a man a fish and you have fed him for today. Teach a man to fish, and he'll say "WHERE'S MY FISH, YOU IDIOT?"
For a brief period on February 5, "en.wikipedia.org" was directed by DNS to an address at "pw-in-f139.1e100.net". That was quickly corrected, although it may have happened more than once. Apparently somebody at Google sent out some bad DNS records. (Google is now in the DNS business, remember.) They need to be more careful.
In theory. In practice I wouldn't be surprised if you're wrong. One thing off the top of my head (which would be deceptive) is they might be trying to treat areas that whitelist Google differently from normal sites. Especially as regards pagerank.
But on the non-deceptive side, there are any number of situations where someone's poor configuration involving .google.com domains makes it necessary to use a different domain. And though obviously this makes the most sense where someone is blocking Google, it could also show up when someone has done something well-intentioned that's breaking something for Google.
Though if it's not something deceptive, I would've expected to see a blog post about it from Google, since an architecture issue like that would be interesting to the world.
1e100.net is a Google-owned domain name used to identify the servers in our network. Following standard industry practice, we make sure each IP address has a corresponding hostname. Starting in October 2009, we started using a single domain name to identify our servers across all Google products, rather than use different product domains such as youtube.com, blogger.com, and google.com. We did this for two reasons: first, to keep things simpler, and second, to proactively improve security by protecting against potential threats such as cross-site scripting attacks. Most typical Internet users will never see 1e100.net, but we picked we picked a Googley name for it just in case (1e100 is scientific notation for 1 googol).
So there you go!
Co-Editor, Open Sources
Open Source Program Manager, Google, Inc.
As a responsible network administrator, I immediately blocked access to it because it looked very unusual and thus suspicious. I will not put my network at risk due to Google and their word games.
Can you please provide me with your full name, email address, home address, and past job experience, so I can make sure that I never hire you?
Can you please provide me with your full name, email address, home address, and past job experience
Says the Anonymous Coward.
"But this one goes to 11!"
Actually, a responsible network administrator would actually check into it, maybe do a whois, etc. to determine who owns it, then make an informed decision based on information. A hack admin would just assume something looks "unusual and thus suspicious" with no info other than a gut instinct, and do a knee-jerk block of that entire domain without actually knowing what is being blocked, or why.
So if you could kindly provide your info so I can never hire you, we will both be set.
"But this one goes to 11!"
Its LESS DECEPTIVE that the old way.
Before, you'd see blogger.com or youtube.com or many of the others, and not necessarily know it was google.
Now, ALL google companies are using 1e100.net for the reverse, so you can tell straight away it's a google server without needing to know all the spinoffs and other companies they may have bought.
Sig out of date