VeriSign Looks At Earning Money on Domain Typos 288
Harald Paulsen writes "In a recent article Computer Business Review uncovers how VeriSign Inc is testing a service that would return a webpage if a user mistypes an URL. Basically all nonexistant domain queries could return an IP address and if the user was trying to access a page with a webbrowser they could get redirected to a search-engine, or worse: a page asking them to buy a domain. This is most certainly breaking the DNS standard and could be compared to cybersquatting (Hey Ford, want to have a banner ad whenever someone mistypes Toyota?). This is interesting in relation to an earlier story about register.com and holding-pages."
Re:And people trust Verisign? (Score:4, Informative)
Did you expect anything less... (Score:5, Informative)
Re:This is already done (Score:5, Informative)
AT&T cable -- they already did this (Score:4, Informative)
Re:I'm confused (Score:3, Informative)
Corporations* are always evil to some degree or another. (Yes, that includes you, IBM--and you too, Redhat (et. al.).) Your mistake was in seeing things as a contest in which you root for some team to win. They're all evil. The only way that we win is to have the really, really evil ones take each other out (if we're very lucky), and try to somehow prevent the other ones from becoming as bad as the most evil ones. It pays to be cynical.
* echo Corporations | sed -e s/pora/rup/ and you will see why.
Oh, and never believe anything you read on slashdot... including this.
It breaks no standard (Score:5, Informative)
No, it's most certainly not.
It uses DNS as the means to some questionable ends, but it doesn't break anything.
As a matter of fact, the master file format (which is not the DNS standard as we care about it in this context anyway) explicitly provides for wildcard records.
Watch your location (URL, address, URI, whatever) bar:
See? [slashdot.org]
Again? [slashdot.org]
One more time? [slashdot.org]
Now, what standards have we broken? What's to prevent the web server from deciding what content to give us based on the Host header field we send?
Mark
Diminishing returns (Score:3, Informative)
Unless, of course, you are like me and your incorrect spelling is saved in the auto-complete: damn http://slsahdot.org!
VeriSign is "Innovating" (Score:3, Informative)
Re:This is already done (Score:2, Informative)
Now I'll get a ping from some verisign server?
There's more to the internet than the web.
Re:Because the Internet is not just 'The Web' (Score:3, Informative)