I'd Wondered What Was Going On: Verisign's Wildcard


I noticed the other day that I mistyped a domain name and got a Verisign page. I thought it was odd, but hadn't suspected what had actually happened. From Slashdot:

As of a little while ago (it is around 7:45 PM US Eastern on Mon 15 Sep 2003 as I write this), VeriSign added a wildcard A record to the .COM and .NET TLD DNS zones. The IP address returned is 64.94.110.11, which reverses to sitefinder.verisign.com. What that means in plain English is that most mis-typed domain names that would formerly have resulted in a helpful error message now results in a VeriSign advertising opportunity. For example, if my domain name was 'somecompany.com,' and somebody typed 'soemcompany.com' by mistake, they would get VeriSign's advertising.

Jeremy Zawodny has a few things to say about it as well. I don't like it, but after all the other crap that happens, I have a tough time working up the indignation.


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Last modified: Thu Oct 10 12:47:20 2019.