Verisign tried to take over the unclaimed net.

[attgig]

http://www.icann.org/announcements/advisory-03oct03.htm

On 15 September 2003, VeriSign unilaterally instituted a number of changes to the .com and .net Top Level Domain zones, including the deployment of a "wildcard" service. VeriSign's wildcard creates a registry-synthesized address record in response to lookups of domains that are not otherwise present in the zone (including reserved names, names in improper non-hostname format, unregistered names, and registered but inactive names). The VeriSign wildcard redirects traffic that would otherwise have resulted in a "no domain" response to a VeriSign-operated website with links to alternative choices and to a search engine.

[RoniMan]

huh? what does that mean?

[topane]

It means if you type in a non-existant .net or .com domain you'll be redirected to Verisign's "sitefinder" service.

[bachviet]

I definitely don't want that.

[Jeffbx]

Originally posted by bachviet
I definitely don't want that.

Looks like it's too late - I've already been redirected to the site a few time, so it's in production. Pretty dang slimy, if you ask me.

[Nija]

If i remember correctly, ICANN told them to suspend it.

http://www.kjsdhfk.com/

takes you back to the good old 404 pages inside of their crap service.

[Jeffbx]

Thank goodness.... that reminded me of the time my machine got infected with the Lop spyware. Leave the search engine choice up to me, thank you!

[topane]

Verisign's redirection is causing another problem: It's messing up some anti-spam software. Some s/w will check to see if the domain it's addressed from exists or not. If it doesn't exist, into the trash. Now everything that comes to a mail server comes from an "existing" domain (.com or .net anyway).