| Verisign hijacks Internet |
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Verisign (a.k.a, Network Solutions), that veritable Telstra of the Domain Name System, has exploited its vertical market position in order to hijack all misdirected traffic under the .com and .net domains.
In other words, if you accidentally type a non-existent domain into your web browser (such as www.bleuskyhost.net) you will get redirected to a Verisign search page. Verisign have historically managed the root servers for the DNS system, and have retained responsibility for this infrastructure well after the introduction of new competition in the registrations business some years ago. This has allowed them to set up wildcards, so that anythingelse.com redirects to their chosen web site, much as anythingelse.blueskyhost.net would redirect to our server. Previously, under Internet Explorer, you would have normally been redirected to an MSN search page if you typed in an invalid address - unless you had (appropriately) configured your browser to give you a correct error message. Now you don't even have the choice. Presumably Microsoft are not very happy about the situation, and will probably try to do something about it. While Verisign don't at this stage appear to be exploiting this traffic in order to gain new domain registrations, this change does have important and dangerous implications for the effective functioning of email servers, SPAM (open relay) databases and of the Internet as a whole, due to the potential general increase in traffic it could cause. For now there isn't really anything we can do except sit back and wait for the mess to accumulate, while feeling rather chuffed about ourselves on account that we deliberately stopped dealing with this company quite a long time ago. LINKS from ZDNet: VeriSign slammed for helping spammers |