At 9/13/03 8:31 AM, Kai Schaetzl wrote: >I don't see how they would be able to technically achieve this. They can't >hand out a faked IP for every dns lookup for a non-existant com/net domain. >If they make every com/net domain exist they would break a lot of things on >the technical side of the net.
Actually, quite a few ISPs already do this for their dialup customers, unfortunately. It doesn't appear to break things horribly -- it just confuses the hell out of naive users. I've had people register a domain name, then 20 minutes later write that when they type their domain name into their browser, it goes to some other search engine site or something. This is because their dialup ISP has replaced the failed lookup for "www.example.com" with something of their own. This is something that would start happening on a much worse scale if Verisign got into the act. Everyone who registers a domain name probably tries typing it soon afterwards to see if it's working yet; until it began resolving properly, they'd see the evil Verisign site. Just imagine the complaints we'll all get. "Someone has hijacked my domain name!" I second the notion expressed here that many of these large companies are sleazebags who don't give a damn about who they inconvenience, annoy, or rip off. >Not to mention that it breaks all applications depending on ns lookups for >host verification, f.i. Mail servers and anti spam tools. I think the suggestion was that they would only do it on "Web traffic", which implied that they'd only return results for "www.example.com" A record lookups, not MX lookups, A record lookups for "example.com", and so forth. This is apparently how it's usually done in the case of ISPs now. -- Robert L Mathews, Tiger Technologies
