> The domain's former expiration would seem to have been 2003-09-26, based > on whois showing a current expiration date of 2004-09-26. > > The Register's story was posted at 2003-10-06 at 23:01 GMT according > to their site.
Other useful dates/times: Sitefinder was disabled at 2003-10-05 00:00 UTC The domain was renewed on 2003-10-06 > The article begins "Yesterday was almost the day the music died for > MP3.com after the firm forgot to renew its domain name". > > Steve Cox is quoted as saying: > ``"When I went to my artist site URL this morning, I saw one of the > infamous VeriSign redirects instead of my music, complete with the > dreaded message, 'We didn't find: artists.mp3s.com'. There is no > Website at this address."'' > > John Moppett is quoted as saying: > ``"Went to MP3.Com, but can't pick up any links, they all end up > with Verisign!!"'' > > This seems to indicate that sitefinder was active when the problems > were noticed and corrected, and this seems to indicate that the > breakage was major, and likely didn't go unnoticed for days. Maybe, maybe not. MSIE is infamous for serving pages from it's cache instead when in it's default configuration. > All of this seems to indicate that the domain continued to resolve > for a period of time after expiring. Yes it continued to resolve. But to where? > But since we're just working from whois and the article above, > there's plenty of room for error and such -- especially with the > lack of specific time/date information. > > Taking this down to a simpler situation... > > For purposes of example: > > I have registered example.com and example.NET in the usual fashion. > > I have a major web site at http://www.example.com/ that also > references example.NET urls for portions of its content. > > If I neglect to pay the renewal fee before the domain example.NET > expires, at some point the domain will be removed from the NET. > zonefile. > > At that time, things will break. With sitefinder, things break with > a sitefinder "hey, there is no website at this address" message. > Without sitefinder, things break with a "no such host" or similar > NXDOMAIN equivalent. Right, with sitefinder it continues to resolve. > Where is the ``bigger link to Verisign's Sitefinder than what the > article reports'' that is mentioned in the "FALLOUT FROM SITEFINDER" > weblog entry? Perhaps that the author of the article didn't notice the domain had expired 10 days earlier. The author probably didn't notice as it appears all of his tests were on mp3.com not mp3s.com. It would be interesting to know why nobody noticed there was a problem after the domain had expired on 2003-09-26. > Where is the specific unintended consequence or non-standard > behavior that resulted in ``The expiration most likely went > unnoticed due to Verisign's wildcard record in the gTLD''? Sitefinder would cause basic site monitoring tools to return false positives when a domain expires.
