Welcome to Sean at the newly launched The Vatican of Liberalism.
Have the mad coding skillz? Eschew the pretentious Mountain Dew Code Red for the more real Jolt Cola? Then you and the Google Code Jam 2003 are MFEA.
Verisign, those masters of devious domain practices, have set up wildcards in the .com and .net zones. What this means in English, explained by Annette from Hosting Matters, Inc.:
Say you have a domain that's hard to type, or someone simply misspells your domain name. In general, good behavior by nameservers will result in an error message of some sort, indicating that the domain could not be found. As of today, Verisign now intercepts those requests and redirects them to it's own search page, which no doubt will be used as a way to sell domains or a place for companies to advertise, or both.Example:
http://www.hmdsn.net (note this misspelling of one of our domains)Further, typos in setting, say, a mail server in an email client, or even a typo in code that references a bad subdomain, could very well lead to the Verisign sitefinder page.
Example:
http://blabhlbah.anythinghereisfake.com (note that this domain is unregistered)(Note: if your ISP is nullrouting Verisign due to Verisign's trickery, you will get a not found; others will see the result of this.)
Once again, show Verisign your displeasure by transferring your domain registrations to any one of the hundreds of other registrars who do not stoop to such subterfuge.
**Update** - Verisign sued by Netster.com for "unfair competition and violations of the Deceptive and Unfair Trade Practices Act." Go get 'em, boys.
The Adam Smith Institute weblog is a design for the Big Blog Company (another Sekimori design), a UK-based company that specializes in developing weblog solutions for businesses.
