Hello John, On the General Assembly discussion list yesterday Jon Nevett of NSI reported: "this issue related to our web hosting platform was brought to our executive managements attention this morning, and already has been addressed". PS. For anyone that still needs the phone number/passcode for the new gTLD implementation teleconference that starts in a few minutes (and continues tomorrow), feel free to send me an email as Nick is likely asleep at this hour. --- John Levine <johnl@iecc.com> wrote:
Are you taking the position that it's OK for registrars to populate users' unassigned subdomains with their own ads?
I don't see any evidence that NSI intended to do that. It looks to me like it was a configuration error.
This particular domain is hosted on NSI's DNS and web servers. It has a wildcard DNS entry for *.gotgame.com. There's over a thousand other domains on the same DNS servers so I spot checked a few of them, and didn't see any wildcard entries, so I assume that gotgame added that wildcard themselves.
When you set up a web server that handles a lot of different domains, one of the things you configure is what to do when someone points a domain at other than one of the configured ones. I can easily imagine that someone at NSI figured that would only happen if an ex-customer left their DNS pointing at NSI, so it's not NSI's problem and it never occurred to them that an actual customer would do something as dumb as to set up a DNS wildcard and not adjust the web config to match.
If you check random blah.gotgame.com domains now, you see a generic page not found error. So although I am not a big fan of NSI, we do have to remember never to attribute to malice things that can be attributed to incompetence.
Regards, John Levine, johnl@iecc.com, Primary Perpetrator of "The Internet for Dummies", Information Superhighwayman wanna-be, http://www.johnlevine.com, ex-Mayor "More Wiener schnitzel, please", said Tom, revealingly.
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