Network Solutions hijacking unassigned sub domains?
Robert, Are you taking the position that it's OK for registrars to populate users' unassigned subdomains with their own ads? You don't see any issue here other than the need for registrant education? __________________________________________________ Do You Yahoo!? Tired of spam? Yahoo! Mail has the best spam protection around http://mail.yahoo.com
Danny: all i'm saying - at this point - is that the news article is inaccurate. As to what the position of at-large should be on this nuanced issue - is one that hope gets discussed. regards Robert On 9-Apr-08, at 12:46 PM, Danny Younger wrote:
Robert,
Are you taking the position that it's OK for registrars to populate users' unassigned subdomains with their own ads?
You don't see any issue here other than the need for registrant education?
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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.
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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Thanks for that clarification John It would be really bad if they were really doing this on purpose! -------------------------------------------------- From: "John Levine" <johnl@iecc.com> Sent: Thursday, April 10, 2008 8:45 PM To: "Danny Younger" <dannyyounger@yahoo.com> Cc: "At-Large Worldwide" <alac@atlarge-lists.icann.org> Subject: Re: [At-Large] Network Solutions not hijacking unassigned sub domains
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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participants (4)
-
Danny Younger -
Jacqueline A. Morris -
John Levine -
Robert Guerra