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Encyclopedia > Site Finder

Site Finder was a wildcard DNS record for all .com and .net domain names not yet registered by others, run by .com and .net top-level domain operator VeriSign between 15 September 2003 and 4 October 2003. A wildcard DNS record is a record in a DNS zone file that will match all requests for non-existent domain names, i. ... .COM is also the extension of the DOS COM file, an extension used for executables. ... .net is a generic top-level domain (gTLD) used on the Internets Domain Name System. ... A top-level domain (TLD) is the last part of an Internet domain name; that is, the letters which follow the final dot of any URL. For example, in the domain name wikipedia. ... VeriSign, Inc. ... September 15 is the 258th day of the year (259th in leap years). ... 2003 (MMIII) was a common year starting on Wednesday of the Gregorian calendar. ... October 4 is the 277th day of the year (278th in Leap years). ...


During that time, Internet users who tried to access these domains were redirected to a VeriSign web portal with information about VeriSign products and links to "partner" sites. This gave VeriSign the advantage of receiving greater revenue from users wishing to register these domain names; however, the redirection was widely frowned upon within the Internet community. It had the effect of "capturing" the web traffic for several million mis-typed or experimental web accesses per day, and meant that VeriSign effectively "owned" all possible .com and .net domains that had not been bought by others as an advertising platform. A web portal is a web site that provides a starting point or gateway to other resources on the Internet or an intranet. ... Example graph of web traffic at Wikipedia in December 2004 Web traffic is the amount of data sent and received by visitors to a web site. ...


VeriSign described the change as an attempt to improve the Web browsing experience for the naive user. VeriSign's critics saw this claim as disingenuous. Certainly, the change led to a dramatic increase in the amount of internet traffic arriving at verisign.com. According to the web traffic measurement company Alexa, in the year prior to the change verisign.com was around the 2,500th most popular website. In the weeks following the change, the site came into the top 20 most popular sites, and reached the top 10 in the aftermath of the change and surrounding controvesy. (Source: Alexa.com) Alexa Internet is a California-based subsidiary company of Amazon. ...


There was a storm of controversy among network operators and competing domain registrars, particularly on the influential NANOG and ICANN mailing lists, some of whom asserted: NANOG is the North American Network Operators Group, which runs meetings, talks, surveys and an influential mailing list for Internet service providers. ... ICANN (pronounced I can) is the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers. ...

  • that the redirection was contrary to the proper operation of the DNS, ICANN policy and the Internet architecture in general;
  • that VeriSign breached its trust with the Internet community by using technical architecture for marketing purposes;
  • that the redirection broke various RFCs and disrupts existing Internet services, such as e-mail relay and filtering (spam filters were not able to detect the validity of domain names);
  • that the redirection amounted to typosquatting where the unregistered domain being resolved is a spelling mistake for a famous registered domain;
  • that VeriSign abused its technical control over the .com and .net domains by exerting a de facto monopoly control;
  • that VeriSign may have been in breach of its contracts for running the .com and .net domains;
  • that the SiteFinder service assumed that all DNS traffic was caused by Web clients, ignoring the fact that DNS is used by other applications such as network printer drivers, FTP software and dedicated communications applications. If users of these applications accidentally entered a wrong host name, instead of a meaningful "host not found" error they would get a "request timed out" error, making it look like the server exists but is not responding.

Others were concerned that the Site Finder service was written entirely in English and therefore was not accessible by non-English speakers. Its grammatical style was specific to the United States of America. In internetworking and computer network engineering, Request for Comments (RFC) documents are a series of memoranda encompassing new research, innovations, and methodologies applicable to Internet technologies. ... Wikipedia does not yet have an article with this exact name. ... Typosquatting, also called URL hijacking, is a form of cybersquatting which relies on mistakes such as typographical errors made by internet users when inputting website address into a web browser. ... A printer can be: Someone who operates a printing press, and prints books. ... FTP may refer to: File Transfer Protocol Foiled Twisted Pair This is a disambiguation page — a list of articles associated with the same title. ... The English language is a West Germanic language that originates in England. ... The Chicago Manual of Style (CMS) is a highly regarded style guide for American English, dealing with questions of style, manuscript preparation, and, to a lesser degree, usage. ...


A number of workarounds were developed to locally disable the effects of Site Finder on a per-network basis. Most notably, the Internet Software Consortium announced that it had produced a version of the BIND DNS software that could be configured by Internet service providers to filter out wildcard DNS from certain domains; this software was deployed by a number of ISPs. Internet Software Consortium (ISC) was an organization that was founded by Rick Adams and Paul Vixie with funding from UUNET to develop and support a number of reference implementations of Internet software. ... Look up Bind in Wiktionary, the free dictionary Bind can mean: BIND - the Berkeley Internet Name Domain, a DNS server Bookbinding Bondage This is a disambiguation page — a list of articles associated with the same title. ... An Internet service provider (ISP, also called Internet access provider) is a business or organization that offers users access to the Internet and related services. ...


On 4 October 2003, as a result of a strong letter from ICANN, VeriSign disabled Site Finder. However, VeriSign has made public statements that suggest that they may be considering whether they will change this decision in the future. On February 27, 2004 VeriSign filed a lawsuit against ICANN, claiming that ICANN had overstepped its authority. The claim regarded not only Site Finder, but also VeriSign's much-criticised Wait Listing Service. The claim was dismissed in August 2004. October 4 is the 277th day of the year (278th in Leap years). ... 2003 (MMIII) was a common year starting on Wednesday of the Gregorian calendar. ... ICANN (pronounced I can) is the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers. ... February 27 is the 58th day of the year in the Gregorian Calendar. ... 2004 (MMIV) was a leap year starting on Thursday of the Gregorian calendar. ... A wait-listing service (WLS) provided by a domain name registry provides the ability to option a domain name that is already registered. ...


On July 9, 2004 the ICANN Security and Stability Advisory Committee (SSAC) handed down its findings after an investigation on Site Finder. It found that the service should not be deployed, and that domain name registries that provide a service to third parties should phase out wildcard records if they are used. July 9 is the 190th day of the year (191st in leap years) in the Gregorian Calendar, with 175 days remaining. ... 2004 (MMIV) was a leap year starting on Thursday of the Gregorian calendar. ... In the domain name system on the Internet there is a need for databases to be kept of which domain name maps to which IP address. ...


See also

This form of "typosquatting" technology has been criticized in purchasers of common misspellings of popular domain names as well as other technologies that redirect web traffic, causing web viewers to see unsolicited advertising. Typosquatting, also called URL hijacking, is a form of cybersquatting which relies on mistakes such as typographical errors made by internet users when inputting website address into a web browser. ...

  • Whitehouse.com / Whitehouse.org - A former political entertainment and adult pornography site and current politcal entertainment site that enjoys high traffic from people who mistakenly typed "com" or "org" instead of "gov" attempting to reach the official Whitehouse.gov site.
  • Internet Explorer - Internet Explorer automatically redirects misspelled URLs to its MSN Search tool, in an attempt to increase traffic.
  • Paxfire - A tool used by some ISPs to redirect mistyped "hotwords" to a Paxfire page with links to paid advertisers. If a user clicks on the link, the revenue is shared between Paxfire and the ISP.

Whitehouse. ... // Whitehouse. ... Pavonazzeto marble sculpture, see Erotic art in Pompeii Pornography (from Greek πορνογραφία pornographia — literally writing about or drawings of prostitutes) (also informally referred to as porn or porno) is the representation of the human body or human sexual behaviour with the goal of sexual arousal, similar to, but distinct from, erotica. ... Microsoft Internet Explorer, abbreviated IE or MSIE, is a proprietary graphical web browser made by Microsoft and currently available as part of Microsoft Windows. ... MSN Searchs homepage MSN Search is a search engine that allows one to search for web pages, news, products, groups (see MSN Groups), images and Microsofts encyclopedia, Encarta. ... Paxfire, Inc. ...

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