Anyone that has a top-level domain registered through ICANN (Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers) should be aware of the shady advertising scheme that VeriSign is trying to pull off.

“VeriSign added a wildcard A record to the .com and .net TLD DNS zones. The IP address returned is 64.94.110.11, which reverses to sitefinder.verisign.com. What that means in plain English is that most mis-typed domain names that would formerly have resulted in a helpful error message now results in a VeriSign advertising opportunity. For example, if my domain name was ’somecompany.com,’ and somebody typed ’soemcompany.com’ by mistake, they would get VeriSign’s advertising.”

If you’re so inclined, there’s a petition to stop the VeriSign DNS abuse.

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[Update: 18-Sep-2003, 10:50pm]

ISC is offering a BIND patch to support “delegation only” zone files. Link courtesy of some guy named Jeffery Zeldman.