(Rich had problems getting this mail through, so I'm forwarding it here.)

From: Rich Gray <rgray_at_plustechnologies.com>

A cautionary note:

Verisign, keeper of the .COM and .NET root namservers has gone
and done something extremely stupid. (In marketese, it is
called a "feature".) They have hacked their nameservers such
that any unknown domain now returns 64.94.110.11 instead of
NXDOMAIN. This address does answer on ports 25 (smtp) and 80
(http.) For smpt, they have a stub mailserver which bounces
any attempted mail. For http, they reply with their own "site
finder page". (Can you say "browser hijacking??".) If I read

http://www.verisign.com/resources/gd/sitefinder/implementation.pdf

correctly, for the vast bulk of TCP ports, they will ACCEPT the
connection, then ReSeT it!! (Although when I tried to telnet to
a nonsense .com name at port 12345, I got a connection refused.

I'm not trying to start a debate here over just how sucky this is,
but rather warn the curl community that a bad .com or .net domain
name will now result in totally unexpected and mysterious behavior!

Rich

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Received on 2003-09-18