Chris-Linfoot.net

Remember Sitefinder?

Sitefinder was that wildcard A record that Verisign famously applied across the .com and .net TLDs a year or three ago.

From time to time we see others engaging in the same subterfuge in order to generate click traffic, and monetise their Internet presence, when web users mistype addresses. And now a whole country is at it.

On noting that their ccTLD, .cm, is just one letter different from the most popular of all TLDs, .com, the good people of Cameroon have implemented their own wildcard at .cm.

For you .com domain owners (good morning Ed - how was the party?), you now have a competitor over at yourdomain.cm. Try it. Here's Ed again, Cameroon style.

Actually that's worse than Sitefinder - there's no attempt to guess what you really meant and all mistyped .cm domains are met with the same generic and rather bland index page which is "© Copyright 2006", though it is unclear by whom.

Expect similar moves from Oman (.om) and Colombia (.co).

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See also:
CircleID: Nation of Cameroon Typo-Squats the Entire .com Space
John Levine: Has Your Browser Been to Cameroon Lately?

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Category: T'Internet
Technorati: .cm Cameroon ccTLD Sitefinder

1. Jerry Carter07/08/2006 16:58:16
Homepage: http://datatribesoftwerks.com

I havn't tried these examples yet from home, but there I have set up the DNS for my router to use Open DNS.

http://opendns.com/

They seem to have some of this sort of thing squashed.

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2. Chris Linfoot07/08/2006 21:00:56

Just tried that. OpenDNS is not currently intercepting the .cm wildcard.

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3. David Ulevitch09/08/2006 04:26:38
Homepage: http://david.ulevitch.com/

Chris,

Check us out in the morning. Well, morning being like 15 hours from now. Still need to hack, sleep, hack a bit more, and release. Maybe have a beer in there too.

-david

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