On Thu, Oct 09, 2003 at 12:13:42PM -0700, [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: > The point is that MP3.com would have most likely realized the domain had > expired if the .com wildcard did not exist. Instead, the domain kept > resolving and user's of MP3.com became confused, "why did I end up at this > sitefinder site?".
I don't see this. The domain apparently continued to resolve until ~10 days past the expiration date, at which time it started resolving to sitefinder. Without sitefinder in the mix, on the 10th day, the lookup for mp3s.com would have started returning NXDOMAIN, and people would have been unable to access the site without some additional work. With sitefinder in the mix, on the 10th day, the lookup for mp3s.com started returning sitefinder's IP address, and people were unable to access the site without some additional work. If anything, sitefinder was just a different form of egg on the face for mp3.com. > > Sitefinder never redirected mp3s.com to mp3.com. It appears that mp3.com > has https://artists.mp3s.com set up to redirect to > http://genres.mp3.com/music/ (I just tried it). This sounds correct. > > I would assume that mp3.com has some type of server monitoring in > place, probably something very basic that pings the domain--if so, the > domain mp3s.com never stopped responding to requests so it went unnoticed. > The domain mp3s.com was in an expired state for 10 days without anyone > noticing. This is inadequate technique, with or without sitefinder. So far, I have seen nothing that indicates that fault for the domain expiring lies with anyone other than the folks at mp3.com. The article in The Register states that a user of the mp3.com site noticed that the domain name artists.mp3s.com was hitting sitefinder, and at that time called the registrar of mp3s.com and submitted payment for the domain. At the time that *someone* noticed and fixed the problem, sitefinder was still operational. This would seem to support the theory that the wildcard's removal was not the catalyst that caused anyone to notice the problem, and therefore the wildcard's presence had no significant role in preventing anyone from noticing the problem. -jeff -- Jeff Godin <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Jedin Technologies
