VeriSign Sued Over Typosquatting Plans
from the not-looking-good dept
As VeriSign claims that they’re sticking by their SiteFinder plan to hijack all mistyped internet traffic, a company named Popular Enterprises, which appears to be something of a typosquatter themselves is suing VeriSign for SiteFinder, saying they’re abusing their monopoly position and creating unfair competition for other companies who try to help surfers find their intended destination. The company apparently offers a “smart browsing” tool bar that attempts to help people find their proper destination if they put in a typo. Now, with VeriSign’s hijackings, their business is pretty much useless. Meanwhile, not only are their technical and legal concerns about SiteFinder, privacy advocates say the site is doing some questionable things concerning visitors’ privacy as well. With all this noise, I’m actually surprised that VeriSign hasn’t caved yet.
Comments on “VeriSign Sued Over Typosquatting Plans”
The ISPs must be on top of this
Yesterday, unkown websites were coming through as “No data in document” errors. I saw it as resolving to the sitefinder IP, but pinging didn’t have any return hits. This morning, I think to do a traceroute (tracert, tracerte depending on your OS) and find that I’m now getting the correct response of Unknown host!
I suspect that Comcast (Hi Mike!) patched their BIND, or whatever they use for DNS, I’m too lazy to find out last night, and yesterday just blocked access to the IP yesterday in it’s routers. I notice today that the site has also changed it’s IP number as well.