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Site Finder

1 min read

Try typing a random bunch of letters follow by a “.com” in your browser address bar now. What do you get? Instead of a normal error message or even the MSN search provided by Internet Explorer, you get a site called “Site Finder”, which is owned by VeriSign.

Apparently this company owns the directories of all .net and .com addresses and is using it to direct mistyped addresses to Site Finder. I started noticing this on Tuesday and at first thought it was one of the adwares installed by MSN Messenger Plus.

VeriSign is now being sued for this monopoly over .com and .net addresses. Frankly I prefer the MSN auto-search function that kicks in when you mistype an address to this Site Finder thing.

The article can be found on Wired here.

And in other news, ATMs to convert from IBM O/S2 to Windows operating system by 2005. Hilarity ensues.