Zorac's LiveJournal

I'm fairly sure that I've only stumbled onto MySpace once, and the horrible mishmash of text, images, sound and video sent me running for the hills, but apparently some people do use it. According to El Reg, since the lovely and benevolent Mr. Murdoch took over, the terms and conditions and conditions have been tweaked just a little. The synopsis seems to be "News Corporation pwns j00" - anything you put on MySpace, they get to keep forever and use however they like. Yup, when the MySpacer grows up and becomes famous, all those skeletons in the MySpace closet can pop up in the Sun or on Fox News. Lovely.

The last couple of days I've been working through my newly-arrived DVDs of the final season of Blakes 7. Yes, the wobbly sets and dodgy special effects are still there, but considering the tiny budget, one can hardly complain - and it's the story and characters that you watch it for (yes, I still want to be Avon when I grow up, why do you ask?) The influence on later shows like Babylon 5 (league of non-aligned planets, anyone?) and Firefly (a bunch of renegades on a spaceship fighting an evil federation which uses pacification drugs...) is clearer than ever. Plus you get one of the greatest endings to a TV series ever...

Ladies and Gentlemen, I bring to your attention Amkells.co.uk. alnitak pointed this site out to me - the similarities in the site design to Amazon.co.uk are quite breathtaking. For the most blatant example, have a look at their safe shopping guarantee and compare it to that on Amazon - they're word-for-word identical, as is much of the "Where's My Stuff?" etc. section at the bottom of each page. Google searching turns up virtually nothing for amkells other than link shops.

I'm not quite sure what's going on there, but it certainly smells like fish to me.

Updates: The email I fired off to Amazon has had nothing but a form reply so far. Googling for amkells now turns up my LJ on the first page :)

More updates: The information in this comment does lean towards their legitimacy, but on the other hand, the site appears to be down at the moment...

Gah! The evil scumbags who operate the .com and .net domains have decided to set up a wild-card DNS record for all non-existant domains. This means that sites like www.dygiehwlkgiuwekrf.com now exist, and take you to a nice little VeriSign plug page instead of a helpful error message telling you that the site does not exist.

Much worse is the effect this will have on email - checking for non-existent domains is a good way of blocking spam, and indeed just verifying email addresses. Also, as VeriSign are running a mail server that rejects all messages, old or incorrect MX records which previously be ignored will now cause all email to a domain to be bounced.

Update 1: Ooh! More fun! Any DNS blacklists (again popular for blocking spam) which no longer exist (eg orbs.dorkslayers.com) will now have sprung back into life listing every address on the internet - meaning more false positives in junk mail blockers.

Update 2: Here's a good article written a couple of hours after this started. There is, of course, much discussion on Slashdot, and an article on The Register (with quotes from my boss, alnitak). VeriSign's posting about it on NANOG can be found here, and there's apparently much backlash to be found there too.

Update 3: One other concern this raises is privacy/security - every mis-typed URL or email address that goes to a non-existant .com or .net domain will now hit VeriSign's servers - and their terms and conditions state that they will keep that information - what email addresses you were trying to send to and from, what websites you were trying to visit (including any form parameters, potentially including usernames and passwords). How nice.

Update 4: This doesn't just happen to un-registered domains - it also applies to domains which are paid for and owned by someone who just happens not to have st up any DNS servers for it. Leading to even further dubious legality.

WAY TO BREAK THE INTERNET!!!!!

Needless to say, large numbers of ISPs and the like will be looking to take their domain registration and SSL certificate business elsewhere.