Because this is probably a community of interest for the
topic of DNS, I thought it would be worthwhile mentioning
that Verisign has apparently unilaterally put in place
wildcard DNS records for *.com and *.net. All unregistered
domains in .com and .net now resolve to 64.94.110.11, which
runs a Verisign-operated web search engine on port 80.
In other words, it is effectively impossible to provoke
an "NXDOMAIN" response for any host in either of these TLDs.
$ dig sdlfkjglei.com
; <<>> DiG 9.2.1 <<>> sdlfkjglei.com
;; global options: printcmd
;; Got answer:
;; ->>HEADER<<- opcode: QUERY, status: NOERROR, id: 35289
;; flags: qr rd ra; QUERY: 1, ANSWER: 1, AUTHORITY: 13, ADDITIONAL: 0
;; QUESTION SECTION:
;sdlfkjglei.com. IN A
;; ANSWER SECTION:
sdlfkjglei.com. 900 IN A 64.94.110.11
;; AUTHORITY SECTION:
com. 172800 IN NS k.gtld-servers.net.
com. 172800 IN NS l.gtld-servers.net.
com. 172800 IN NS m.gtld-servers.net.
com. 172800 IN NS a.gtld-servers.net.
com. 172800 IN NS b.gtld-servers.net.
com. 172800 IN NS c.gtld-servers.net.
com. 172800 IN NS d.gtld-servers.net.
com. 172800 IN NS e.gtld-servers.net.
com. 172800 IN NS f.gtld-servers.net.
com. 172800 IN NS g.gtld-servers.net.
com. 172800 IN NS h.gtld-servers.net.
com. 172800 IN NS i.gtld-servers.net.
com. 172800 IN NS j.gtld-servers.net.
;; Query time: 48 msec
;; SERVER: xx.xx.xx.xx
;; WHEN: Mon Sep 15 23:12:05 2003
;; MSG SIZE rcvd: 272
/a