surprisedVirgin media have recently started redirecting missing DNS queries to their own search page. So, if you go to an address that doesn't exist, like http://www.bad.pleaseremoveyourfeet.com/ (a non-existant subdomain of a friend's site), you get redirected to a search page like http://advancedsearch.virginmedia.com/subscribers/assist?url=www.bad.pleaseremoveyourfeet.com. On the one hand this breaks the expected behaviour of DNS, while on the other hand this is much better than Verisign's Site Finder as a) only Virgin Media's customers are affected, b) they seem to be applying actual intelligence to this system and c) you can opt out of it in a way that actually works
So, on the whole I don't mind this. It would have been good if they'd given some notice of this (though I recall a Register article from a while back talking about this for their cable customers), but this is far superior to Verisign's attempt to take control of the internet, and for non-tech-savvy users it's probably ideal.
Interestingly, they only seem to be doing this with some addresses:
10/17/09 15:31:25 dns www.pleaseremoveyourfeet.com Canonical name: pleaseremoveyourfeet.com Aliases: www.pleaseremoveyourfeet.com Addresses: 74.54.206.194 10/17/09 15:31:30 dns www.bad.pleaseremoveyourfeet.com Canonical name: www.bad.pleaseremoveyourfeet.com Addresses: 81.200.64.50 10/17/09 15:31:34 dns bad.pleaseremoveyourfeet.com No DNS for this address (host doesn't exist)
This makes sense... a request for a domain name beginning www is likely to be for a website, while a request for a different domain is probably not. Curiously their redirect script also only works with some user-agents:
GET / HTTP/1.1 Host: www.bad.pleaseremoveyourfeet.com Connection: close User-Agent: Sam Spade 1.14 HTTP/1.1 403 Forbidden Date: Sat, 17 Oct 2009 14:33:34 GMT Server: Apache Content-Length: 286 Connection: close Content-Type: text/html; charset=iso-8859-1 GET / HTTP/1.1 Host: www.bad.pleaseremoveyourfeet.com Connection: close User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Win98; I ;Nav) HTTP/1.1 302 Found Date: Sat, 17 Oct 2009 14:33:55 GMT Server: Apache Location: http://advancedsearch.virginmedia.com/subscribers/assist?url=www.bad.pleaseremoveyourfeet.com Content-Length: 327 Connection: close Content-Type: text/html; charset=iso-8859-1
Again, this seems to make some sort of sense - if it's not got a common browser user-agent, then it's probably not a browser and will get hopelessly confused by a redirect. Even better, at first glance it looks like their server isn't running SMTP or similar, so it won't get mis-addresses email (in fact, it looks like SMTP attempts just timeout).
