In 1990 Michael Jackson was hospitalized for chest pains, on my birthday!

This amazing fact came from the VERY comprehensive Historic Events & Birthdates site run by Scope Systems.

Scope Systems seem to be some kind of electronics repair company, so I guess the staff just have a thing for interesting trivia facts! They claim over 3 million hits - I hope they're not paying for outbound traffic...

While surfing the ICANN site, I noticeded a memo on the future of the now very fragmented whois system: external link

Dubbed the "wildcard" service, Verisign (the US for profit company that manages top level domains .com .net and others), Verisign's dns servers dynamically generate bogus records that redirect you to their own search site, eith (of course) paid advertising...

For example, www.cndsuidghsdjkfh.com will take you to sitefinder.verisign.com - ICANN (the US not-for-profit organisation responsible for many of the technical standards of the Internet) has issued an advisory asking Verisign to retract this "service" while it completess technical studies into the ramifications.

For a start it means that when you register a domain name it will take another 450 or 900 seconds (the timeout given with the wildcard dns - depending on your ISPs dns settings) for the name to come into effect, and I am sure there are more nasty side effects I have not had the time to think of.

The Register points out that this destroys the usefullnes of checking for spam by checking that the sendors domain exists - since now every .com or .net permutation resolves correctly.

If you do a dns query for a non existant domain in a Verisign name space, you get an "IN A" record with the IP address 64.94.110.11 - which takes you to sitefinder.verisign.com - real nasty :/

The title of this blog was snarfed from the following The Register article: external article