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I warned about this back when all those new TLDs were being considered. Single-word TLDs are not properly supported in browsers, in DNS, or even at the glibc level. At the browser level, is it a keyword or a domain? Try "ai". "ai" is a real domain, and there's a web site at "http://ai", touting the advantages of starting an offshore company in Anguilla. Most browsers interpret "ai" as a search term by default. If you enter "ai.", though, you've specified a rooted domain name (a feature few people know about) and should get the "ai" web site. Firefox understands this, but Android doesn't. Try various browsers. At the glibc level, there's an exploitable bug, which I reported in 2012.[1] It's still open. The bug was first seen in 2011 and reported on serverfault.[2] The problem is that glibc DNS lookup has a feature which is supposed to allow abbreviating domain names. The idea was that if you're on "something.harvard.edu" and you look up "law", it tries "law.harvard.edu". The exploit is that if you're on "foo.com", and you look up "baz.com, glibc tries "baz.com.com". There's a domain "com.com", and it has a wildcard DNS server, so it will resolve "baz.com.com". What's there? A scam. "You are selected by G00GLE to be among the first few persons to win an iPhone 7...". This behavior is a problem for all single word domains. Whether it is active depends on the hostname of your local host. It's mostly a server problem, but some ISPs issue clients hostnames such as "12345678.comcast.net", which means that "google" gets tried as "google.comcast.net". Fortunately, "google.comcast.net" doesn't resolve in DNS. Neither does "com.comcast.net" ISPs need to be careful about this. (It's a big problem if you're writing a web crawler, which is why I know about it.) [1] https://sourceware.org/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=13935
[2] http://serverfault.com/questions/341383/possible-nxdomain-hi... |
This can also be set via DHCP.
https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc3397
https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc6106#page-7