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by drusenko 6035 days ago
1- Periods (.) don't do anything after a domain (ie www.weebly.com.), but they are useful for preventing the browsers from redirecting to http://www.to.com/

2- The real domain we're looking at: "to" -- no "suffix" attached (TLD: top-level domain)

3- The .to registry added an A-record for the "to" domain, which resolves correctly.

[Edit: Looks like .cm does this too:

;; ANSWER SECTION:

cm. 86400 IN A 195.24.205.60]
3 comments
qeorge 6035 days ago
.cm is owned by a spammer. Nearly anything .cm redirects to agoga.net.
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tlrobinson 6035 days ago
Kevin Ham: http://money.cnn.com/magazines/business2/business2_archive/2...
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NathanKP 6034 days ago
org. is interesting. It looks like the Apache server isn't set up correctly.
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rythie 6034 days ago
Actually the period at the end is part of the DNS standard, without it, your machine's search path is searched first (e.g. in resolv.conf on Unix/Linux)

So if your ISP is AOL, you might have a search path of aol.com so looking up "to" will first try to.aol.com if that exists it will go there. Putting a "." at the end will let it go straight there.

This isn't normally a problem because it's not like aol is going to set up google.com.aol.com. But really everyone should have periods at the end of domains.

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lecha 6035 days ago
Does this mean we should expect http://com./ http://net./ etc?
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iamdanw 6035 days ago
Didn't CNet used to use http://com./?
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eli 6035 days ago
no, they had com.com (e.g. http://news.com.com/). I believe that domain is now for sale. Probably gets a TON of typo traffic.
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pauldino 6035 days ago
For whatever reason they actually used com.com.
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tedmielczarek 6035 days ago
Because it was the dot-com boom, and what was better than one dot-com? TWO!

But yeah, they then proceeded to put everything under .com.com, so they had news.com.com, cnet.com.com etc. It was painfully stupid.

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seldo 6035 days ago
I believe the justification was so they could use unified cookies across all their properties -- they set the cookie for "com.com", and then it was available to news.com.com, search.com.com, downloads.com.com, etc., in the same way that yahoo.com cookies are available to news.yahoo.com, sports.yahoo.com, etc.
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