Hacker News Reader

Comment by bkallus | Hacker News Reader

AT&T was doing this in 2021. They called it "DNS Error Assist."

I imagine they're still doing it.

They implement this at the edge, so bypassing the nameservers bypasses the silly search page and doesn't change the authoritative domain name. Verisign was changing it at the root, for everyone.

A difference of degree, not kind. This technique is the predator of the attention ecosystem, singling out the "old and weak" if typos imply weakness!

An angle no one has mentioned it how this played into googles dominance. These predators made it legitimately safer to type into a search box than a URL bar. At least for a little while.

> singling out the "old and weak" if typos imply weakness!

They don't.

Do you have an actual disagreement to communicate, or just thought-terminating dismissal, because it seems that typos would be more frequent for users with poorer attention to detail, which sounds to me like the kind of user that is more likely to fall for a scam.

So yeah, preying on users who make frequent typos would also serve to target less observant users, who have the potential be exploited more easily than the general population. AKA: typos imply an exploitable weakness

Case in point: Verisign and Telekom squatting on typo'd domains to extract revenue from exploitable users.

Having a weakness in typing isn't what "the weak" means. There's no need to be overly emotive. We can define its badness objectively.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com