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Comment by patio11 | Hacker News Reader

Sounds like "A cheap way to figure out if we're in a restricted DNS environment like e.g. airport wifi pre-payment." The implementation is clearly suboptimal, though - you want to control the canary domain.

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Windows 7 does this in a cool way: http://superuser.com/a/277955

It tries to load a text file over HTTP (http://www.msftncsi.com/ncsi.txt) and fetch the DNS record of dns.msftncsi.com. If the return of either is not as expected, Windows indicates 'No Internet Access' (although you are connected to a network).

I think the "typo" scenario makes the most sense. bogus.apple.com vs bogusapple.com. It would be an easy mistake to make and everything would look like it's working fine until someone happened to register the domain.

Surely Apple wouldn't use a domain they don't control for this.

If you read the linked thread, it’s clear they did not, in fact, register or otherwise control the domain.

Right. I should have been more clear in my statement. I meant that, since Apple clearly doesn't control the domain, I find it hard to believe that they would use it intentionally.

Maybe it's a cheap way to drive up a squatter's bandwidth costs?

I resent that.

I was at work and the network had blocked it putting it in the "placeholders" category. Note to self: hacker news may be more reputable than the large government agency's IT management.

> Note to self: hacker news may be more reputable than the large government agency's IT management.

More clueful, certainly.

I don't know exactly when it started, but I suspect Apple has used this domain for at least a few days now. Whether that's as far back as Mountain Lion's release, or as recently as iTunes 10.7.

Considering some of our active theories, it may have only started becoming used as a result of that Terms & Conditions snafu that occurred the other day.

Either way, the problem predates my registration of the domain, which was around 13 hours ago now. I registered bogusapple.com as a result of seeing use of the domain.

I think you're being overly generous in ascribing the intentions of an entire company on this.

Most likely the real reason behind this is that some programmer in their employ who didn't know better hammered in "bogusapple.com" as the first thing he could come up with, committed it since it worked for him, and now a lot of people are trying to ascribe more complex intentions to Apple than that.

Could be. I don't know much about the internal development practices at Apple. One has to assume they have strict development and testing guidelines, but you're right - it is possible that some programmer hammered this in, and the change slipped past the code review and testing phases.

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