Hello,
OK, I have my theories, I have seen additional sites similar to this but I wanted to hear from you. Click on this link and tell me if you have seen additional Google hosted url’s in a similar disposition and what are your thoughts? This link and additional information was found using the new www.Syntryx.com beta which will be out in a month, you will see more about the www.Syntryx.com beta soon stay tuned. (Yes you could call this a teaser!)
I have added a follow up article for this post on my Revenews Blog here
Its pulling the code from Google.com. It looks like a simple DNS forwarder to Google’s data center 39-GV (IP 216.239.59.104). The sites DNS Server is DNS1.NAME-SERVICES.COM. If you ping the domain, it shows the real IP, which is 69.25.142.3. There is no reverse DNS set for that IP.
The registrant of the xxxdisc.net domain is a guy in zimbabwe
High Av Video co
cosomer lee ([email protected])
+263.123555777
Fax: +263.123456777
West wood street 213# linken road
mogan, 432229
ZW
It does not seem to be a mallicous attempt by that guy to do something sneaky. He just does not use that domain yet and instead of having a parking service thowing up some stuff (e.g. ads) does he simply redirect to Google.
However, that Google (the site code) allows that the Google.com site is pulled via a different domain name that is not owned by Google is a big oversight by Google. Somebody with malicious intentions could use it for bad things. The Google site uses relative URLs, which keeps the user on the different domain.
I checked the logins, they redirect to Google.com, which is good, because that prevents that the login cookie is being created on that non-google domain.
There is also a link that appears on the Homepage that reads. “Go to Google.com”, but that is not enough IMO. Google should (301) redirect any request to their sites if the domain is not the real Google domain.
Thank you Carsten! You are a trooper! Anyone Else have comments?
You can use the same kind of tricks to force specific datacenters, if you want to check for or analyze differences. Just add a few lines into your local “hosts” file (or if you want to get fancy, use an unused domain and set up DNS for subdomains). Things like that help to explain datacenter differences to clients.
Why ownership of this and other sites that appear to be uh.. highly questionable sites under Google ownership? Is this from them being domain registrar? Carsten is talking about it in more detail follow the link:
http://www.searchenginejournal.com/are-you-tired-of-the-googlecom-domain/5428/