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They changed microsoft.com to mic2soft.com: only 1 bit difference between the two. I'm astonished that they got so many hits with that. Someone bit-squatting w

by joss82 15y ago

They changed microsoft.com to mic2soft.com: only 1 bit difference between the two. I'm astonished that they got so many hits with that. Someone bit-squatting with many different combinations of the same domain can really do some damage...

evilswan 15y ago
Forgive me, genuinely interested - how does 1-bit difference turn microsoft into mic2soft.. ?
- Mithrandir 15y ago
  In ASCII, microsoft is: 0110110101101001011000110_1_1100100110111101110011011011110110011001110100 micr2soft is: 0110110101101001011000110_0_1100100110111101110011011011110110011001110100 The important bit is the one between the underscores.
  - evilswan 15y ago
    Gotcha - thank you.
  - unwind 15y ago
    I think the question is made more relevant when taking into account that the poster above omitted the 'r' ("mic2soft"), thus causing the name to be shortened which is, indeed, very hard to call a 1-bit error.
joss82 15y ago
Sorry, I made a typo: please replace mic2soft with mic2osoft. And by the way, there are "only" 72 (9 characters x 8 bits) domains to register to cover all the 1-bit error for microsoft.com. If one discards not-valid characters like _,. or A-Z, it might actually be way less...