4 ms·
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, t
by patio11 14y ago
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.
- bgrohman 14y agoSurely Apple wouldn't use a domain they don't control for this.
- alanh 14y agoIf you read the linked thread, it’s clear they did not, in fact, register or otherwise control the domain.
- bgrohman 14y agoRight. 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.
- niels_olson 14y agoMaybe it's a cheap way to drive up a squatter's bandwidth costs?
- VxJasonxV 14y agoI resent that.
- niels_olson 14y agoI 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.
- derleth 14y ago> Note to self: hacker news may be more reputable than the large government agency's IT management. More clueful, certainly.
- VxJasonxV 14y agoI 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.
- avar 14y agoI 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.
- bgrohman 14y agoCould 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.
- qeorge 14y agoWindows 7 does this in a cool way: http://superuser.com/a/277955 http://superuser.com/a/277955 It tries to load a text file over HTTP (http://www.msftncsi.com/ncsi.txt 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).
- __david__ 14y agoI 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.