Because this is probably a community of interest for the topic of DNS, I thought it would be worthwhile mentioning that Verisign has apparently unilaterally put in place wildcard DNS records for *.com and *.net. All unregistered domains in .com and .net now resolve to 64.94.110.11, which runs a Verisign-operated web search engine on port 80. In other words, it is effectively impossible to provoke an "NXDOMAIN" response for any host in either of these TLDs. $ dig sdlfkjglei.com ; <<>> DiG 9.2.1 <<>> sdlfkjglei.com ;; global options: printcmd ;; Got answer: ;; ->>HEADER<<- opcode: QUERY, status: NOERROR, id: 35289 ;; flags: qr rd ra; QUERY: 1, ANSWER: 1, AUTHORITY: 13, ADDITIONAL: 0 ;; QUESTION SECTION: ;sdlfkjglei.com. IN A ;; ANSWER SECTION: sdlfkjglei.com. 900 IN A 64.94.110.11 ;; AUTHORITY SECTION: com. 172800 IN NS k.gtld-servers.net. com. 172800 IN NS l.gtld-servers.net. com. 172800 IN NS m.gtld-servers.net. com. 172800 IN NS a.gtld-servers.net. com. 172800 IN NS b.gtld-servers.net. com. 172800 IN NS c.gtld-servers.net. com. 172800 IN NS d.gtld-servers.net. com. 172800 IN NS e.gtld-servers.net. com. 172800 IN NS f.gtld-servers.net. com. 172800 IN NS g.gtld-servers.net. com. 172800 IN NS h.gtld-servers.net. com. 172800 IN NS i.gtld-servers.net. com. 172800 IN NS j.gtld-servers.net. ;; Query time: 48 msec ;; SERVER: xx.xx.xx.xx ;; WHEN: Mon Sep 15 23:12:05 2003 ;; MSG SIZE rcvd: 272 /a