Is it an accident? No, it's a wildcard subdomain

http://www.eBay.c.uk

by TuxMulder • 11 years ago

55 46 11 years ago

ebay.c.uk

MrSourz6• 11 years ago

I think this is a good demo to share with family and am glad this organization has c.uk.

Another more general example to share with family is:

http://www2.scotiaonline.scotiabank.com.online.authenticatio...

These are both cases where the subdomain can trick people. The .c.uk one is a bit more dangerous as they claim a lot of people end up landing on those pages. I had a quick look through some other second level domains to see if anyone else had a site like this.

The more details on two level domains here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Second-level_domain

MrSourz6• 11 years ago

What I find hard to believe and just realized was that this domain was registered on 10-Jun-2014.

Edit: People were first able to register .uk domains last year, and if the .co.uk domain already exists then you must own it in order to register the .uk domain.

0x03• 11 years ago

Direct registrations under .uk (and not just .co.uk, .org.uk etc) were only opened last year.

cbd19842• 11 years ago

Interesting that they would allow such an odd domain to be registered in the first place. It seems like a big security hole.

MatthewWilkes3• 11 years ago

Why is that interesting? c.uk is a registered domain, the WHOIS for subdomains correctly states that it can't be registered.

cbd19842• 11 years ago

Why is that interesting?

Because I found it interesting.

Yelwis2• 11 years ago

Because .UK only allowed registrations at the third level for decades, i.e. example.co.uk, example.ac.uk etc. I think it's also the most-used CCTLD.

Then they introduced second level domains, but they're still rarely used at present. ebay.uk and google.uk are registered, but don't do anything yet.

MrSourz6• 11 years ago

You're missing something here. The UK is a country that allows second-level domains e.g., co.uk, gov.uk, org.uk as well as just domains ending in .uk.

This organizations owns c.uk (so the who-is you should lookup is just c.uk.

What I find hard to believe is that ti looks like it was registered on: 10-Jun-2014!?

iamben• 11 years ago

You need to own the .co.uk to get the .uk (at the minute), unless the .co.uk hasn't been registered.

icebraining• 11 years ago

What I find hard to believe is that ti looks like it was registered on: 10-Jun-2014!?

That's the date when they started allowing registration for top level domains (before they just allowed second level).

AshleysBrain• 11 years ago

I didn't know single letter domains were allowed? For example none of a.com, b.com, c.com etc. work - do other gTLD allow single letter domains then?

0x03• 11 years ago

X.org is pretty well known

TheDong4• 11 years ago

https://t.co/ is very well known. Probably the most used single-character domain in existence :)

Unrelated, but I've never understood why t.co counts against your tweet length.. for example, if you tweeted "ebay.c.uk", it would count for length(http://t.co/xxxxxxxxxx) characters (15 characters even though you only typed 9).

TheLoneWolfling• 11 years ago

Related: http://qntm.org/twit

dmart• 11 years ago

According to Twitter, t.co is mandatory in order to prevent phishing and calculate link popularity:

https://support.twitter.com/articles/109623

abraham• 11 years ago

Because your tweet is no longer "ebay.c.uk", Twitter changes is to to "http://t.co/xxxxxxxxxx" which takes additional charactors that what you entered.

Macha• 11 years ago

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Single-letter_second-level_dom...

There's a list.

mmahemoff• 11 years ago

q, x, and z are the only registered .com domains. Go figure! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Single-letter_second-level_dom...

Of those, x is currently timing out, q redirects to some kind of customer-only login wall, and z is the winner as the only normal public-facing website on a single-letter .com.

I wonder if eBay still owns x.com, having been Elon Musk's PayPal precursor. If so, it's a staggering oversight to leave the domain dormant.

ryanlol• 11 years ago

Registrant Organization: PayPal Inc. Admin Organization: eBay Inc.

Yes they do. Although, I do recall x.com being online not too long ago.

0x03• 11 years ago

I ended up on x.com when i was looking for paypal api documentation, it must have been just a year or so ago.

eric59• 11 years ago

How is a wildcard subdomain configured?

MrSourz6• 11 years ago

A simple DNS configuration would be:

An A record * .domain.com -> IP address

and in Nginx on the server with that IP address

server {

        listen          80;

        server_name     domain.com *.domain.com;

datenwolf• 11 years ago

Have the glue record for a/your domain (e.g. c.uk) point to your own nameserver. Configure the nameserver to respond to any request for an A or AAAA record under that domain with the target IP address. Make the HTTP server listening on that IP address answer regardless of the Host header.

TheDong4• 11 years ago

It depends on your DNS provider as to if they support it or not. Often, they will not and you'll simply have to run your own dns nameserver (bind) with a wildcard config, such as http://community.aegirproject.org/dnswildcard ... Googling around will find you many bind configurations and discussions of this feature.

nav1• 11 years ago

Something along lines of

  *	IN	A	<ip_address>

xg15• 11 years ago

So, does this mean, I can buy com.uk and edu.uk now?

Yelwis2• 11 years ago

    Error for "com.uk".

    This domain cannot be registered because it contravenes the Nominet UK
    naming rules.  The reason is:
      third-level domains may not be identical to a top-level domain.

    WHOIS lookup made at 00:32:52 13-Apr-2015

But edu.uk is available for the owner of edu.co.uk.

Other 2-3 letter domains seem to have been squatted (I tried several ISO codes and some newer generic TLDs).

gabeio2• 11 years ago

You could buy e.uk and catch typos like <college>.e.uk with the same page!

mizzao• 11 years ago

It's ac.uk for "academic".

nattofriends• 11 years ago

You would fool no one because the UK uses *.ac.uk for academic institutions.

pidg• 11 years ago

Another fantastic outcome of non-profit (lol) Nominet's recent, desperate attempts to squeeze every last penny out of the .uk tld.

Jodie_C• 11 years ago

There was an ok.su that would accept any traffic sent its way: mail, web, im, dns, so on.

I often wonder how many errors sent ok.us traffic to that black hole, and what they did with the data. I assume there are several other .su domains set up with blackholes as well.

Is it an accident? No, it's a wildcard subdomain

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