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Comment by drusenko | Hacker News Reader

1- Periods (.) don't do anything after a domain (ie www.weebly.com.), but they are useful for preventing the browsers from redirecting to http://www.to.com/

2- The real domain we're looking at: "to" -- no "suffix" attached (TLD: top-level domain)

3- The .to registry added an A-record for the "to" domain, which resolves correctly.

[Edit: Looks like .cm does this too:

;; ANSWER SECTION:

cm. 86400 IN A 195.24.205.60]

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.cm is owned by a spammer. Nearly anything .cm redirects to agoga.net.

Kevin Ham: http://money.cnn.com/magazines/business2/business2_archive/2...

org. is interesting. It looks like the Apache server isn't set up correctly.

Actually the period at the end is part of the DNS standard, without it, your machine's search path is searched first (e.g. in resolv.conf on Unix/Linux)

So if your ISP is AOL, you might have a search path of aol.com so looking up "to" will first try to.aol.com if that exists it will go there. Putting a "." at the end will let it go straight there.

This isn't normally a problem because it's not like aol is going to set up google.com.aol.com. But really everyone should have periods at the end of domains.

Does this mean we should expect http://com./ http://net./ etc?

Didn't CNet used to use http://com./?

no, they had com.com (e.g. http://news.com.com/). I believe that domain is now for sale. Probably gets a TON of typo traffic.

For whatever reason they actually used com.com.

Because it was the dot-com boom, and what was better than one dot-com? TWO!

But yeah, they then proceeded to put everything under .com.com, so they had news.com.com, cnet.com.com etc. It was painfully stupid.

I believe the justification was so they could use unified cookies across all their properties -- they set the cookie for "com.com", and then it was available to news.com.com, search.com.com, downloads.com.com, etc., in the same way that yahoo.com cookies are available to news.yahoo.com, sports.yahoo.com, etc.

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