This year's .cm bust: Mind your typos

The administrators in charge of regulating Cameroon's .cm top-level domain have been accused of "typo-squatting."

According to the claims, administrators have authorized a DNS wildcard that has the effect of redirecting all accidental .cm traffic instead of returning an error. So a user who mistakenly types .cm instead of .com will get a page full of ads.

Besides confusing users, the move could pose a security risk, since domain checks are used in spam detection and other security measures.

Blog community response:

"Ultimately, the winner of all of this jockeying are contextual ad providers, who have ingeniously managed to cram ads into every last nook and crannie on the planet without having to look the least bit evil."
--TechDirt

"The Cameroonian ccTLD operators (or the business they've outsourced this service to) makes the argument that they are 'helping you' find what you're looking for. If they wanted to help you they'd just correct .cm to .com for all domains that didn't exist in the .cm namespace, or do nothing at all."
--OpenDNS

"Unfortunately, ICANN has little control over what a country can do with its own TLD, unlike the earlier attempt by Verisign on the actual .com TLD."
--2600uk.com