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Parked domain pages being generated - Afternic partnership

Hi,

 

I've noticed a (new?) feature being put in with NextDNS' parked domains blocking. It appears that, through a partnership with GoDaddy and/or Afternic, NextDNS generates "buy me" pages for what would be a parked domain. This behavior extends into TLDs that don't exist, like .s, .a, etc. This is a bit shady to me, as I'd expect the "block parked domains" feature to return NXDOMAIN or 0.0.0.0 for parked domains like it does for items in the Denylist, and retain normal DNS resolver behavior for non-existent domains (instead of generating a response regardless, pointing to some third party server). It's sketchy to me that this page is forced navigated to, and I see absolutely no technical reason from my perspective as someone who works with these things on a daily basis. What is up with this?

4 replies

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    • Martheen
    • 3 mths ago
    • Reported - view

    Can you give an example of the parked domain? I've just tried k dot top but apparently NextDNS doesn't even tell it's a parked domain and just serve it.

      • Nullptr
      • 3 mths ago
      • Reported - view

       

      Just tried (random letters).zxb which afaik is not a real TLD at all, getting the afternic.com redirect. This is over DoH too and I've ruled out local network and/or ISP rewriting my requests by testing it over cellular- same behavior. dig also returns A records for nonexistent domains when using NextDNS, but using a different one e.g. 1.1.1.1 resolver doesn't for the same domain. Note that this requires the parked domain blocking feature enabled, and maybe I'm also in a sort of A/B test?

      • Martheen
      • 3 mths ago
      • Reported - view

       Did you enable Web3? It seems that NextDNS just forward any non-ICANN TLD to other provider, which in turn then return the afternic redirect for non existent domain, but only if the parked domain blocking is also enabled, not sure who's at fault here.

      • Nullptr
      • 3 mths ago
      • Reported - view

       Yep looks like it's the web3 feature. Really weird but at least I can turn it off.

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