Oh boy, as reported by Slashdot and others, Verisign, who is trusted to administrate the contents of the .com, .net and .org DNS root servers added a wild-card entry to an IP of theirs, which catches all mistyped domain names. Currently they redirect to a search engine supported by paid listings (as Microsoft has been doing in IE), but I'm sure that they will offer you to register this domain very soon, too.
Aside from the unfair advantage their position creates, many technical problems with this approach have been pointed out. E.g. this will break anti-spam filters that check for valid sender domains.
Developers of spiders will now have to treat this as a special case for dead links. Otherwise all mistyped or expired links will point to Verisign now. Imagine if Google wouldn't fix this: They would accumulate a mind-boggling amount of pagerank due to this trick!
So Veri$ign's greed causes troubles and confusion for users mistyping domains, forces many software authors to fix parts of their software (and that every time they change something significant in their system, like pointing to another catch-all domain), which in turns causes users to unnecessarily update their software.
Boycott Versign, Network Solutions and Thawte (all the same company)!
We already have publicly boycotted Verisign. See our press release at www.maedata.net/press, also please InternetNews.com has published an article about our boycott.
see http://www.internetnews.com/bus-news/article.php/3081611