Verisign now advertises on every non-existant web site there is.

Normally, when you send an email or look up a web site, the name is looked up in DNS, and if you type something wrong, an error results. Now, the company that was entrusted by the government to run the name system has added a "wildcard A record to the .com and .net zones", which means any typo sends you to Verisign's Sitefinder. This is basically leeching free advertising from the net. In addition, private email might be collected by their site. It becomes a real problem when somebody's DNS server goes down, and all of a sudden web and mail traffic for them goes to Verisign. Of course, right now it seems like their web site is down anyway.