Sunday, 30 January 2011

Example.com has changed!

Nearly everyone involved in security testing or website design has undoubtedly used the domains example.com and example.net to demonstrate something or other. These are special domain names, reserved for private testing, so nobody is allowed to register them.

For as long as I can remember, the domains have been configured to point to a web server. For several years, they returned the following rather minimalist content:

You have reached this web page by typing "example.com", "example.net","example.org" or "example.edu" into your web browser.

These domain names are reserved for use in documentation and are not available for registration. See RFC 2606, Section 3.

But now it's changed! The example domains now issue a 302 redirect to a page on a different domain: http://www.iana.org/domains/example/

Try it out: http://example.com

I don't like this. I'm all in favour of making things look a bit prettier, but for some reason it seems wrong to redirect users to a completely different domain name.

I wonder if any test code will be broken by this change?

Posted by at

20 comments:

  1. Anonymous30 January 2011 at 18:41

    Any "test code" that relies on any host actually existing at, or there even being DNS records for, example.* is broken already. So no.

    ReplyDelete
  2. Anonymous30 January 2011 at 18:49

    Just because you shouldn't do that doesn't mean some people won't have. So "no" probably isn't true.

    ReplyDelete
  3. Anonymous30 January 2011 at 19:25

    Idiots shouldn't be protected from the consequences of their actions. If something breaks, it's their fault.

    ReplyDelete
  4. Anonymous30 January 2011 at 21:03

    http://web.archive.org/web/*sa_/http://example.com shows that the site content has actually changed a couple of times...

    ReplyDelete
  5. Paul30 January 2011 at 21:09

    It's been practically the same for 9 years.

    ReplyDelete
  6. Anonymous30 January 2011 at 21:25

    note the term "Documentation purposes" i.e. use it in a book, not for security testing. If for security testing you have to rely on a particular domain acting in a particular way, register it yourself.

    ReplyDelete
  7. Paul30 January 2011 at 21:33

    I agree to some extent. A key part of security testing is documenting what you have discovered, and that is where it is appropriate to use example domains.

    ReplyDelete
  8. Andrew Smith31 January 2011 at 06:52

    Maybe they got a really good offer for example.com and this is part of clearing the way? Woulldn't surprise me.

    ReplyDelete
  9. peten31 January 2011 at 09:15

    Well they all are unavailable right now giving error unable to load page Firefox 4b10

    ReplyDelete
  10. Criação de Sites31 January 2011 at 18:22

    This is a bad example that should not be followed...

    ReplyDelete
  11. Anonymous2 February 2011 at 14:01

    A test of the VoiceXML 2.1 test harness is broken (see the default configuration).

    ReplyDelete
  12. chaand farish6 January 2015 at 10:04

    nice

    ReplyDelete
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