I have found that most of the common mis-spellings of our domain name
have been registered with the Internic by a company named Americaoffline.
Yup. They've been busy registering dropped-letter variants of many
folks. All the zones I've looked at are merely wildcard A records, not
purposeful hosts. I was sorely disappointed that
http://www.americaoffline.com/ contains no references to malicous nor
humourous stuff. Personally, I was hoping for large-scale lampooning.
Nothing at the real provider's home base, INSTANET.COM, reveals anything
of interest. Some kook thinking he can auction off typo domains?
Joe
On the same thread, or possibly not, there is also a company that is
trying to make a go at redirection of typos (typo.net). For an example,
try www.yaho.com
Barry
Barry L James | Mikrotec Internet Services, Inc (AS3801)
Director R & D | 1001 Winchester Rd
bjames@mis.net | Lexington KY 40505
http://www.mis.net/ | 606/266.5925 800/875.5095
Member AAAI, IEEE # 40277528
On Mon, May 11, 1998, Joe Provo - Network Architect <jprovo@ma.ultranet.com> quoth:
Nothing at the real provider's home base, INSTANET.COM, reveals anything
of interest. Some kook thinking he can auction off typo domains?
Heey! I feel special!
bash-2.00$ host mindsring.com
mindsring.com A 205.231.48.243
bash-2.00$ host mindpring.com
mindpring.com A 205.231.48.243
bash-2.00$ host mindsping.com
mindsping.com A 205.231.48.243
Someone out there has money to blow. Expect to see forthcoming spam about the
vast moneymaking potential of misspelled donaims.
I suppose obfuscation is one of the sincerer forms of flattery...
There has been at least one other company that I know of in the past
couple of years that has done this, although the name slips my mind. Their
purpose was to hit poorly spelling surfers with ad's when they typed
"ayhoo.com" or "entcom.com" etc... accidently in their browser. Legitimate
use of the domains, no matter how stupid 
-Ryan Jeffs
An illegitmate use of these types of domain is easily proven in cases
such as one I dealt with a year or so ago. In a domain that was one
character off from one that my company owned, DNS revealed that there
was a record for every server hostname that was on my network (and
they weren't all commonly-used hostnames, either). If anyone can
think of some ethical and non-malicious reason to do this, I would be
interested in hearing it.
Mark Borchers
InfiNet
Someone out there has money to blow. Expect to see forthcoming spam about the
vast moneymaking potential of misspelled donaims.
actually, I like that, a purposely mispelled domain should be called a
"dohname", emphasis on DOH.
Try http://www.altavista.com/
altavista.digital.com now spots this referral (for folks that allow
referrals through ..) and makes you page down to see the search page,
putting up the 'bad referral' reminder.
Dumb of them to miss that one ..
Cheers, Andy!