The Day Verisign Hijacked the DNS
Yesterday, September 15, 2003, Verisign hijacked the Domain Name System by essentially making a sales tool out of every combination of letters or numbers that is NOT currently registered in the .com or .net heirarchies. Essentially, they are the world's largest "typosquatters."
This hijacking also affects email, or any other service that formerly used "domain not found" messages to process information. For example, if your anti spam software was set to reject any bogus domain names, it will no longer work, and all of that spam will now get through as a "valid" domain. Further, any mistyped email address will divert the mail to Verisign. What they currently do with it is send an error, but in future, they could send you yet more ads for Verisign services.
So how did Verisign get the power to do this? They run the master DNS servers for .com and .net. We have yet to hear from ICANN on this important issue.