The country of Cameroon has redirected all unregistered domains ending in their country top-level domain (TLD) of .cm to advertising pages in attempt to capitalize on people that mistype .com. Slashdot is where I read about it this morning, and their source was an article at CircleID.com, and someone else has more details and opinion over here.
Further investigation by a Slashdot commenter at the article above shows that the ads are being served by a company called “NameView Inc,” which is the owner of the IP block 72.51.27.0 – 72.51.27.255 (72.51.27.0/24), a subnet I’ve easily blocked access to from work (which at least gives an error when mistyping domains as .cm, I haven’t stumbled upon an easy way to redirect .cm to the correct .com using the Microsoft ISA 2004 firewall). OpenDNS doesn’t yet fix this but I’ve asked them to, so we’ll see what their decision is on this! If they re-start typo-correcting .cm to .com as they used to before Cameroon’s new trick, it should just work on top of my firewall block since they won’t be redirecting to the advertising IP addresses I’m blocking!