We’ve all experienced a bad case of “fat fingers” from time to time. You type away at a common enough domain such as cnn.com yet somehow end up at a page filled with horrible ad links. Upon further inspection you realise that you’ve actually typed cnn.cm and with a shrug, make your way to the correct URL.

You might think this was a simple case of an industrious cyber squatter getting a hold of a single domain variant but it seems things run a little deeper than this. The Cameroon government who run the .cm country code have cut a deal with a broker who set up a wildcard redirect on all .cm domains. One can only imagine the huge volume of traffic that must be snagged in this little maneuver. You might think that trademark holders would simply put an end to this sort of thing but as it is a wildcard redirect no domains are actually being registered and so there is no recourse. Clever (if not dastardly) stuff.