Sneak has stumbled across a piece of odd behaviour, brought to light by a malformed link at an otherwise innocent web site. Given a URL that began http://http Sneak's browser unaccountably ended up at Microsoft. Not so surprising, perhaps, except that unlike 95 percent of web users, Sneak doesn't use a Microsoft browser. It was actually the open source Mozilla Firefox 0.9 that performed this unexpected piece of network interconnection. Surprisingly, the same URL inserted into Microsoft's own IE 6.0 will, quite correctly, result in a "page cannot be displayed" message. Meanwhile both a copy of the main Mozilla browser and IE 5.1 on Mac OS 9 will happily trot off to SearchMachine.com given the same input, on the more comprehensible basis that this company happens to have registered the http.com domain. Perhaps other software combinations will act differently again, but Sneak has run out of systems to try here at Sneak central.
Sneak would welcome suggestions as to why the Firefox team has decided that inputting a malformed URL is equivalent to typing www.microsoft.com. A subtle comment on the company's malformed products, perhaps? An underhand way of co-ordinating a sustained, low-level denial of service attack? Or, worse, could some daring Microsoft moles have secretly infiltrated the Mozilla camp, leaving this as their only calling card?
Try it, see where you end up: http://http.

20 Jul 2004