Is there an application that treats a local file specifier and a host specifier indistinguishably? If so, how does it deal with strings (like those I listed above) that could potentially be executables as well as domain names?
Looking at the 2007 DITL data (traces from DNS roots) its interesting to see traffic for invalid TLDs that look just like filename extensions. For example: % of all TLD/ Queries extension ---------- ----------- 0.182 txt 0.055 htm 0.051 c 0.049 lib 0.041 jpg 0.026 gif 0.012 html 0.011 php 0.005 exe (Note, those really are percentages.) I have no idea what applications are behind them, but it indicates that there is software out there that has a hard time telling the difference between a filename and a hostname. Or maybe its (ab)using the DNS to help make the decision. FWIW I was able to find one application, the text browser 'links,' which accepts either filename or hostnames as its commandline argument. From what I can tell its algorithm is something like this: - if tld/extension has two letters --> URL - if less than two letters --> File - if tld/extension is in list of known gTLDs --> URL - else --> File DW