question: Why do old web addresses often redirect to completely random places?
comment: It is called cyber squatting. The squatters buy such old domains to place a link or redirect you to some web page which they want to make popular.
passages: As computer systems became networked email addresses needed to be able to identify not only the user, but also which host or mail system they were on. Addresses of this type were used in a number of early email systems, including:
  
  BULLET::::- ARPANET: "jim@washington"
  
  BULLET::::- PROFS: "userid@node"
  
  BULLET::::- DECnet: "host::user" (e.g. DECWRL::WRL-TECHREPORTS)
  
  BULLET::::- : "John Alexopoulos at MicroCircuits"
  
  BULLET::::- MHS: Barry@MICROSOFT
  
  Section::::Delivery path.
   BULLET::::- Address munging : Address munging—e.g., changing "bob@example.com" to "bob at example dot com"—is a common technique to make harvesting email addresses more difficult. Though relatively easy to overcome—see, e.g., this Google search—it is still effective. It is somewhat inconvenient to users, who must examine the address and manually correct it.
  
  BULLET::::- Images : Using images to display part or all of an email address is a very effective harvesting countermeasure. The processing required to automatically extract text from images is not economically viable for spammers. It is very inconvenient for users, who type the address in manually.
   BULLET::::- Archive.is, an archive site which stores snapshots of web pages. It retrieves one page at a time, but unlike WebCite, it includes Web 2.0 sites such as Google Maps and Twitter.
  
  BULLET::::- Perma.cc, which is supported by the Harvard Law School together with a broad coalition of university libraries, takes a snapshot of a URL's content and returns a permanent link.
   BULLET::::- Locality of reference of user software has weakened. This is mostly attributed to the spread of object-oriented programming techniques that favor large numbers of small functions, use of sophisticated data structures like trees and hash tables that tend to result in chaotic memory reference patterns, and the advent of garbage collection that drastically changed memory access behavior of applications.
   Some services require additional time to set up forwarding, but others allow to create new addresses "on the fly" without registering them with the service in advance. However, this method allows storage and access of all emails from a single main account, although to manage forwarding for some services the user has to remember the password for each alias.
   Historically, Internet registries and Internet service providers allocated IP addresses in blocks of 256 (for Class C) or larger octet-based blocks for classes B and A. By definition, each block fell upon an octet boundary. The structure of the reverse DNS domain was based on this definition. However, with the introduction of Classless Inter-Domain Routing, IP addresses were allocated in much smaller blocks, and hence the original design of pointer records was impractical, since autonomy of administration of smaller blocks could not be granted. RFC 2317 devised a methodology to address this problem by using CNAME records.
   Expired domains that were formerly websites are also sought after for parked domain monetization. A domain that was used as a website and is allowed to expire will still maintain most of its prior inbound links. These types of domains usually attract their largest amount of visitor traffic initially after being claimed from the domain drop lists. As website operators and search engines begin to remove the former inbound links, the traffic to the parked domain will begin to decline. The process of re-registering expired names is known as "dropcatching" and various domain name registries have differing views on it.
   It is common for packets originating in private address spaces to be misrouted onto the Internet. Private networks often do not properly configure DNS services for addresses used internally and attempt reverse DNS lookups for these addresses, causing extra traffic to the Internet root nameservers. The AS112 project attempted to mitigate this load by providing special "blackhole" anycast nameservers for private address ranges which only return negative result codes ("not found") for these queries.
   BULLET::::1. The Memento client contacts the original resource to see if it will return information about a TimeGate (URI-G) in the Link header.
  
  BULLET::::2. The Memento client then uses the Accept-Datetime request header to submit the datetime desired by the user to the URI-G discovered in the previous step. Most resources on the web do not return a URI-G yet, so most Memento clients use a predefined list of TimeGates to accomplish this step. The TimeGate then returns a 302 redirection status code and a Location header to tell the client where to find the archived resource (URI-M).
   With URL redirects, incoming links to an outdated URL can be sent to the correct location. These links might be from other sites that have not realized that there is a change or from bookmarks/favorites that users have saved in their browsers. The same applies to search engines. They often have the older/outdated domain names and links in their database and will send search users to these old URLs. By using a "moved permanently" redirect to the new URL, visitors will still end up at the correct page. Also, in the next search engine pass, the search engine should detect and use the newer URL.
   When the ISP's DNS server receives a request for a name that is not recognized or is unavailable, some ISPs spoof the NX (null) response and instead return the IP address of a search or advertising page to the client. When the client is using a web browser, this will display a search page that contains possible suggestions on the proper address and a small explanation of the error. These search pages often contain advertising that is paid to the ISP.
   When changes are made to working memory, a WME list that previously matched no WMEs may now match newly asserted WMEs. In this case, the propagated WME list and all its extended copies need to be retracted from beta memories further down the network. The second approach described above is often used to support efficient mechanisms for removal of WME lists. When WME lists are removed, any corresponding production instances are de-activated and removed from the agenda.
   December 2012 saw the release of Million Short DNS, a series of domain name system servers programmed to exclude specific domains on the internet, redirecting them instead to an error page. Servers are available to exclude either the top million, hundred thousand, ten thousand, thousand, or hundred sites on the internet.
  
  In addition to redirecting the URLs of excluded domains, the servers will not load any content hosted on these domains. In some cases this results in missing images, typefaces, or JavaScript files, lending a radically different browsing experience even to sites that are not excluded.
  
  Section::::External links.
   BULLET::::- Dismissed addresses : When users change their email addresses, an administrator may set up forwarding from an old address to a current one in order to avoid losing messages.
  
  Section::::Server-based forwarding.:Forwarding versus remailing.
   BULLET::::- there are no examples in the subset, which happens when no example in the parent set was found to match a specific value of the selected attribute. An example could be the absence of a person among the population with age over 100 years. Then a leaf node is created and labelled with the most common class of the examples in the parent node's set.
   Of course, the issue of persistent identification predates the Internet. Over centuries, writers and scholars developed standards for citation of paper-based documents so that readers could reliably and efficiently find a source that a writer mentioned in a footnote or bibliography. After the Internet started to become an important source of information in the 1990s, the issue of citation standards became important in the online world as well. Studies have shown that within a few years of being cited, a significant percentage of web addresses go "dead," a process often called link rot. Using a persistent identifier can slow or stop this process.
   Lastly, certain types of attacks, such as DNS rebinding or server-side proxies, permit the host name check to be partly subverted, and make it possible for rogue web pages to directly interact with sites through addresses other than their "true", canonical origin. The impact of such attacks is limited to very specific scenarios, since the browser still believes that it is interacting with the attacker's site, and therefore does not disclose third-party cookies or other sensitive information to the attacker.
  
  Section::::Attacks in face of same-origin policy.
   Non-Internet email address
  
  A wide variety of non-Internet email address formats were used in early email systems before the ubiquity of the "john.smith@example.com" form used by Internet mail systems since the 1980s - and a few are still used in specialised contexts.
  
  Section::::Single system.
  
  The earliest email addresses simply had to identify one user from another on one homogenous system, often a single host minicomputer or mainframe. They were therefore typically the user's login name on that system.
  
  Examples of this style include:
  
  BULLET::::- ATS: "123"
  
  BULLET::::- CompuServe: "432654,6564"
  
  BULLET::::- MCI Mail: "373-1994"
  
  Section::::At a host.
   Address munging
  
  Address munging is the practice of disguising
  
  an e-mail address to prevent it from being automatically collected by unsolicited bulk e-mail providers. 
  
  Address munging is intended to disguise an e-mail address in a way that prevents computer software from seeing the real address, or even any address at all, but still allows a human reader to reconstruct the original and contact the author: an email address such as, "no-one@example.com", becomes "no-one at example dot com", for instance.
   Spammers may also use a form of dictionary attack in order to harvest email addresses, known as a directory harvest attack, where valid email addresses at a specific domain are found by guessing email address using common usernames in email addresses at that domain. For example, trying alan@example.com, alana@example.com, alanb@example.com, etc. and any that are accepted for delivery by the recipient email server, instead of rejected, are added to the list of theoretically valid email addresses for that domain.
   Some link spammers utilize expired domain crawler software or monitor DNS records for domains that will expire soon, then buy them when they expire and replace the pages with links to their pages. However, it is possible but not confirmed that Google resets the link data on expired domains. To maintain all previous Google ranking data for the domain, it is advisable that a buyer grabs the domain before it is "dropped". 
   Throughout the domain's history, a one-page placeholder site at the nic.so address claimed that "no .SO domains are available and we are not looking for any registrar partners." 
  
  However, the DNS servers for the domain name were badly configured, so the nic.so address was only available intermittently.
  
  Section::::History.:Relaunch.
   Another approach is to register one main and many auxiliary email addresses, which will forward all mail to the main address, "i.e.", the auxiliaries are used as aliases of the main address. The advantage of this approach is that the user can easily detect which auxiliary email is 'leaking' with spam and block or dispose it.
   In a workgroup of fewer than 32 computers, the list of network destinations in My Network Places is generated by one of the computers on the network, which has been designated "Browse Master" (sometimes called "master browser"). The Browse Master is elected by system strength. Sometimes when similar systems are connected to a network, there might be a conflict between Browse Masters with unexpected consequences, such as the disappearance of the list altogether or some system becoming unreachable. A system can be forced to decline Browse Master status by disabling the Browser service and rebooting. In a workgroup of 32 computers or more, the shortcuts are created automatically when the user opens a shared network resource, such as a printer or shared folder.
   Additionally, there is a Route 53-specific virtual record type called "Alias". Alias records act similarly to CNAME records but are resolved on the server side and appear to clients as an A record. They can be used to create transparent references to other AWS resources that only provide DNS names and not IP addresses, such as an Elastic Load Balancer or a CloudFront distribution. Because alias records are resolved on the server-side and return A records to clients they can be used in domain apex records in a similar way to a CNAME record, where CNAME records are disallowed for this use by RFC 2181
  