Why pinging "drive" gets replies from 127.0.53.53?

Solution 1:

What's happening is a name collision.

127.0.53.53 is a special IPv4 address that will appear in system logs alerting system administrators that there is potential name collision issue, enabling a quick diagnosis and remediation. The "53" is used as a mnemonic to indicate a DNS-related problem owing to the use of network port 53 for the DNS service.

(source: ICANN)

But what does it mean? Well, turns out over the last years the number of TLDs (top-level domains) has been expanding. Apart from the original .com, .org, .net, .gov and the like, there's an ever-growing list of generic TLDs. As of the writing of this, there's currently more than a thousand gTLDs.

Guess what are some examples of gTLDs? Words such as "drive", "google", "microsoft", "hotmail", "youtube" and "android". So, when you enter those words on the address bar on Firefox, instead of using it to perform a search on the default search engine, it will first check if it resolves as a domain name.

Thanks to our friends at ICANN, it does resolve to 127.0.53.53. Which means localhost. Your browser is trying to connect to the port 80 of your own computer and, unless you have a web server running, you will see a connection error message.

(obs: this doesn't seem to affect all browsers -- at least, I was able to test the latest version of Chrome for Android and it isn't affected by this issue)