Right. I should have been more clear in my statement. I meant that, since Apple clearly doesn't control the domain, I find it hard to believe that they would use it intentionally.
I think you're being overly generous in ascribing the intentions of an entire company on this.
Most likely the real reason behind this is that some programmer in their employ who didn't know better hammered in "bogusapple.com" as the first thing he could come up with, committed it since it worked for him, and now a lot of people are trying to ascribe more complex intentions to Apple than that.
Could be. I don't know much about the internal development practices at Apple. One has to assume they have strict development and testing guidelines, but you're right - it is possible that some programmer hammered this in, and the change slipped past the code review and testing phases.
I don't know exactly when it started, but I suspect Apple has used this domain for at least a few days now. Whether that's as far back as Mountain Lion's release, or as recently as iTunes 10.7.
Considering some of our active theories, it may have only started becoming used as a result of that Terms & Conditions snafu that occurred the other day.
Either way, the problem predates my registration of the domain, which was around 13 hours ago now. I registered bogusapple.com as a result of seeing use of the domain.
I was at work and the network had blocked it putting it in the "placeholders" category. Note to self: hacker news may be more reputable than the large government agency's IT management.