VeriSign Changes DNS Servers: No ASCII Needed

An anonymous reader points to this story at The Register and this one (in French) at news.yahoo, writing "VeriSign has made changes to the root DNS so that they handle non-ascii names (for .com and .net). Furthemore, an erroneous lookup results in getting a VeriSign IP, not an error message." An excerpt: "The IAB [Internet Architecture Board] feels that the system VeriSign had deployed for .com and .net contains significant DNS protocol errors, risks the further development of secure DNS, and confuses the resolution mechanisms of the DNS with application-based search systems."

Comments

Re:Mixing layers

[Tailhook]

The real story, just like the IAB says, is that it's a hack, and it messes with the distinction between application and service.

The academics what to maintain their precious model and the grown-ups need to deal with real world demands. Same old problem, new medium.

When 32 bits was clearly too few to cope with many new Internet hosts the academics began to invent IPV6. Meanwhile, the grown-ups deployed NAT, classless subnets and RFC2317. Despite the extent of hackery, the sky fails to fall.

Attempting to "secure" the Internet (and push a certain agenda) the academics invent IPSec. The grown-ups, wishing to obey and comply, discover that IPSec provides zero support for NAT and must invent NAT-T. NAT-T is also an ugly hack. Yet the sky, somehow, remains aloft.

The academics are perpetually behind the curve and chock full of agenda. The grown-ups operate on short time lines and small profit margins. If academia wishes to retain control of the destiny of the Internet, it must accelerate the process an order of magnitude. Prior to this you are to expect to witness further hackery from the likes of Verisign et al.

The world wants fully internationalized DNS. The world will not wait another 5-10 years for IETF to bless a solution. The world does not care about the "distinction between application and service". Get over yourselves and deal with it.

In the end, the world will get what it wants. The grown-ups will see to it that the sky remains safely above us. The structure of the Internet will be the result of the first solutions that appear (as opposed to the "best",) regardless of whether they come from Verisign, Microsoft or the IETF.

BTW, perpare to start working on your resolvers. The ones you're using are now obsolete.