VeriSign Sued Over SiteFinder Service

dmehus writes "It was only a matter of time, the pundits said, and they were right. Popular Enterprises, LLC., an Orlando, Florida based cybersquatting so-called 'search services' company, has filed a lawsuit in Orlando federal court against VeriSign, Inc. over VeriSign's controversial SiteFinder 'service.' While PopularEnterprises has had a dodgy history of buying up thousands of expired domain names and redirecting them to its Netster.com commercial "search services" site, the lawsuit is most likely a good thing, as it provides one more avenue to pursue in getting VeriSign to terminate SiteFinder. According to the lawsuit, the company contends alleges antitrust violations, unfair competition and violations of the Deceptive and Unfair Trade Practices Act. It asks the court to order VeriSign to put a halt to the service. VeriSign spokesperson Brian O'Shaughnessy said the company has not yet seen the lawsuit and that it doesn't comment on pending litigation."

Comments

Arrrrrr!

[Anonymous Coward]

VeriSign be a bunch of land-lubbin' butt pirates, mateys!

Re:Arrrrrr!

[Anonymous Coward]

Aye, I do believe you be correct, me bucko.

Talk like a pirate day

The pool

[r_glen]

OK guys, who had 3-5 days??

Try this in I.E.

[Anonymous Coward]

http://www.";alert("fuckverisign");".com

don't u love these spokespeople

[hansoloaf]

VeriSign spokesperson Brian O'Shaughnessy said the company has not yet seen the lawsuit and that it doesn't comment on pending litigation."

They should just build an ASIMO robot in the mold of a spokesperson. There would be only 2 lines of code for the robot to speak out everytime they are contacted on a story: "The company has not seen the lawsuit." "No comment" Then we can skip the obligatory spokesperson quote in articles in the future as its' pretty much all they say nowdays.

Re:don't u love these spokespeople

[phauxfinnish]

Then we can skip the obligatory spokesperson quote in articles in the future as its' pretty much all they say nowdays.

Unless you are a SCO spokesperson, then the story would go a little like this:

VeriSign spokesperson Brian O'Shaughnessy said that the company has discovered that ALL internet addresses belong to them and that everyone else is incroaching on their intellectual property. They are currently selling licenses to use their internet addresses for $699 per subdomain. Once the lawsuit begins, the price of these licenses are set to double to $1398 per subdomain. VeriSign requests that all domains be redirected to the SiteFinder address.

Questions reguarding such details as evidence to these claims, Mr. O'Shaughnessy stated, "will be released during the discovery phase of the trial." Until that time, VeriSign suggests that every domain registrant purchase a license, "just in case".

I'm not surprised...

[Pan T. Hose]

Their new ad campaign with naked women went too far in my opinion. They were basically asking to be sued. Didn't they think about the children?

Re:Give them a break, they just want more hit

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm sure your dial up connection has their server at its knees.

Right...

[Anonymous Coward]

So if we're really lucky, just as the guilty verdict is being read, with the upper level management of both companies present...that asteroid that everyone said was going to destroy civilization twelve years from now, will crash in down on the courthouse, ionizing not only the leadership of both companies, but several ragged hordes of killer attack lawyers as well.

Then when the press questions the astronomers on how their orbital calculations could have been so wrong, the astronomers (being the clever guys they are) will say, "but are calculations were right!" and then erupt in maniacal laughter.

I for one welcome our new...[looks up at the sky]...never mind, I didn't start to say anything. Nope, nothing at all.

Re:Give them a break, they just want more hit

[Anonymous Coward]

Awh come on now, we can do better than that! Use the built-in distro-standard apache benchmark tool! ab -n1000 -c100 sitefinder.verisign.com/ That will send out 100 requests at once, 10 times. Might want to increase that number.... Anyway, its a good way to test your bandwidth...

Note to self

[curtlewis]

Companies to boycott:

SCO (need you ask?)
Verisign (screwed by em long before this)
SBC (for not blocking Verisign)
Microsoft (ya just gotta)
RIAA (You don't sue your customers. Solve the problem!)
Sun (for the abomination called Java)
Gray Davis (because he DOES suck)
Cruz Bustamante (Don't give him a CHANCE to suck)

Note to self:
Get more RAM for Notes to self

Funny Stuff

[NeoGeo64]

http://sitefinder.verisign.com/lpc?url=www.microso ft.com&host=www.microsoft.com

"We didn't find www.microsoft.com"
"There is no web site at this address."

Only in a perfect world...

Re:Pert Peeve

[Malcontent]

"though one of the great minor evils of the web"

A great minor evil. That's a new one on me.

Re:Most ISPs have blocked it

[Enigma Deadsouls]

the remaining ten or so I spent in shock with my jaw scraping the floor.

Thats part of Verisigns new "Shock and Jaw" Campaign.

Verisign should be forced to pay the ICANN $$$

[flyboy974]

Verisign, in essence, has registered every domain and is providing DNS services for those domains. They should be forced to pay the standard registration fee to ICANN for every domain which was served during this outrage.

If I were to make it so that every unique domain on the internet went to my server, I would have to pay a Google's worth of cash (well, maybe some pun intended. But, long live Google! The best search engine and popup blocked!).

Anybody up for making a wget script to fetch a bad host with a 32 bit integer on the end until the end of time? I'm a Software Architect but feel like playing script kiddie for a day. ;-)

Journalists should not write tech stories

[flakac]

From the article:

Typically, Internet users are shown a generic "404 -- cannot be found" page when a Web address does not exist.

Sooooo, if the web server can't be found, who's sending the HTTP 404 response (which incidentally means that a file on a server doesn't exist...)?

comparison

[Jucius Maximus]

The only thing I can say here is that Verisign seems to be in competiton with SCO for numerous titles:

- most hated company on the internet
- most stupid business moves
- most obvious 'shoot self in foot' maneuvre

I expect that slashdot would implode if SCO sued Verisign for this maneuvre. Do you cheer because one of them will lose? Or groan because one will win?

Re:comparison

[Elwood P Dowd]

I expect that slashdot would implode if SCO sued Verisign for this maneuvre. Do you cheer because one of them will lose? Or groan because one will win?

Cheer, because both of them would be wasting money on a lawsuit.

Cry, if that lawsuit provided precedent for either of their parasitic business models.

Re:comparison

[Reziac]

Experience bewilderment at the SCO-Verisign merger. ;)

Re:Owning a domain you don't use

[Amomynos Coward]

> GreatDomains used to have thousands of listings, and you'd see things like "Asked: $25,000. Bid: $20."

Aah those were the days. Some idiot for example paid me $1500 for a T0P10.COM domain...probably buyer didn't understand that the second O is a zero.

Re:Null space needs to remain null

[Elwood P Dowd]

Four feet and thirtythree inches of silence?

Damn, that'd deep.

script: a day at Verisign

[thomas_klopf]

Setting: Deep in the innards of Verisign's server rooms.. Characters: Mr. Barnacle: VP, Marketing, Verisign Mr. Patsy: some Admin for Versign Mr. Barnacle: "Yeah, so I was reading DNS For Dummies last night, and it said you can put this thingy called a wildcard in records.." Mr. Patsy: "Um, yeah, so?" Mr. Barnacle: "Couldn't we use this to redirect people to some other site?" Mr. Patsy: "Er, maybe...." Mr. Barnacle: "WOW.. Let's do that!" Mr. Patsy: "Ummm... I don't know..." Mr. Barnacle: "Do it!" Mr. Patsy: "Oh jeeez.. alright..."

Re:Owning a domain you don't use

[Anonymous Coward]

TH4T W45 M3 Y0U 1N53N5171V3 CL0D!

Official Verisign Response

[johnraphone]

Official Verisign Response

Good has come out of this for me.

[analog_line]

While I'm appalled at VeriSign's rank power grab, it's probably done me, personally, more good than harm Why you ask? Well, I took the time to get up to speed on BIND 9 and am running my office/home DNS on local machines, and uitilizing the code that blocks Verisign's hijacking attempt from affecting me.

Now I can charge my clients for setting up a DNS server on their local networks on any spare crap machine they have lying around, making their networks more resilient to ISP DNS outages and crap like this.

Now I have every excuse I might need to move all my clients name registrations to another registrar ASAP, and all the reason I need to not use VeriSign, or be plagued by their idiot customer service ever again!

Thank you Verisign, for teaching me how to laugh about love...again.

Re:Dear VeriSign, Thanks for the spam.

[Smallpond]

So do what I did:

To: abuse@verisign.com
From:
Dear DNS administrators,

The mail server I am administering is experiencing a problem with spam. I have
not getten check_rcpt rule checks in the .com TLD since 9/15. All domains are
now returning an A record, even though they are not registered domains. Please
correct this error in your servers.

Thank you,