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

Pert Peeve

[QuantumSpritz]

Cybersquatting, though one of the great minor evils of the web, is damned hard to stop. I can't think of any way to regulate/legislate it without messing up the domain registration and transfer process for everyone else - though it would be nice to be able to buy domains BACK from these companies - I would imagine quie a few choice domains are in their hands. Nice to see a lawsuit taking on Verisign over this - even if it is a cybersquatter. I wonder if there's an intelligent way to reserve domain names for individuals and organizations which already have use for the name - maybe a form of 'prior branding' only better implemented...

another annoying 'feature' of sitefinder

[ApheX]

My browsers - Firebird and IE both keep history for a few days. It used to be that when i accidentally typed something in and the domain could not be found that it wouldn't be in my history since it wouldn't resolve. Now - thanks to URL resolving my history is gradually starting to fill full of crap. So when im in a hurry and select something out of my history i sometimes end up getting a sitefinder page instead of what I was looking for. ARRRGH.

Verisign Sucks. They always have and always will.

Electronic Communication Privacy Act

[Anonymous Coward]

The Electronic Communication Privacy Act (ECPA) provides that "any person who intentionally intercepts, endeavors to intercept, or procures any other person to intercept or endeavor to intercept, any wire, oral, or electronic communication; . . .shall be punished as provided in subsection (4) or shall be subject to suit as provided in subsection (5).

wherein, "intercept" means the aural or other acquisition of the contents of any wire, electronic, or oral communication through the use of any electronic, mechanical, or other device;

The ECPA also provides that "In a civil action under this section, appropriate relief includes--(1) such preliminary and other equitable or declaratory relief as may be appropriate;(2) damages under subsection (c); and (3) a reasonable attorney's fee and other litigation costs reasonably incurred.

Damages.--The court may assess as damages in a civil action under this section the sum of the actual damages suffered by the plaintiff and any profits made by the violator as a result of the violation, but in no case shall a person entitled to recover receive less than the sum of $1,000.

Seems like a good case can be that emails to mistyped addresses are being intercepted by Verisign. Certainly, the emails where not intended to be sent to Verisign, and they appear to be collecting some information from the email (the from address).

Verisign delusional

[SnowWolf2003]

In this article on on CNET O'Shaughnessy said "the service has been embraced by end users. "We've seen nothing but very positive results from the Internet community," he said. "Usage is extraordinary. Both individual users and enterprises are giving very positive feedback."

So they are attributing a slashdotting, and a lot of media interest to people being positive about the service. I haven't seen one article, comment or anything that was even remotely positive. What are these guys on?

He also claims they are fully compliant with every RFC. I don't see how this is possible, unless they have found some loophole.

Re:"Unfair advantage"?

[bernywork]

This actually causes LARGE problems for people operating over VPN connections.

What normally happens is this:

People do a request for a site, e.g. intranet.internal.foo.org.

The external DNS servers fail in that they don't come back with an answer, and then the client continues through its list of DNS servers until it gets to the internal servers where it gets an answer.

What's happening now is that they ARE getting a good answer from the external servers, and the client is trying to connect to the 64.x.x.x address of Sitesearch. Now in most organisations the client isn't able to connect to that box (because its firewalled or whatever else), so it isn't a problem for VeriSign, however, it is a problem for the organisation, as the clients who are trying to work are getting given IP addresses for internal servers that are incorrect.

I have had to change dial up settings on a few clients and change others over to using static IPs at the moment until a better solution comes around. Or even better till VeriSign stop doing this.

Berny

You need to reject their terms of use!

[royles]

I have simply sent them an email and more importantly a 'letter' that informs Verisign that I do not accept their terms of service and that I am seeking their advice on how to stop making use of their software, considering I do not meet their terms of service.

I have informed them that if they cannot stop providing me with this service, (for which I do not accept their terms, and by which I cannot be bound) then they will have to contact me to negotiate a new set of terms to which I do agree.

I would imagine that if every user that is upset by this new 'service' was to do the same then Verisign would have to do 'something' about it.