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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."
VeriSign be a bunch of land-lubbin' butt pirates, mateys!
Anti-trust was one of the very few tactics I didn't hear discussed as possible ways to stop Verisign.
Arguing that they get for free what other companies must pay for is probably one of the easier arguments for win, since it proves itself nearly by definition.
I applaud the jackass who pays to abuse typos. At least they've finally proven their worth.
--
Use Vobbo for Video Blogs
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...
OK guys, who had 3-5 days??
I guess people will figure that the end justifies the means, but the argument still seems a little distasteful.
The bold print giveth, and the fine print taketh away
*Confirmed*: Adelphia has blocked VeriSign's new "service."
Please reply to this and list names of fellow anti-VeriSign ISPs if your ISP has blocked this new "feature" as well.
Thanks! I will enjoy analyzing this data.
Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate. Ex-O'Reilly/MIT employee, now a full-time Google employee.
At the rate things are going, in a couple weeks, no one will be able to get to their search engine site at all, whether they want to or not.
Someone probably deserves recompensation for the hassle, but it's looking like the Internet has proven resilient to even this "high level" attack.
Bush: He's Liberal in all the wrong ways.
- buying up random names, and hoping someone would buy it from you (aka. domain speculation)
- buying up specific company names, and charging them obnoxious amounts if they want it (which would end up in court, etc)
In this case, Verisign didn't pay for anything-- they're claiming everything that hasn't been bought. Not only that, but if someone had a domain, but didn't have a host in the domain, they're claiming that as theirs, too.[Not that I'm surprised...the first sign that things like this were going to happen was when IE started replacing webserver error messages with their own if they decided your error message wasn't big enough, and replacing 'server not found' with links to their search engine]
So well, your 40 acres comparison falls through as it's more the equivalent of someone saying 'all this is mine until someone else buys it' and then, after you buy your plot, they still claim the area that you haven't built on yet, even though you have the deed to it.
Build it, and they will come^Hplain.
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.
-
aphex
I Steal Music!
How is it different from the pioneers getting 40 acres and a mule?
First, a history lesson. '40 Acres and a Mule' wasn't a pioneer issue. What it is true that during the western rushes, various federal lands were put up for auction or claim by pioneers. The lands were not, however, specified to be 40 acres, but varied in size based on the territory and the specific land grant. For that matter, according to one of my HS Social Studies teachers (a dozen years ago), there were still federal lands for claim in parts of Alaska. That teacher was known to embellish the truth, so I won't put any varacity statement with that.
'40 acres and a mule' were reparations for slaves in the south. They were instituted by a Northern (Union) general, during the aftermath of the civil war, and were later reveresed by an presidential executive order.
So, in short, your parellel falls a little short. If the ICANN were to pass a ruling granting johnny-come-latelies names from vast corporate pools, that would be comprable.
So, what's wrong with cybersquatting: Well, with the federal land grants, if you occupied and developed the federal lands for a specified period of time, they became yours. You could sell or otherwise use them as you wished. Here, cybersqquatters either are taking a developed item (debatably property) and using its good will and value for an interest contrary to the orginal owners. Which would be a violation of the land grants, so thats one point where your analogy fails.
The other type of cybersquatter (who speculates on names or misspellings) is also abusing the good will of the originator, but may be a valid comparison. It is, however, annoying, to get redirected away from what you wanted because of a typo, and from the other side, a squatter who is taking an otherwise useful resource and making it near-useless is neither providing a valid service or generating good will.
At what cost? Routers are working harder, code has been introduced into core servers that has no technical reason to exist, and an IP address, or possibly a sizeable range of IP addresses are now blacklisted worldwide. Those IPs won't be usable for anything anymore, or at least until we see widespread adoption of IPv6. *cough*
What the Internet doesn't need is to become even less of an end-to-end transport, less reliable. And we did it to ourselves.
Feh.
Yes, it's semi-sleazy, but they don't cybersquat.
Timeline:
1997 or so: I registered tylereaves.com, mainly for use in e-mail
2000: I let the domain lapse, not really using it, and tired of paying $40 a year or so for it (Hey, registering was expensive in '97!)
200?: Netster becomes the owner of tylereaves.com
2003: I nicely ask for it back.
2003: I get my domain back. They didn't even charge me the trasnfer fees.
TODO: Something witty here...
I sent an email to various VeriSign addresses about their abuse. Somehow one of them got routed to a Network Solutions drone.
The drone informed me in a form letter that VeriSign's practices were "well within the guidelines" established by the document Domain Name System Wildcards in Top-Level Domain Zones.
After deconstructing this, we are left with: VeriSign is within the guidelines of the document VeriSign wrote on the matter.
Uhm...
This is a good time to look at Bob Frankston's dotDNS proposal for a layer of reliable but meaningless domain names. dotDNS lookups can be made self-verifiable using public-key signatures, but without the costly chain of trust required by DNSSEC methods. The validity of a dotDNS binding can be verified easily by the querier, without relying at all on the server that provided the putative binding.
dotDNS does not solve the whole problem, since any layer that translates from humanly meaningful names to dotDNS names is still vulnerable to hijacking. But the reliable and verifiable name bindings in dotDNS will make it *much* easier to switch name-resolution services when we are dissatisfied with their policies.
dotDNS is a cheap and immediately deployable positive step toward fixing the DNS mess, requiring no approval by any central agency. It's time for a visionary sponsor to step forward and just do it.
Mike O'Donnell http://people.cs.uchicago.edu/~odonnell/
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?
Sincerely,
Pan Tarhei Hosé, PhD.
"Homo sum et cogito ergo odi profanum vulgus et libido."
But why? There's no real market in domain names any more. Verisign tried to make one. GreatDomains used to have thousands of listings, and you'd see things like "Asked: $25,000. Bid: $20." Now Verisign only has "premium domains" on GreatDomains, ones like "record.com". There are only 66 domains for sale, and few sales.
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).
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.
But at the same time, if you take a step back, the rapid mobillization of the response to this is VERY impressive, and the rate at which the Internet is reconfiguring itself to get rid of the trouble is quite amazing.
Remember, three days ago, people were moaning about how this would be a disaster, DNS would be broken, spam filters would be rendered impotent, etc etc.
I'm just saying that, objectively, if you look at this sort of like a body repelling a bacterial attack, the rate at which it's been countered is quite amazing, and shows how well the Internet is fundamentally put together.
Bush: He's Liberal in all the wrong ways.
Homesteading required that the homesteader develop and improve the property in order to receive title. You had to actually live on the land, and farm it, and build a house with a door and window, and after you had proved the land, you would receive title.
Cybersquatters do no such thing. There's a difference between registering coffee.com to build a coffee site and registering www.coffee.com to resell it later. Cybersquatters are more akin to ticket scalpers than to homesteaders.
Where have you been? Have you noticed the fact that it's important to be able to tell when a site doesn't exist? That this crap means typos can cripple most e-mail servers? That it invalidates a good section of the RFCs the Internet itself was based on???
Wake up. If you want to find a site, you use Google. If you want to go to a non-existant one, you should damn well be told there's nothing there.
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.
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...
First off, the idea that Verisign can appropriate unregistered domains represents a huge conflict of interest with its management of the TLDs. Nobody should be able to reassign IPs for non-registered domains. This undermines the whole system, which has facilities to address this situation.
The fact that ICANN didn't block this move is further evidence than this organization is totally useless and political.
Along the same vein, I disagree with MS's misleading implementation of the IP-not-found error page to redirect users to their proprietary search engine.
The Internet community should rally against any entity that seeks to appropriate undefined address space for their own gain.
If Verisign is allowed to do this, what we're likely to see is each major ISP and browser manufacturer follow suit and hijack undefined space to promote their own systems.
Imagine if you dialed a wrong number on the telephone and you got an advertisement for the phone company. What if local broadcasters bombarded all the unused frequency spectrum with their own promotions.
This has less to do with Verisign than it does to protect the sanctity of null space.
It makes me wonder if someone has a patent on silence yet?
Has anyone else noticed this? It returns a sitefinder page immediately for blahblahsucks.com, but nada for verisignsucks.com.
I truly thank VeriSign's lovely spam service.
.com domain or .net domain is returning an SOA record and none of these messages are being blocked.
Someone a few months ago mentioned to me that Sendmail has a feature where, upon receiving mail, it will check the domain of the sender. If the domain does not exist, it has a forged From: header and is obviously spam.
Thanks to Verisign's efforts to piss me off, every DNS query on a nonexistant
Since this "service" has been implemented, I've gone from 7-8 spams a day to 30-35.
Thanks a lot, assholes.
Never thought it'd happen, but I'm rooting for the squatter... if there's a group worse than spammers and domain squatters, it's Verisign. Just on a whim, I typed in a non-existent domain name, and sure enough, found myself on their page. Take a look at the "Terms of Use". Sections 2 and 14 are really telling:
2. You may have accessed the VeriSign Service(s) by initiating a query to our DNS resolution service for a nonexistent domain name.
14. By using the service(s) provided by VeriSign under these Terms of Use, you acknowledge that you have read and agree to be bound by all terms and conditions here in and documents incorporated by reference.
I'm not sure how the came up with the fact that I, the end user, made a query to their DNS server. In fact, I did not. My ISP may be using their services, but I personally have no legal relationship with Verisign whatsoever. My ISP may be using their services, but that in no way establishes a relationship between myself and Verisign. IMO, unless you're querying Verisign directly, their terms of use cannot possibly apply -- which means that they apply to almost noone. I would challenge them to show any log that shows my IP address accessing their service. If they can't, then I did not in fact access their service.
And what's worse is the implication that I can bound by "Terms of Use" that I have never seen, based on the assumption that I made the query, when in fact the query mas made to a DNS server at my ISP (and again, I don't really care how my ISP handles that request as long as it sends me the requested info.
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...)?
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?
When Verisign was given the authority to manage DNS for these TLDs, they were given this responsibility with the public trust.. The public trusted them NOT to do things exactly like this. You should do DNS, and that's it - nothing more, nothing less. In return, Verisign was given a source of income. I think that if Verisign continues in this way, it may be time to take back this thing entrusted to them. This has become yet another disaster in "privatization", and we should maybe consider moving this service back to the "public" sector (as much as it can be...).
One comment I've seen noted about the whole SiteFinder thing is that Verisign now resolves domains which are not available for registration, so it's possible they're profiting from something that they're not allowing others to purchase.
... you can't buy single character gTLDs)
(Try www.a.com, www.b.com, etc
You are missing the whole reason everyone is so upset. Verisign DOESN'T HAVE the rights. They DO NOT OWN the .com or .net
domains. They have entered an agreement
with ICANN where they are the designated
people who ADMINISTER the domains.
They are being financially compensated to
provide a service related to .com and .net;
this does not mean they own them!!
Think about this distinction. If you'd like an analogy, think of mutual funds. Mutual funds are owned by shareholders; however, they pay a fund administrator to manage them. The administrator has the power to make all kinds of changes, but this does NOT mean he owns the mutual fund! If the administrator decided he was going to manipulate the direction of the mutual fund to maximize his own personal income instead of the fund's income, he'd be taken down faster than you can say "Martha Stewart".
2. NATURE OF THE VERISIGN SERVICES.
You may have accessed the VeriSign Service(s) by initiating a query to our DNS resolution service for a nonexistent domain name. We are unable to resolve such queries through the DNS resolution service.
They are, and they do. They resolve such queries to 64.94.110.11.
Stop worrying about the risks of nuclear power and start worrying about the risks of not using nuclear power.
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.
Official Verisign Response
Free Instant Site Inclusion
you can file a complaint about Verisign to ICANN by using their:
chongo (was here)