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ICANN, IAB Ask VeriSign to Suspend SiteFinder
dmehus writes "ICANN issued an advisory late today concerning VeriSign's controversial SiteFinder service. The advisory requests that VeriSign voluntarily suspend SiteFinder until various independent and objective reviews, which are now underway, have been completed. Interested parties should see the advisory for more details." I think most people here can agree it was a bad idea, although it's not generating revenue for most of us either. ICANN isn't alone here either. Nuclear Elephant writes "The Internet Architecture Board issued this response to an ICANN inquiry about Verisign's SiteFinder service."
VeriSign's wildcard creates a registry-synthesized address record in response to lookups of domains that are not otherwise present in the zone (including restricted names, unregistered names, and registered but inactive names). The VeriSign wildcard redirects traffic that would otherwise have resulted in a "no domain" response to a VeriSign-operated website with search results and links to paid advertisements.
Why should VeriSign get the money ?
...in the meetings in which Verisign decided to implement SiteFinder.
Do you think they innocently believed they had found a valid loophole for commercial exploitation a legitimate feature of the Internet protocols?
Or did they say something like this? "Well, OK, so it does violate DNS specifications. People will scream. Let them scream. Nobody can touch us. The IETF has only moral authority. And ICANN and the U. S. Department of Commerce are never going to interfere seriously with any big, successful Internet company. So a few technies get angry, big deal."
Ask? How about demand. Verisign screwed up when they thought up this scheme. They have abused their position and should be stripped of it.
I think the real solution is this: If Verisign wants to continue this practice then Verisign should have to pay to register each mis-typed domain. After all, the end effect of Verisign's Sitefinder is to dynamically create a domain if it isn't already registered. Making Verisign pay to register each of these mis-typed domains would most likely halt their practice. In my opinion, Verisign is now "domain squatting" on any domain that isn't registered.
Forgive me if I'm being idiotic about this, but relatively recently, the .museum TLD went live. It's just like any other TLD except that domains that don't exist diect you to a page saying the domain doesn't exist and with a couple of links. It's not very different than Verisign's SIteFinder, but there's little to no outcry over this. I'm curious because a lot of the objections about SiteFinder should also be true about the .museum TLD. What's different here?
In common with the majority of internet protocols, DNS is not a best-guess system, it is a technically accurate way of transferring information, with correct failover mechanisms. From the article:
As a lookup system, the DNS is designed to provide authoritative answers to queries.
And later...
The DNS is not a search service, and presenting speculative mappings based on HTTP inputs is not the service that the registry is expected to provide.
And later still...
To restore the data integrity and predictability of the DNS infrastructure, the IAB believes it would be best to return the .com and .net TLD servers to the behavior specified by the DNS protocols.
That seems to wrap it up really. I doubt any further studies will find differently, unless Verisign follows the apparently accepted way of paying for a biassed study......
Simple shoot marketing.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
Actually, if you read that article you will find that it is dated January 25 and is a response to another Verisign screwup. That one was similar to the present one, but had specifically to do with "internationalized" domain names -- DNS records for strings with characters above ASCII position 127.
Historians find it important to check the dates of events and documents, so they can know which ones could possibly be responses to which other situations. For instance, an American comedian telling anti-French racial jokes in August 2001 could not possibly be responding to the French objection to Bush's war. Similarly, a document released January 25 2003 cannot be a response to a situation that arises the following September. Time just doesn't work that way.
Anyone else notice the lack of advanced notice that verisign gave ... well the world. I just can't immagine that they thought it through at all. If they wanted to do it you would think that they would have notified ICANN ahead of time or put up some sort of notice
We don't need no stinking sig!
So I guess Verisign interpreted that as "we better wildcard everything then."
No sig, sorry.
We won't have any of this "advertising" on the Internet. The Internet is surely doomed if we allow it.
"If you want to improve, be content to be thought foolish and stupid." - Epictetus
Where is democracy? oh...we don't live in one. We live in corporate dictatorship.
The url linked to the IAB comments are talking about the Internationalization of the root DNS servers, they are not talking about the "new" implementation of the sitefinder re-direction taking place.
Please note that the dates on those messages are from January 25, 2003.
Nothing new about those at all. Please check the url's submitted before posting inaccurate information.
Jib
Get the latest version of BIND to block that Verisign junk. go here
Now all it needs is support for the Evil-Bit in TCP/IP
at last i can surf to all those hate pages and give a big shit on those idiots in this world
todays link is:
http://www.fuckthemverisignbastardz.com
muahahahaha
Because for now, All our inexistant bases are belong to them.
instead of the verisign sitelooker page, I suggest that BIND (the software that runs 60% of the DNS) should be enhanced in several ways: The most important one, IMHO, is to compute a list of close matches and present these choices to the user. They may use the Soundex algorithm or some other tricks to see if characters are transposed, if one characters is wrong, if one is missing, etc. If well implemented, this would solve 60% of the problem. The remaining 40% is due to the fact that people sometimes doesn't actually mistype a known address... they type a dead wrong address, such as "amazonbookstore.com" instead of "amazon.com". In this case, BIND should split up the phrase into separate word (in this case "amazon book store" and redirect to a search engine with those words as parameters. The big question in this case is: which search engine? I think that one should be able to choose, in one way or another. If not, Google would be my choice ;-)
This has been happening for months at least, similar to what verisign do with .net and .com but wider ranging:
$ ping anything.zzzzz
PING ds1.domainspa.com (67.96.63.112) 56(84) bytes of data.
What the hell is that? It doesn't do it on every isp I've tried, but more than one. It can be any invalid tld or even a valid tld with a non-existent domain or hostname.
After the world has accepted the site finder, they will probably rent the wildcard to MSN. I'm sure that would be worth a lot of money.
The difference is that virtually no one uses the .museum TLD. There have been complaints about the wildcards used for .cc, .nu and other TLDs. But it's only when they start playing games with .com and .net that people notice, because this affects everyone.
Verisign should patent this.
Then if ICANN wants to run a similar service, or award it to someone else in exchange for payments, Verisign can take all the money in licensing fees.
I mean, why not pimp this out all the way. It's not like ICANN wouldn't take the idea and exploit it for fees now that Verisign has suggested it. It's not like ICANN is accountable to anyone, and those fees would allow them to fly private jets to private islands in the pacific to have their meetings. I'll bet they wouldn't even have to show anyone their books.
They could even put spyware in the pages that come back from non-existent domains. Let's get Gator involved with this. There's a sleazy buck to be made, so you gotta have Gator involved.
It's obvious to everyone who thinks about it that the real problem with the net is that there isn't enough advertising.
What's wrong with this redirection ?
They only redirect when the domainname is misspelled. You would get an error in this case anyways.
And I doubt that anyone could confuse this sitefinder with the page he searched for.
I think all this fuss about sitefinder is just negative propaganda generated by some competitors of VS aiming for VS's market share.
Owner of a Mensa membership card.
The url pointing to an IAB response in the story posted actually is about an other issue that happened somewhere in January. It was in response to Verisign's proposed wildcarding of only domains that contained non-ASCII characters, not all domains.
s -w ildcards.html
However, the IAB has issued a response to the current issue at the following URL.
http://www.iab.org/documents/docs/2003-09-20-dn
Please update the link in the story, thanks.
1) A lot of spam detection relies on DNS lookups of the from line.
2) Many spam filters are broken by the fact that now all DNS lookups return valid answers.
3) Noticed any increase in spam lately? I have.
$ sudo pfctl -sn | grep 64
rdr on tun0 inet proto tcp from any to 64.94.110.11 -> 127.0.0.1
I'm glad the IAB took that position. Hopefully Verisign will do the right thing....but, given their history, they probably won't.
We started a petition on Tuesday, and it got more than 16,000 signatures, before the site apparently got Slashdotted or something. We had to move it to a new server, with backups of the first 10K signatures. The new link is:
Stop Verisign DNS Abuse Petition
We also made announcements here and here, including having sent a hardcopy of the first 10,000 signatures to ICANN via FedEx. Thanks for all the support!
The response in the orignal article links to something old. Here is the IAB's offical reponse. The bottom has a whole section on "Principles, Conclusions, and Recommendations" Good reading http://www.iab.org/documents/docs/2003-09-20-dns-w ildcards.html
except, this type of thing is not the responsibility of the DNS.
The fact that we tend to use DNS as an index of everything, and that humans can't get over "Www." is OUR problem, not a problem with DNS. DNS is a precise lookup service... we'd just like it to function as it always has, thanks.
DNS wasn't put here to look up websites, it's far more fundamental than that.. and if people are too lazy to learn how to use a web browser right.. tough cookies for them. We should not be mangling DNS in order to do it.
DNS is about a LOT more than just you looking up a web address, and to break it now is absurd.
If you want a feature like you suggest, you build it at the application level, into the web browser... you don't mess with the fundamental protocols involved.
The messages referenced in the article are from January and concern a different (equally stupid) Verisign proposal. The IAB's comments on Verisign's current actions can be found here.
Every time I send a message with a typo in the domain name, my message goes straight to Verisign's email servers. Though they are kind enough to send a bounce back to me, in the meantime they have the ability to
Shouldn't this be the main concern?
Mod Parent Up
Your right
If you look at TLD Sponsorship contracts on the ICANN site you'll see that some of the things a TLD Sponsors must do are...
Produce an accurate count of domains.
Pay a per-domain fee to ICANN.
Follow the money baby
Indeed. This is not new. But there are differences:
.museum gTLD was a new gTLD. If you implement a wildcard from the start of a gTLD, that is something the community can take into account when developing systems around it. (this does not mean I agree with doing so).
.tk and .nu doing the same. There is however a fundamental difference between a gTLD and a ccTLD. A gTLD is operated (or at least should be) under control of the community and should be more strict in following the RFC's. A ccTLD is operated by a country or representatives of a country. If Tokelau and Nieu wish to break the RFC's, it's their problem. It is the responsability of their government to correctly operate the ccTLD and if they fail to do so, to bad for them as the world will eventually turn it's back on them.
The
Some people also mention some ccTLD's like
I'm not a complete idiot... Some parts are missing.
The outrage about Verisign's move has nothing to do with whether or not they're making money on it and everything to do with breaking a system people rely on. It does add oil to the fire that they have commercial motives for doing so, but the point is that DNS is expected to behave a certain way and they have arbitarily changed it without asking anyone (IETF, ICANN, etc). And this broke a lot of systems that relied on DNS's expected behaviour.
And of course there's the principle that as guardians of a tld (and effectively a monopoly), they should not abuse their position -- not that they haven't proven it already that they are simply incapable of doing so. ICANN should really have a "three strikes and you're out" system to deal with practices like this.
I signed up for a
The IAB was far more charitable with its reply than I would have been. This wildcarding was a patently scummy thing for Verisign to do--abuse of a trust granted to them for financial gain.
You are right, this decision must apply unilaterally.
.museum so that their DNS always resolves and the spam gets through?
1) We need to make sure that our argument against Verisign isn't the CONTENT of the Verisign page - if so, they will just remove the ads or something. The problem here is that it breaks the DNS specification (see the IAB response for why).
2) What happens when all the spammers start using
http://any-site-called-google.com/
Something that seems to be mildly overlooked here, in my opinion, is that this has the power to give VeriSign "ownership" of the web in many users' minds.
If my mom tries to go to http://www.gooodhousekeeping.com and gets a VeriSign message and a search box, well it doesn't take much of that before she starts thinking that VeriSign == The WWW, because VeriSign is who always tells her what she typed wrong and where she should be going.
What this comes down to is a company trying to "brand" the web. In many ways, Google has been successful at this, but they have actually played fair and achieved what they have on the basis of merit. VeriSign is ABUSING their power to brand the web as their own.
It should be patently obvious by now that VeriSign 's modus operandi is one of deceit and trickery. Evidence the fake "renewal" cards they have sent out in the past to "slam" DNS registrants much like the shady phone companies have tried to do with your long-distance.
Damn, it's ridiculous that people even try to get away with this sort of crap these days...will someone with the power to please stop this?
-JT
Well, one thing interesting I discovered - Earthlink appears to have patched their DNS servers so they return NXDOMAIN now instead of sitefinder. Cheers to a big ISP taking charge :)
Brielle
This does not appear to be "oops", this appears to be a knowing, willful abuse of trust.
At the very least, I think it would be appropriate for the Dept. of Commerce to issue a very hefty fine against Verisign. If a fine is not feasable, then a lawsuit is in order.
This is not "boys will be boys." If there's no penalty for a knowing, willful abuse of trust, we're going to have to deal with a lot more abuse in the future.
A week ago I saw Verisign as a highly respectable registry and provider of all sorts of security products and verification. Then these recent events occur and their reputation in my mind has gone terribly sour.
Maybe it's just the bias I've learned from the Slashdot community, but they now just seem so imcompetent; maladroit? So much for the whole "trust" thing. I haven't given them my business in the past, but now it's looking significantly less likely. (Although they probably end up with some financial gain regardless of where I purchase domain names, correct?)
Now they just join the list of organisations that just leave a bad taste: SCO, RIAA, and now... VeriSign! (I'm sure there's many more.)
Do you suppose that this means Verisign may be removed from its post of managing .com and .net DNS?
--<Mike>--
Assuming you're young enough to buy into a theory calling government services "free."
There's an interesting op-ed piecein El Reg about the way that ICANN is being reconstructed. (Brits like myself would immediately recognise what's being described as a Quango[*].) The point is, ICANN's new directors are approaching this as a political and diplomatic problem - not surprising as this is what they are familiar with. Their public statement that they have asked Verisign to "voluntarily suspend the service until the various reviews now underway are completed" is - how to put it? - the sort of advice that Verisign would be reckless to ignore.
(BTW, I imagine that the digital certificate side of Verisign is mad as hell about the actions of the cowboys in the name-service unit. Think about it for a moment: would you trust a certificate of identity that was issued by a company that has changed the behaviour of the nameservers it runs under contract for the most important top-level domain on the internet, so that they return invalid results, in the hope of making a few quick bucks?)
* Quango: acronym for Quasi-Autonomous Non-Government Organisation. In case it's not obvious, the term was invented with extreme ironical intent.
Verisign collects a fee for every domain that is registered in the .com and .net space by anyone other than Verisign. I believe ICANN also gets a small fee.
Therefore, Verisign should pay a fee to ICANN and to all the other registrars (the other registrars could split the money with their customers) for all the domains they are now servicing.
If Verisign paid ICANN and the other Registrars and all of us that have registered domains a fee for all the possible combinations of domains that Verisign is now answering requests for, I think most wouldn't mind letting them keep the SiteFinder service.
I believe you want the 2003-09-20 IAB response to Verisign (written 2003-09-19). It's reasonably thorough in listing all the problems caused by wildcards.
Am I the only one who would rather have VeriSign control this spillover page than Microsoft? For 90% of the world, Microsoft controls it now, right?
It's either a money-grubbing domain name registrar that could be ousted if need be or a convicted monopolist that can't.* I'll take the former, thank you.
Erik
*At least not until people stop buying Windows. But that's a few years out yet.
09/19/2003 VeriSign said Thursday that it would respond to technical complaints over its recent move to redirect Internet users who enter nonexistent or misspelled domain names to its Web site, but it said it would not pull the plug on the service. Criticism has been growing over the company's surprise decision to take control of unassigned .com and .net domain names, which has confused antispam utilities and drawn angry denunciations of the company's business practices from frustrated network administrators.
"There is a lot of fiction about the actual technology and the service," VeriSign spokesman Brian O'Shaughnessy said. "What we are doing is trying to determine fact and fiction and we're doing so by reaching out to the technology community and helping them to understand exactly what is fact and fiction."
VeriSign would not disclose what changes it might make to address technical complaints about its SiteFinder service.
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."
VeriSign's new policy is intended to generate more advertising revenue from additional visitors to its network of Web sites. But the change has had the side effect of rewiring a portion of the Internet that software designers always had expected to behave a certain way. That can snarl anti-spam mechanisms that check to see if the sender's domain exists, complicate the analysis of network problems and possibly even pollute search engine results. Because VeriSign will become a central destination for mistyped e-mail and Web traffic, its move also raises serious privacy questions.
In response, the Internet's technical community has developed a patch to BIND, the workhorse utility that implements the Domain Name System protocols. It's designed to counteract VeriSign's change by blocking traffic to its SiteFinder site and returning the same "domain not found" error message as before.
When asked why VeriSign did not inform the Internet's technical organisations of the change in advance, O'Shaughnessy replied: "There's not much I can add except to say that our testing and the resources we've applied toward this have been in accordance with prevailing industry standards for new products and services."
Neither the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN), which in principle oversees VeriSign's actions as a domain name registrar, nor the U.S. Department of Commerce, which has a contract with VeriSign that grants it a government-granted monopoly over .com and .net, has responded to repeated requests for comment since Tuesday.
O'Shaughnessy said there's no need for any outside organisation to get involved. "There's some religiousness that's been brought to bear here besides the technical reality," he said. "We're fully compliant with every RFC," O'Shaughnessy said in reference to the technical standards that govern the Internet.
Original article: http://www.zdnet.com.au/newstech/ebusiness/story/0 ,2000048590,20278764,00.htm
Good security is based upon reality and common sense. Common sense is a function of having common knowledge.
"no".
Original Article
VeriSign said Thursday that it would respond to technical complaints over its recent move to redirect Internet users who enter nonexistent or misspelled domain names to its Web site, but it said it would not pull the plug on the service. Criticism has been growing over the company's surprise decision to take control of unassigned .com and .net domain names, which has confused antispam utilities and drawn angry denunciations of the company's business practices from frustrated network administrators.
"There is a lot of fiction about the actual technology and the service," VeriSign spokesman Brian O'Shaughnessy said. "What we are doing is trying to determine fact and fiction and we're doing so by reaching out to the technology community and helping them to understand exactly what is fact and fiction."
VeriSign would not disclose what changes it might make to address technical complaints about its SiteFinder service.
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."
VeriSign's new policy is intended to generate more advertising revenue from additional visitors to its network of Web sites. But the change has had the side effect of rewiring a portion of the Internet that software designers always had expected to behave a certain way. That can snarl anti-spam mechanisms that check to see if the sender's domain exists, complicate the analysis of network problems and possibly even pollute search engine results. Because VeriSign will become a central destination for mistyped e-mail and Web traffic, its move also raises serious privacy questions.
In response, the Internet's technical community has developed a patch to BIND, the workhorse utility that implements the Domain Name System protocols. It's designed to counteract VeriSign's change by blocking traffic to its SiteFinder site and returning the same "domain not found" error message as before.
When asked why VeriSign did not inform the Internet's technical organisations of the change in advance, O'Shaughnessy replied: "There's not much I can add except to say that our testing and the resources we've applied toward this have been in accordance with prevailing industry standards for new products and services."
Neither the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN), which in principle oversees VeriSign's actions as a domain name registrar, nor the U.S. Department of Commerce, which has a contract with VeriSign that grants it a government-granted monopoly over .com and .net, has responded to repeated requests for comment since Tuesday.
O'Shaughnessy said there's no need for any outside organisation to get involved. "There's some religiousness that's been brought to bear here besides the technical reality," he said. "We're fully compliant with every RFC," O'Shaughnessy said in reference to the technical standards that govern the Internet.
Good security is based upon reality and common sense. Common sense is a function of having common knowledge.
Frankly I think ICANN should formally seperate the registrars and the root DNS registry. Make these changes to the rules:
If you look at TLD Sponsorship contracts on the ICANN site you'll see that some of the things a TLD Sponsors must do are...
Produce an accurate count of domains.
Pay a per-domain fee to ICANN.
Reposted cuz the format of these forums sux
The web is not the internet.
No sig, sorry.
Live your life each day as if it was your last.
The posted link & response are related to the IDN redirection changes VeriSign made months ago.
This is not a response to the current SiteFinder service. Doh!
"We don't care. We don't have to. We are Verisign"
Verisign is evil, taking over the internet!!
DNS is looked up for a thousand purposes besides HTTP. This is going to break a lot of programs I guess. It would have been less offending if they were doing this just for www.{*}.com lookups.
while [ 1 ]; do wget -T 10 www.verisign-sucks-ass.com; sleep 1; done;
--
Luck is just skill you didn't know you had.
I do applaud the ISC for patching BIND to eliminate this issue, but at the same time I am suspicious of another of their patches/features to DNS servers calle "views".
/.
Views seem (to me) that they will cause similar effects to that of wild cards in the root domains: that answers will not exactly be consistent or authoratiative depending on what you ask and where you ask it.
In my opinion any use of the "views" functions of BIND are better handled by sub-domains.
somesystem.mycompany.com would be used by all people outside the company, those inside would be on a different (sub)domain such as somesystem.intranet.mycompany.com.
For example: an employee uses a laptop at work and the resolver returns 10.5.10.1 for the name www.mycompany.com. When that employee connects to the same DNS server from outside (working from a hotel) the resolver returns 66.35.250.151 for the same name.
Now... the internal http server was runnung intranet specific services that are not on the public http server, what can the exec do? Now sure, you can say that this would only be used by those in the know who have already worked out all of this, but the point is, that it makes the DNS system return different results to different people, there is no one true correct answer any more. That is wrong.
Granted, I've not throughly researched what exactly views do in BIND, but it certainly on the face seems to be covered by at least several of the points mentione in the letters we've read from ICANN and the IAB, as well as numerous others here on
Article X: The powers not delegated... by the Constitution...are reserved...to the people
Any site that sitefinder "helps" you with has a robots.txt file that disallows all agents. I am trying to access an old site of mine that was archived on the WaybackMachine and it won't let me access the old information now. Verisign must be stopped at all cost.
With all the complaining we do here on slashdot about what companies do to OUR internet, we seem to do very little to protect our claim to this digital property. ICANN apparently encourages public involvement and I suggest that we all try to get involved in this and other internet organizations. ICANN also allows the public to participate in their meetings, supposedly via video conference. http://www.icann.org/participate/
Among my other big problems with the whole thing, is the following line in their Terms of Use, section 10:
Sole Remedy.
Your use of the Verisign services is at your own risk. If you are dissatisfied with any of the materials, results or other contents of the Verisign services or with these terms and conditions, our privacy statement, or other policies, YOUR SOLE REMEDY IS TO DISCONTINUE USE OF THE VERISIGN SERVICES OR OUR SITE.
Great.. and exactly HOW do *I* as the defined "user" do that?!
When did I consent to verisign that I wanted to use their free service? and how would I tell them I don't WANT to use it?
Anybody?!
For those who have upgraded/patched BIND to allow for the "type delegation-only" zones, here is a listing of all known publicy accessible TLDs configured for such operation.
Simply put this in your named.conf, or use the new "include" operation and store these in a separte file.
Due to the lameness of the lameness filter I can't post the list here. Get it from here This is a plain text file signed with GPG.
My web server should be able to handle the load since it's only a 16KB text file. Feel free to mirror it elsewhere.
Article X: The powers not delegated... by the Constitution...are reserved...to the people
Free as in Free to the Applicant.
You and 99% of all readers should have been able to interpret what I meant by "free".
Idiot.
In a quick search I found 12 two-letter TLDs doing the * thingy:
.ac, .cc, .cx, .mp, .nu, .ph, .pw, .sh, .td, .tk, .tm and .ws
.com, .net and .museum this makes 15 TLDs.
Including
The search was done using this very clumsy one-liner:
for b1 in a b c d e f g h i j k l m n o p q r s t u v w x y z ; do for b2 in a b c d e f g h i j k l m n o p q r s t u v w x y z ; do host asqerdfqewrd.$b1$b2 >> dom.txt.slet; done; done
(I wonder if there is a character equivalent for 'seq 1-27'.)
> > Also verisign makes it money by selling domain names. Recall that they used to
/year.
> > be free at one point.
> Assuming you're young enough to buy into a theory calling government services
> "free."
Why assume that?
Its free as in $0
When you were done with a domain, you sent in a form to deactivate it. Same form you sent in to register it in the first place.
I cant remember when this change over happened exactly, but it was the early 90's.
(I want to say 1993 but my memory is very shaky there.. shouldnt be hard to look up if you care)
Then they started charging $50/year until the late 90's when they lowered that price to $35/year.
They also for the longest time, starting when they first charged money for domains, that a domain must be paid for atleast for 2 years.
I think NetSol may still do this (I havent used them in forever)
It was the alternate registration services that first started allowing 1 year registrations.
Oh by the way. All of this was from InterNIC, who was appointed after the ArpaNet became the Internet, so it had very little (Read: none at all) to do with a government service at this point.
Even the government service on arpanet before DNS was free.
You simply emailed the guys with the master internet-hosts file.
They add your records (host to IP)
Then you wait about a week for everyone on the internet to download the new file and update their machines with it (Yes it was a totally manual process)
Unfortunately, despite the fact that they say they aren't collecting e-mail addresses, for the community at large the issue is we now have to trust them to continue to honor that promise. Considering their actions in implementing SiteFinder in a most irresponsible fashion, I'm not sure that trust would be well placed.
Are we having fun yet?
Mail? Put "slashdot" in the subject to pass the spam filters.
Hmm.. I do know there was a period where it was $50/year.
I paid $100 to register and $50 twice for two renewals before they lowered their price, at which time i paid $35 on the next statement.
Maybe they were adjusting it and i missed the 35/yr w/ 30 setup.
I didnt register alot of domains myself, but I worked at an ISP from 1995 till 2002 and never once heard of the pricing plan you outline.
Doesnt mean it didnt happen and you arnt correct, I just find it strange no customer complained about it (As they did for each other time they changed their pricing)
OK, at the risk of repeating myself, you seem to be under the delusion that government services are free.
Let me disambiguate. The only reason domains and DNS used to be 'free' is because the government run the services. These services were in fact paid for by you, and by people who never even heard of the Internet, in the form of taxes. Is this clear enough for you now? Do you propose turning over any other businesses and industries into the hands of 'the people'?
> into a theory calling government services "free."
Why assume that?
Its free as in $0
If you wish to call government bought computers and government paid employees "free" then it was "free." Otherwise, the current system simply makes the immediate beneficiary of the service pay for it instead of spreading the cost over all the taxpayers -- a more fair and less wasteful scheme.
Jez, you people need to defrag your brain...
.com and .net is an insignificant fraction of the money collected for domain registration and renewal. Network Solutions (Verisign) is just pissed off that they don't get to set the price for domains and collect their billions every year. (35$/yr x how many million domains?)
Domain names were never free. You were simply never charged for them. The NSF entrusted Internic with running the domain service. They were allowed to charge for domain registrations (and actually claimed to do so) but didn't do so for years. When they did start charging, they only billed the initial cost (2 years up front) and never sent bills for renewals. As I recall, domains were 100$ per year then. Increasingly greeder people have been running the system ever since -- the cost of running DNS for
(Internic started charging only after the costs began to exceed the amount NSF was paying them.)
DNS isn't the web. There is no "user" just sitting there to be queried for virtually any of the transactions.
Are you going to pay an outsourcing company in india big bucks to sit and preview each of the spam attempts that pass through your ISPs email system to check if there is a SOUNDEX match to each mention of a DNS-resolved element?
Hyperbole? Mayhaps, but well deserved.
OK, so you go to this site, say "slashdot.org" but you type "slsahdot.org". The site has 70 graphics and insets on the page, all targeted by "relative" links. So, you will want to have the DNS support in your computer pop up the same "did you mean slashdot?" dialog box 71 times?
Remember that the DNS system isn't *IN* the browser. So the fact that you told the DNS system which IP address you wanted (by picking ithe right one out of the SOUNDEX list) it has no means of going back into the browser and telling it to stop asking for what you asked for.
You basically have violated the first principle of design. You asked "couldn't we just (something)" without even understanding the most basic divisions of labor/effort and therefore, the implications of your proposed action.
You presumed that since you only directly interract with the system in one way, that being your browser, that all interractions with all people (including yourself) using the system follow a similarly interractive model.
Or even simpler: which "search engine" should get to pick where I go to validate the security for this web page before I send my credit card information off?
Or even simpler: "Ikea" or "Ike & Leah", either way, I expect if I send them my credit card info, I'll get a nice floor lamp.
Or even simpler: when Bank of America sends your electronic funds transfr for your mortgage off to "your" mortgage company, do you want it to be "guessing" between ranked alternatives as to which bank gets your money?
The mind boggles.
"I think the phone book, when you open it, should decide which numbers to give you because all these people are the same."
Innocent people shouldn't be forced to pay for inferior software development.
--"Code Complete" Microsoft Press
I'm on Earthlink DSL in San Francisco (nee Mindspring) and I'm still getting Verisign.
Breakfast served all day!
http://www.iab.org/documents/docs/2003-09-20-dns-w ildcards.html
This is the actual IAB Commentary on Verisigns recent activity. The link the article gives is not correct.
I'm a signature virus. Please copy me to your signature so I can replicate.
To the people whining and moaning about money, shut up.
.com and .net spaces. That is a LOT of cash and more than enough to cover the bandwidth and server bills.
Verisign gets $6 per year PER DOMAIN from all of its registrars. That means godaddy, tucows, register.com, and all the others pay Verisign $6 for every single domain registered in the
This is also why you won't see domain name registering services ever drop below $6-10. They must pay the $6 fee, and also have enough left over to make a profit.
Natural != (nontoxic || beneficial)
http://verisign-sitefinder-should-not-exist.com
sitefinder.verisign.com
<off-topic>gator.com
whenu
goatse
kazaa.com
ezula
toptext
cydoor
Of course, I'm running MacOS X, so I don't have to worry about those cheesy spyware apps, I have to protect my bandwidth, and save my clueless Windoze roommates from themselves. :-) </off-topic>
What a fscking redneck, whitetrash, brown-nosed, backcountry, sleazy, divorced arsehole this guy is. They should fire this guy and put someone in there who can actually read an RFC, understand DNS internals, and won't spend all his time chasing skirt around the office while showing off his own vagina . What a bunch of losers we've got running the biggest tld - run away to .org or make your own big-ass host files yourselves!
God dammit, what pisses me off most is even if verisign stop today ( and I am convinced they will be forced to stop in the next week or so ), a lot of damage has already been done. They've harvested *millions* of mistyped domains, run statistical software over it, and harvested the most profitable. They have done the same thing with emails, and have generated vast lists pertaining to certain interest groups, and will sell them on to large marketting concerns. Verisign's own site states that they monitor all traffic to their servers. URGE TO KILL...*RISING*!
I'm wondering if anyone else has been having similar problems with Verisign this week. I made a simple change to add a new nameserver to the existing five nameservers for six domains I administer. Everything looked fine; their web interface confirmed the changes.
The next morning, all h*ll broke loose, as the root nameservers were now returning the infamous 64.94.110.11 on these valid domains!! Checking the whois database revealed that the nameserver addition had not taken place, but the previous five nameservers were still there and still valid. Checking with the Verisign web interface showed the same five nameservers. Nevertheless, the root nameservers were acting as though these domains did not exist!!
I have 46 domains registered with Verisign and have been using Network Solutions for ten years. This qualifies me as a "VIP" client I guess. So I've been calling the VIP hotline for two days now and have five trouble tickets, to no avail. They can see the problem, they admit that it's a Verisign problem, but all they can say is that it may take five to seven days to fix!!
I've spoken with people who say they are in Pennsylvania and they can't talk directly to the engineers because "they're in Virginia". And I've spoken with people in Virginia who say they can't talk with the engineers because they're in Pennsylvania!
Meanwhile, whois is returning valid information while the root domain servers are just serving up the wildcard. I'm stuck and being held hostage by Verisign...
Anyone else in the same boat??
Has anybody analysed the JavaScript to determine what it does, not really got a lot of patience for this sort of thig, but it strikes me that all these dynamic pages have tonnes of script in them.
What also worries me is this script could be changed at any time to carry out other funtions and we probably would not be aware of it.
who copied and pasted your post above into
A new verisign thread and got +5.
FYI, plagarism by trolls is alive and well.
Fuck Beta. Fuck Dice
Gee, time to write a new RFC then.
if you fed ex'd it to the wrong address, would it still end up there?