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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."
...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."
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?
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.
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
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
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?
To foist a broken DNS on us in order to introduced a non-consensentual second revenue stream takes some gall. ICANN shouldn't be "asking Verisign" to suspend this, it should be taking actual action against them. I wonder what Jon Postel would say about it?
You are not alone. This is not normal. None of this is normal.