Paul Vixie And David Maher On VeriSign Wildcarding

chromatic writes "The O'Reilly Network has just published an interview with Paul Vixie, chairman of the board of the Internet Software Consortium and a primary author of BIND. Topics include the recent VeriSign controversy, ISC's BIND patch in response, and other potential issues that might come to light in the near future." On a related note, dmehus writes with a link to the letter sent by David Maher, chairman of the Public Interest Registry -- the .org registrar, to ICANN President and CEO Paul Twomey. "The letter says that it supports ICANN's call for VeriSign to voluntarily suspend SiteFinder and the Internet Architecture Board preliminary position paper. It goes on to say that PIR will not be implementing any DNS wildcard to the .ORG zone. It urges ICANN to stand its ground, but also to implement a policy preventing registries from taking this kind of unilateral action in the future." The letter is in .doc format, but AbiWord and OpenOffice.org both open it fine.

Comments

Now this is interesting

[Saint Aardvark]

From Vixie:

Some people suggest that administration of the DNS is a public trust, and that VeriSign is merely the caretaker of this system, not its owner. And now VeriSign has abused that trust. That may be true. Before a few days ago it didn't matter whether VeriSign was the owner or a caretaker. Now it matters a lot. VeriSign kicked a sleeping dog. It's a bizarre thing to do. Was it really VeriSign's decision to make, unilaterally? Did it need permission to make this decision? If so, what entity has the authority to grant such permission?

If you think about this from a social point of view, not just technical, this is absolutely fascinating (rather than just irratating/punch-provoking): here's an ability, that was theoretically possible all along, to have this big effect on something lots and lots of people use. No one made use of it before. Now someone has, and it's

1. (presumably) made a bunch of money for those who did it, and
2. pissed off a lot of -- but not all -- people.

Who's responsible? Who gets to say "No, you can't do that", or "Yes, you can"?

I know what I think is the right answer, and it's what (probably) the rest of you think. But the final answer isn't up to you and me, or at least not you and me alone. Watching that process of who-gets-to-decide is going to be at least as interesting and precedent-setting as what the final decision ends up being.

Re:To be honest

[Anonymous Coward]

(Posted anonymously to avoid a rampaging mob outside my house)

I'm a professional spammer. Well, that's a harsh term. I run bulk-email servers. I trust my clients that their entire list has double opted-in when they say so. Most are quite legitimate mailing lists; some are probably not.

This new bug is a godsend, but not for the reason a lot of people are saying. I don't fake "from" addresses, so I don't get any added anonymity from a wildcard.

What I do get is the ability to send my emails that have bad domains in them to a nominally but not effectively existant box at Verisign. I no longer get bad domain bounces to worry about.