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3rd Lawsuit Against VeriSign Seeks Class Action
dmehus writes "A third lawsuit has been filed late Friday in a federal district court in California against VeriSign, Inc. over its controversial DNS wildcard redirection service known as SiteFinder. According to the article, it was filed by longtime Internet litigator Ira Rothken. In addition, while two other lawsuits have been filed by Go Daddy Software, Inc. and Popular Enterprises, LLC. in Arizona and Florida, this is the first lawsuit to seek class-action status."
Verisign truly has no shame, but the reason they can get away with this is simple: most people on the net now are new to it, and have not the faintest idea about how the net used to be a cooperative medium, where bullshit like this was not tolerated. Today? No such luck, users expect to be scammed and abused with every click, they will accept this, and they are the majority.
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. Many other countries also do this sort of thing with their domains. They're 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 and all the others. What's different here?
And don't tell me because nobody uses those domains, that it's okay. That's just an elitist view and also blatant hypocrisy.
Can one get in trouble for launching a DOS attack on an unassigned web address? Do they all by default belong to Veri$ign (OK, I couldn't resist porting the obligitory $, generally reserved for M$), or are they fair game to hit with reckless abandon?
What about Email, IRC, USENET etc etc... How would that be forwarded to a search engine? HOw do I prompt a user in IRC to choose which is the mistyped addresses they really meant? Do you expect half the software for internet communication to be re-written?
The Internet is not just the web!
And this is a very stupid, ill-thought out idea!!
D.
1. The distributed network in its infancy is lovingly brought to life by researchers: arpanet is born.
...man in his time plays many parts, His acts being seven ages. At first the infant, Mewling and puking in the nurse's arms. And then the whining school-boy, with his satchel And shining morning face, creeping like snail Unwillingly to school. And then the lover, Sighing like furnace, with a woeful ballad Made to his mistress' eyebrow. Then a soldier, Full of strange oaths and bearded like the pard, Jealous in honour, sudden and quick in quarrel, Seeking the bubble reputation Even in the cannon's mouth. And then the justice, In fair round belly with good capon lined, With eyes severe and beard of formal cut, Full of wise saws and modern instances; And so he plays his part. The sixth age shifts Into the lean and slipper'd pantaloon, With spectacles on nose and pouch on side, His youthful hose, well saved, a world too wide For his shrunk shank; and his big manly voice, Turning again toward childish treble, pipes And whistles in his sound. Last scene of all, That ends this strange eventful history, Is second childishness and mere oblivion, Sans teeth, sans eyes, sans taste, sans everything.
2. Rapid protocol development as the network begins to start walking: from gopher to httpd to mosaic. Email and usenet populate most universities.
3. Private enterprise realize the potential and small companies start forming around services and products aimed at network usage. Network usage is a daily exercise for academics and early adopters. Linux arrives and Slashdot's squeaky pubescent voice first heard.
4. The internet meets the economy and Wall Street goes apeshit. Billion dollar companies are started, sustained, and identified by their position on the network and mindshare of net users. The network is the computer.
5. Infrastructure buildout is complete, and educated people worldwide use it as a communication medium. Initial high-growth opportunities are gone so Wall Street sours on the newness, returning its attention to fundamentals of profit-grubbing.
6. Annoying spammers take over, search engines are all manipulated, pop-ups for porn and travel are everywhere, Microsoft mass-marketed virus hysteria takes place, simple hosting efforts become a bitch.
7. Lawyers and short-sighted opportunists inexorably and slowly strip everything likeable from the network by lawmaking and lawsuits until there is nothing left but death and taxes.
Shakespeare's As You Like It (Act 2:7)
http://tinyurl.com/4ny52
Register.com might be the next one to file suit, given their strongly-worded letter which was sent to VeriSign and ICANN.
The Stop Verisign DNS Abuse Petition is still going strong, with 15,000 signatures. ICANN still hasn't had the sense to post it on their website, though. They have a public forum at the very bottom of the page here at least, with 64 comments (many from the petition site, as we're giving folks the option to forward those along to ICANN too).
Let me guess... it'll be settled out of court, Verisign will admit no wrongdoing, the lawyers will get a few million dollars, and we'll all the $5 off the next domain we register with Verisign.
I can hardly contain my enthusiasm.
I am NOT a man!
I am a free number!
This would ruin the authoritative nature of DNS. It's not supposed to be an "approximation" system. Doing the above would cause more problems than it would solve, as it would leave to misdirected emails, misdirected websurfers, and big privacy and security issues.
Failed lookups are a good thing. It empowers the end-user to decide how to best handle those errors. Shifting that power to the registry (in the case of Verisign's Sitefinder), or to BIND (hosted by the ISP) would remove power from end-users.
I see big problems arising from this. One, if it looks like VeriSign will lose, they will more than likely settle out of court and make sure an issue like this stay untested as to be lawful or not. Just like the DMCA mess and the mass suing from the RIAA.
.com/.net domain on good faith really. No one has the power to remove them from handling these domains. There is no true law up to this point on who owns them and what guidelines they HAVE to follow. Even the RFC's don't contain any insight on how something like this should be handeled.
Second, VeriSign is handling the
Do we really want the gov (at any level) to start getting their hands in this? Do we want another self appointed body saying what can and cannot go? Both of which, to me, are scary but it seems that the "self healing" that the internet was built apon is failing at this point. Even if another RFC is written, who's to say that VeriSign will follow it?
I see no good comming from this really. The only good ending would be that VeriSign halts its practice on its own and an RFC is drafted to prevent this in the future and people follow it. The only issue I see there is it's still done on faith and it looks like faith has gone the way of the dot.coms.
Register.com simply put up a test patern page by default when somebody registered a domain but failed to come up with with valid nameservers. That was annoying to those who paid for domains they weren't using, but then again its also their fault for not having one of the reqirements it takes to operate a domain.
.net and .com that hasn't been registered, which is something only VeriSign could possibly do.
.com or .net query is supposed to return "NXDOMAIN", an indication that the domain doesn't exist and therefore the request is no good. That was an error that used to be handled by the user's software, now Verisign has overtaken that.
This is different because Verisign isn't limiting their actions to domains registered through them. In fact, SiteFinder replaces every domain in
Basically, SiteFinder's IP address is being returned any time a
This breaks any application that depended on "NXDOMAIN" accurately being reported. One key application was an important spam defense... if the domain in the from field returns an "NXDOMAIN" when somebody tries to look it up, trash the message because the from line must be bogus. Now, nothing returns "NXDOMAIN" when queried, so that test always returns a negative.
ICANN hired VeriSign to run the DNS system according to the protocols. This is something that's not in the protocols, and VeriSign is just doing with a "You can't stop us!" attitude. ICANN nicely asked VeriSign to suspend the service, and got a defensive reply. It's time for either ICANN to fire VeriSign, or for the US Dept. of Commerce to fire ICANN...