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McLaughlin Defends Site Finder As 'Innovation'
psimeonbeta2 continues:"Additionally (shades of Darl) he suggests that an anti-capitalism animus is behind the resistance to sitefinder. This despite the known problems that sitefinder caused and despite the fact that breaking the DNS standards may have constituted a breach of contract on Verisign's part. Resistance, he concludes, must be due to some sort of techno-religious fervor.
While Verisign's chutzpah certainly doesn't rise to fiaSCO levels, I find the similar tones in spinning the issues at hand to be truly disturbing. Not only did Verisign screw us by changing how the internet works at a fundamental level, now they purport to be irritated that we didn't thank them for the favor! At least in this case the good guys(cherish this moment, ICANN!) won."
or even better some of us don't like to have to rewrite tons of scripts that use the DNS system for something besides the web. I mean there is more to the internet then just the World Wide Waste :). When Verisign decided it would do this, I noticed all my domain checking scripts stopped returning NXDOMAINS, and had to be hacked real quick to look for the magic site finder ip, and then before that wonderful Bind patch, had to worry that they would change the magic ip thus breaking my scripts again.
Then to add salt to my wounds, they send me an e-mail saying that my domain name is expired and I should call a friendly Verisign scumbag^H^H^H^H^H^Halesperson to help get my domain back. This was the last domain I had registered on them, and it was moved to OpenSRS 5 months ago. I don't see how someone this incompentant and this greedy should be put in charge of something this important.
To E-mail me, replace the first period in my domain with an @
I hate M$FT as much as the next guy here, but their autosearch solution was innovative* (* not sure if it was their idea). Without changing how the internet fundamentally works, they chose to render a failed DNS lookup as something more friendly and functional than a limited, rather useless OK popup. Something well within the right of a client application, and easily checked off if it doesn't float your boat. And it only affected those people that voluntarily chose to use their product (don't beat me up on the voluntarily bit).
With Verisign, there is no choice. They took a common community resource that should benefit all equally and biased it in their favor. They were selected as guardians of the system, not burdened with a mandate to "improve it". If they really think themselves clever, have them deploy a new, distinct system and compete for our patronage.
Why is everybody assuming that innovation is a good thing? Seems to me it is really a bad thing.
What convinced me that this was the right course of action is that Thawte's slogan is "It's a trust thing." Well, yeah, it is and VeriSign has shown that it can't be trusted. So I guess I'll give my money to someone else.
Prevent email address forgery. Publish SPF records for y
No bluster. I think you just don't realize a. the scope of this issue and b. the potential for future mismanagement. The problem came in because Verisign tried to think for itself, but it doesn't have a license to think! Their job is to competently maintain a prescribed service, not to "innovate", and frankly they failed on both counts. You may consider this no big deal (if you were the admin of a major network you might feel differently, I suppose) but do you really want a bunch of marketing drones making decisions that affect the root servers? That's what happened here, whether you like SiteFinder or not. If they aren't put squarely in their place now, the next time they make some stupid little decision it may have worse impact. Verisign likes to make a big deal out of trust, but they don't understand that trust comes from predictability: the knowledge that a trusted entity will behave in a known way. I (and pretty much the rest of the planet) don't want these people to innovate ... just run the damn servers they way you contracted to run them. And I will tell you this: they are a lot less trusted now then they were before all this foolishness.
... fine. Some people might even pay for it. But what they did was utterly irresponsible for a company in their position.
As a developer of Internet-aware applications, Verisign already caused me some grief. We had a problem with one of our customer's data acquisition systems failing because they misconfigured the name of a remote server and the software couldn't tell! Ordinarily the software would have simply rejected the bad domain as unknown, but it (and we) had no reason to suspect that a long-time network standard would be violated simply because Verisign's marketing department saw an opportunity. So don't tell me this was no big deal: our problem was repeated the whole world over. I lost the better part of a day over it, and I have better things to do.
If Verisign wants to offer SiteFinder as a service
The higher the technology, the sharper that two-edged sword.
decentralizing the DNS system... or at least promoting alternatives 8)
http://www.opennic.unrated.net/ would be a good start.
They break all sorts of applications that rely on proper DNS behaviour, and typosquat EVERY domain name, and they call it innovation?
Hell, there isn't even an entry in sitefinder for every domain, (Try searching for my site, novasearch.net, on sitefinder. No hits.), so it's not even good at the task they purport it to be for!
Everything in moderation. It's no use polarizing the polemic.
It should be clear though, that what Verisign is doing is wrong, not because it wasn't done before or some very esotheric reason that only a slashdotter could come up with, it's because DNS is not only used by HTTP (as the ICANN very aptly explained). The very bottom line is that DNS is used by more than just humans. That being said, yet another point against them: DNS over HTTP is used by more than just english speaking people.
In contrast, sitefinder's suggestions were never even close and it broke protocols to boot. Amazing here that Microsoft could actually have come up with the right solution. I never liked their error pages, but it was only because the error number wasn't immediately obvious. If they had just added "404" or "505" in big letters I would have been happy with them.
Someone ought to tell Verisign that they didn't innovate anything. Microsoft already had this idea, and they did it way better.
There WAS advance notice.
I'm dubious. I read one of the very first, if not the first, announcements on NANOG, and it was after-the-fact (or approximately at-the-fact). There was certainly not the at *least* six months of warning that would be necessary for a change like this.
Also, has anyone noticed that Verisign and Microsoft, two of the largest tech companies that play the nastiest and are the *worst* at coming out with new tech (actually, to be honest, I don't know Verisign's history well enough to know whether they're historically like this or not) are the ones that *constantly* claim that any interference with their operations would "stifle innovation"?
I don't see Google pulling the "stifle innovation" card. Google's research lab comes out with exciting, helpful, interesting things on a regular basis. I don't see Apple pulling the "stifle innovation" card -- and while Apple may not be the tech luminary that it once was, it still comes out with decent and out-of-the-ordinary products. The only people claiming that their "innovation" is at risk are those who *aren't* innovating.
May we never see th
At first I didn't read the article, figuring that it was just a longer sappier version of the summary posted here. The summary does it no fucking justice.
More likely, ICANN caved under the pressure from some in the Internet community for whom this is a technology-religion issue about whether the Internet should be used for these purposes.
For this vocal minority, resentment lingers at the very fact that the Internet is used for commercial purpose, which ignores the fact that it's a critical part of our economy.
At this moment the veins in my forehead are bulging, and I'm envisioning a fate for this man pulled out of Crichton's Congo.
Apparently this gigantic ass doesn't realize that we are the critical people that make it function as a critical part of our economy. It also happens to be the fucking critical part of putting food on our plates. Somebody needs to get this through his thick head before the next time he hops into his 6 figure car heading back to his 7 figure house.
This unforgivable libel needs to be answered on the pages of news.com, and I think we should be petitioning to get this guy canned. He is not of the moral character I want near the big red button of the Internet.
I need to go cool off...
Sorry... Maybe the only application you use on the intenet is Web Browsing, and, so you
aren't effected by the things they broke. Lucky you.
However, for those of us that use other applications (email, ssh, IPSEC, etc.), which are suffering
incorrect error messages at best, and, significant malfunctions at worst as a result of this
action by Verisign, it's not a good thing. If you get a 404 page, you're welcome to go to
sitefinder yourself. You're welcome to go to google or any other search engine.
This isn't knee-jerk reactionism, it's response to painful stimuli. Additionally, Verisign made
this change without public review, without public comment, without public notice, and, without
approval from any of the governing bodies (IETF, IAB, ICANN) or the operational communities.
Further, when the governing body that owns their contract (ICANN) asked them nicely, they
refused to fix it. They had to resort to threatening legal action.
I hope this will help you understand the issue a little better and realize that most of the people
making the most vocal reaction are responding to real pain in trying to keep their networks
running. Most of us don't have time to be chicken little.
Owen