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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."
If someone types in a bad domain name, they should get a message that states just that. I don't know if there are any statistics on this, but for me 9 times out of 10 it is a typo. If not, then you can go to the search engine of Your Choice and search for the name.
The decisions made over the next months and years will determine the future growth and vitality of the Internet
Should Read
The decisions made over the next months and years will determine the future growth and vitality of the Verisign.
appears to be the same defense used by spammers.
Let someone else "innovate"; someone not trusted to serve the .com/.net root zones without biased interest in the outcome of how it works.
Spammers do a lot of creative things to get their messages through. So, would it be "stifling innovation" to make spam illegal?
There's a difference between actual innovation that benefits society vs. people just finding a way to take advantage of the system.
Rank Presidents by th
Congratulations.
On the other hand, some of us like having the choice to let the user-agent do that when NXDOMAIN is returned, which uh, it never is with Sitefinder.
(I mean, I like root beer. Therefore, I think that all fast food chains should make it the default, and not provide user choice... after all, I like it.)
-ben
myselfmusic
... in the form that we have recently come to know it.
This sort of innovation followed by the "This will stifle innovation defense." must surely infringe on a Microsoft business process patent
I smell another lawsuit on the horizon.
134340: I am not a number. I am a free planet!
Why is * in bind so special? Here are some more 'innovative' wildcards: rm -rf /* (innovative on sco's lawyers machines... won't take much time at all to complete...)
cat * > /dev/null (Zero loss compression of verisign's arguments...)
and the best yet...
cat * > /dev/sda (or /dev/hda) (Method of preserving the data, but making it useless - similar to press releases by verisign)
... street beggars have announced that the "innovation" of pointing loaded guns at the people they are asking for money greatly increases their profits. "Well, we the panhandling industry can't just remain static. They should be thanking us for innovating new sources of revenue" said one street bum as he was being arrested...
"Freedom means freedom for everybody" -- Dick Cheney
It was obviously innovation. Nobody had ever done it before, yes. (Sure there were wildcards in other TLDs, but they weren't trying to provide the service SiteFinder was.)
The thing is, not all innovation is good. In this case, VeriSign innovated, and most people didn't want their innovation.
If they like, they could provide the *exact* same innovation by distributing a fully opt-in browser add-on.
Internet Explorer can do that with MSN search and it usually works well enough. (Too bad you can't use google instead...or can you? I don't have their toolbar since I don't use IE.) .com registrars as an added bonus.
Site Finder, however, takes EVERY invalid domain request from every kind of program on every platform, and breaks the DNS standard, with screwing over the other
I just innovated 4 of my domains over to
another registrar.
Sneakemail is to spam filters what an ounce of prevention is to a pound of cure.
Now looking at Sitefinder from the technical perspective, it's a scary ass "development". As once again, calling the wrong 800 number, the person could say "Oh this happens all the time, but I know a better place get (insert product/service here)! Try calling...", here in lies the devil!
It would be nice to have the feature in the first instance, but we all know that it will end up being served as in the second instance (besides all the anti-SPAM issues, et la). <rant>Since the CEOs of now are children of the 80's, everything always boils down to the all mighty $</rant>. BUT... is there any way that this idea could be put to good use?
"1984" was ment to be a warning, not a guidebook. You hear that Kim Jong-il!? BushCo?!
Sometimes I misspell URLs and I actually *like* having a service that attempts to find the site I'm looking for.
So set your browser to do that. Most of the popular browsers will, and you can even chose your search engine.
No need to force that behaivior on every user of every Internet service. The Internet is not (just) the web.
Bullshit. This is clearly written from the perspective of the user, who will click the pretty buttons while completely unaware of what's going on in the background. Instead of asking "anyone who has used it," why not ask a DNS admin or someone who is similarly qualified to make a decision on this point? Those people will tell you loud and clear that this thing indeed caused serious problems.
I made a PHP/MySQL library that prevents SQL injection & makes coding easier!
Starting nmap 3.28 ( www.insecure.org/nmap/ ) at 2003-09-15 06:36 PDT ... good. :365 .1%D=9/15%Time=3F65C0E9%O=80%C=-1)% IPID=Z%TS=U)= AS%Ops=MNNTNW)g s=AS%Ops=MNW)A CK=S++%Flags=AS%Ops=MNW)O %Flags=R%Ops=))
Host sitefinder.verisign.com (12.158.80.10) appears to be up
Initiating SYN Stealth Scan against sitefinder.verisign.com (12.158.80.10) at 06
Adding open port 80/tcp
The SYN Stealth Scan took 94 seconds to scan 1643 ports.
Warning: OS detection will be MUCH less reliable because we did not find at least 1 open and 1 closed TCP port
For OSScan assuming that port 80 is open and port 36304 is closed and neither are firewalled
For OSScan assuming that port 80 is open and port 43206 is closed and neither are firewalled
For OSScan assuming that port 80 is open and port 44655 is closed and neither are firewalled
Interesting ports on sitefinder.verisign.com (12.158.80.10):
(The 1642 ports scanned but not shown below are in state: filtered)
Port State Service
80/tcp open http
No exact OS matches for host (test conditions non-ideal).
TCP/IP fingerprint:
SInfo(V=3.28%P=i386-portbld-freebsd
TSeq(Class=TR
T1(Resp=Y%DF=Y%W=16A0%ACK=S++%Flags
T1(Resp=Y%DF=Y%W=16D0%ACK=S++%Fla
T2(Resp=N)
T3(Resp=Y%DF=Y%W=16D0%
T4(Resp=Y%DF=Y%W=0%ACK=
T5(Resp=N)
T6(Resp=N)
T7(Resp=N
PU(Resp=N)
TCP Sequence Prediction: Class=truly random
Difficulty=9999999 (Good luck!)
TCP ISN Seq. Numbers: 673A4C36 652AB817 BBE534C3 685BB54A
IPID Sequence Generation: All zeros
Nmap run completed -- 1 IP address (1 host up) scanned in 137.552 seconds
The linux hacker
i think at least some internet users will find Site Finder a good service, especially when you're not too sure about a URL, or mistyped one.
the annoying part is the opportunity for verisign to make a good profit out of this as there are quoted millions of mistyped URLs daily.
however who wants/can to provide a sevice (which costs money) for free? or even, who wants to not make a profit when there is profit to be made?
anyway, if site finder is associated with a neutral web directory like dmoz.org, it might be a different story.
You have the entire Internet bookmarked so you never need to type in a URL?
That's so cool!
There's nothing innovative about having the network do centralized processing, and perform those specific functions that Ma Bell or Verisign or whomever thinks it can market and charge money for.
What was innovative was the concept of a network that just provided connectivity, and allowed the users at the network termini to provide the innovation.
To call SiteFinder innovative is like cutting the wings off an airplane and saying that you've created an innovative new form of ground transportation.
"How to Do Nothing," kids activities, back in print!
"You keep using that word. I believe it does not mean what you think it does." -- The Princess Bride
The whole idea of sitefinder is "implemented" by other companies, and this destroys all of the "competition", so how are we the anti-capitalist saying others should be able to handle DNS errors their own way, rather than have them shove their stuff down our throats using somthing that goes against RFC, they are one of the most important companies to run the net, and they don't obide basic RFC, I think the gov't should step in and take away their .com and .net privledges away and give them to someone we can trust...
Sig: I stole this sig.
They exploited a known feature in the DNS system, and abused their monopoly. There's no innovation there - just an abuse of a government-granted monopoly position. Had they actually proposed something innovative, and proposed it as an RFC (even if it was an Informational RFC), then maybe things would be different. Instead, they decide to do something that was not contemplated by the IAB for the standard. The Internet is built on standards - and sometimes standards can be slow to change because of the sheer number of different systems involved. You can't expect things like DNS standards to change overnight.
Dude, abuse of power, greed, and lying to the public are not exactly "innovation". Can we please have our "weaker" Internet back? Uh, thank you.
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 @
The problem is not that something like sitefinder isn't a good idea. The problem is that putting it in the root name servers is the wrong place for it. Something like a browser plugin or browser feature is the correct place for it. Users can have the feature, and it may even be good, but this is the dead wrong way to implement it.
why don't they try submitting it as a standard for the internet and get it peer-reviewed instead?
Simple, they knew the stink it would cause. It is the same tatic I have used with my wife when wanting a new toy -- It is better to ask for forgiveness than permission.
To E-mail me, replace the first period in my domain with an @
It's called Google.
Uh ... no. Verisign altered and partially busted a rather critical piece of Internet infrastructure and caused significant problems. The Sitefinder aspect of their "innovation" was only part of it. Billions of lines of code out in the world were written to function with DNS servers that behave in a certain way, to a particular well-defined specification. Verisign altered they way the root servers respond to DNS requests, and they did it unilaterally, without warning, and for profit. That is precisely the kind of mentality we do not want in an entity that maintains systems and equipment that we all depend on.
.COM and .NET domains. There are other ways of providing SiteFinder-like capability with causing worldwide disruption, and if Versign is unable to handle their assigned responsibility it should be given to someone who can.
Suppose your power company decided, all on its own, without consulting you or anyone else, that they were only going to supply 90 VAC to your home or office instead of the usual 120. Some pieces of equipment would work fine, others would simply fail, or even destroy themselves. You would probably not have any idea what the hell was happening. That's pretty much what Verisign did to programs that interact with
What Verisign did rocks the foundation of trust that other nations have in America's ability to operate such globally important services. Verisign's upper management needs an attitude re-adjustment, or better yet complete replacement with more ethical businessmen.
The higher the technology, the sharper that two-edged sword.
You can use google, believe it or not. Search sidebar (Ctrl-E), Customize (Alt-Z or toolbar option on top of search sidebar), Autosearch Settings.
Web Browsers have been doing this for non-existant domains ages.
The web browser is the right place to implement such a feature. Providing extended functionality to the user is the role of the user agent.
Implementing it all the way down in DNS is just bonkers.
Boffoonery - downloadable Comedy Benefit for Bletchley Park
For that I have google, which will then happily keep track of everywhere I've visited.
' But there is another issue here, one that is hardly ever mentioned and that's the coining of the term "innovation." This word, which was hardly used at all until two or three years ago, feels to me like a propaganda campaign and a successful one at that, dominating discussion in the computer industry. I think Microsoft did this intentionally, for they are the ones who seem to continually use the word. But what does it mean? And how is it different from what we might have said before? I think the word they are replacing is "invention." '
Perhaps Verisign will help the world see through this concept of "innovation" and let us get back to inventing things.
Personally, I think this kind of innovation is a Good Thing. However, the innovation should be done at the application level, not at the infrastructure level. Let applications determine how to handle the case where a DNS query returns NXDOMAIN. But don't break the infrastructure and force all applications to go south just because you want a web browser (1 port out of 65K) to handle DNS differently.
</rant>
Want to improve your Karma? Instead of "Post Anonymously", try the "Post Humously" option.
The only time I just type something in is if I want a pr0n site. They're usually the ones that have the domain names for legitimate stuff. Like www.whitehouse.com. I always forget the .gov. ;-)
There is no spoon or sig.
You just paid someone else to register it with them.
Ah, the joys of a monopoly.
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.
Couldn't you determine their magic site-IP dynamically? It seems to me that you could just look up an invalid address and then compare the result to what you got when looking up your questionable one. Looking up example.com should work, for instance. Even if Verisign deliberately broke things by making a distinction between reserved names line example and other errors, you could pretty much guarantee that your chosen domain was invalid by using a string of 30 random alphanumeric characters. Not, of course, that this justifies stupidity like sitefinder.
There's no point in questioning authority if you aren't going to listen to the answers.
if he says that stopping SiteFinder will slow down innovation.. I say they are slowing down the innovations. We could innovate Mozilla, IE, Safari, etc to automatically go to specific server on DNS errors. And sites like SiteFinder could contract with those browser owners for redirects. Guess we can't do that cuz Verisign killed that innoviation with their innotivative SiteFinder
bobNo 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.
Last time I checked, there were 569 protocols defined as well-known services on my machine. The ONLY one that could have any benefit from the Verisign land grab is HTTP.
Breaking 568 protocols to deliver a marginally useful, if at all useful, service is technical idiocy of the highest degree.
The only thing innovative about it is driving stupidity to new heights.
I mean, I like root beer. Therefore, I think that all fast food chains should make it the default, and not provide user choice... after all, I like it.
No, this would just mean that if you ask for a beverage (or entree) that they don't have, they give you root beer, and you can't return it.
You can change IE's default to Google with this
I mainly use Mozilla and I use the Google toolbar from here.
Bad boys rape our young girls but Violet gives willingly.
It sends you to sites of VeriSign's choosing. Say they wanted companies to pay them for it. They could kill small companies and damage competition, which is very bad news for consumers and the economy.
You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.
well example.com wouldn't work as it's registered to iana, but yes in hindsight now(and what I will do if verisign turns the blasted thing back on), I could just look up *.tld, and get the magic address and store it. The problem was. Right when this was going on we where in the process of taking over another ISP, so trying to figure out if which of their domains was still valid, on on the hosts in question, got a lot harder...
To E-mail me, replace the first period in my domain with an @
VeriSlime's sitefinder is innovation is much the same way that the SARS virus is evolution.
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!
My concerns about the SiteFinder:
- Who decides what pages are shown? Is it a completely objective search or are we under the cover of corporate sponsorship?
- What kind of user control do you have? So far I see three options available to me, and I could really care less about content filtering so where is everything else?
- Where are the other languages? Google supports just about every language known to mankind, living, dead, and ficticious. Why does America think it runs the world?
- How does this make the Internet stronger? So far, this move has defeated spam filters and caused other network problems.
As far as I'm concerned, this is an abuse of their administrative powers and ICANN has done the right thing for a change by putting a stop to this operation. They should revoke Verisign's power if abuse continues.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.
threatens that stifling 'innovation'
I could make a special-toed boot specially designed for kicking people such as McLaughlin in the arse. I will of course, have features that makes it optimal for aiming directly towards that great rectal divide.
Then, when McLaughlin tries to press charges, I'll just state that my device is an innovation, and just because it damages the way he works doesn't mean it isn't useful to somebody...
Of course, I wouldn't have the power to force the masses to use such a device... but really I think that a swift-kick-in-the-arse is probably a lot more useful for many people than sitefinder ever was.
It would be a sad irony that if in the interest of the status quo we stifle innovation, because in the end all that will lead to is less investment in these important networks.
It's a shame all of us can't see we are stifling innovation. If it wasn't for verisign, we wouldn't have redone some of our programs. Think of it as an upgrade, we are providing yet another "upgrade" to our application/scripts. Thats innovative!
This is innovatation as defined by marketing 'droids...
I use DNS to match IP addresses to domain names... When I want to search for something, I'll the use the search engine of my choice.
Site Finder is like trying to use a fuel additive to change the colour of your car
...so much as the sneaky excuses.
I'm reminded, distantly, of a hoax that took place in the art world in the Sixties. A modern art exhibit was set up at a small downtown (NY) gallery, with about forty paintings, and an art critic for one of the major rags came down to check it out. He started doing this gush to the curator full of the usual ArtSpeak jargon, and then the hoax was revealed: the paintings were all the work of a two-year-old boy. There was a pause, and then the critic shifted gears as if nothing had happened and started gushing about the purity of a child's untarnished perspective!
The more I live, the more I see that people will do absolutely anything to pretend that everything is just hunky dory, even if it means being a consummate horse's ass. VeriSign are just the latest heirs to ass-dom.
Honorary Member of Jackie Chan's Kung Fu Process Servers
Need I say that anti-spam applications, networked printers, mail forwarders and mobile IP users were hung because of these highly-modified genetic root servers?
Should I point out that Mae-West traffic actually shot up because spammers were having a wonderful and rare day for unfeterred spamming?
He must be smoking crack...
Oh, forgot one thing. Did you read at the end where he pretty much implied that, if Verisign doesn't find a way to make more money off the Internet, they'll no longer be able to keep the root nameservers running effectively?
I loved that part.
Semi-topical link.
You want the truthiness? You can't handle the truthiness!
"It returns valid values for every query."
Including invalid queries. There's an error code for nonexistant domains for a reason.
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.
Did anybody notice that SiteFinder only worked for Verisign customers? I have 6 .com and .net domain names, 3 of them are registered through Verisign, and 3 others are registered through another registrar. The only sites that were "suggested" by Sitefinder were the Verisign ones.
Nice "innovation"! Promote Verisign customers only!!!!
"Only two things are infinite, the universe and human stupidity, and I'm not sure about the former." - Albert Einstein
Another problem with Sitefinder, which I haven't heard anybody mention yet, is that the suggestions offered were often not the actual domain you were looking for, but various typo squatters. So how is this helping the consumer?
NICE troll!
You said they rolled out sitefinder "without warning", but I disagree, and that has been my problem with this from the beginning.
There WAS advance notice. And what didn't happen then was quite surprising: ICANN should have come down hard on VS for even suggesting that they might do this. They waited, and now they look like reactionary cowards instead of proactive stewards. ICANN looks weaker than Verisign at the end of the day, and Verisign isn't really discouraged.
I think they should ALREADY have their contract pulled, there should ALREADY be a termination date delivered to them, and there should be no discussion. THAT would send a message that says "this is not something you fuck with, and this is damned sure not a fuckup you have the opportunity to make twice in your position because, guess what, you're out of business. Have a nice live. Goodbye."
I really don't understand why that hasn't happened, except that ICANN is too weak and has too many conflicts of interest to make that happen and be done with it and we can wash our hands of Netsol and Verisign once and for all.
I don't speak for my employer, but they feel that way as well, and would say so with fewer f-words...
-fb Everything not expressly forbidden is now mandatory.
(I mean, I like root beer. Therefore, I think that all fast food chains should make it the default, and not provide user choice... after all, I like it.)
IF the STATE has given you the sole authority to distribute beverages to all fast food chains, THEN you have an analogy...
-fb Everything not expressly forbidden is now mandatory.
Note: This post has been censored for your reading pleasure.
Jesus, what else is this a**hole going to say? It'd be great if they could say what's really on their mind:
"Profit is our number one motivation. F*ck the Internet, f*ck standards, f*ck all you others who get in the way of us making a profit. We are duty bound to make money for our shareholders and we aren't going to apologize for it. Now f*ck off."
Instead, we all pretend they are making valid arguments when they talk about "service to the community," "innovation," and all the other "we care" b*llsh*t they spew. The bottom line is that when anything gets in the way of the bottom line, they will f*ck their own mothers to get ahead. The sooner we realize it the better.
<a href="http://www.joblessjimmy.com">Work is dumb and so is Jobless Jimmy.</a>
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...
from dictionary.com
There's also a new technical meaning for "innovation", which is synonymous with "monopolization". Whenever you hear Microsoft saying "innovate", substitute "monopolize" to extract the true meaning. Now it's the same with VeriSign(R).
The SiteFinder fiasco was the final impetus for me to remove my last couple of domains from NetSol's hands to a more internet friendly domain registrar. Apart from saving me money in the process I'm pleased I finally got off my ass and voted with my wallet!
A little planning goes a long way...
With all due respect, this could be very problematic if Verisign is allowed to continue it. .com and .net domains essentially belong to Verisign to do whatever
Not only because of all the technical implications, but, more importantly because it sets
the precedent that the
they choose with. If ICANN cannot stop this, then ICANN truly has no power to manage
it's resources in the public interest. If ICANN cannot do that, there is noone elase with
the public mandate to do so. This could be very bad going forward.
Given how hard Verisign is working on the PR engine against this, we should make it
as clear as possible that this is a significant operational issue with significant impact
to the community. We should stand united that this is a bad thing first and foremost,
and worry about the infighting about how bad later.
Owen
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
Innovation, changing society, can lead to good or bad. It's not some clear-cut evil thing. Freedom to innovate is freedom to break rules... for hackers and other clever people, with good intentions, this can lead to cutting through layers of crap and figuring something out for what it really is, solving a problem directly, and possibly confusing and/or irritating people in the process.
There's lots of bullshit out there which isn't doing the majority of people any good... and, in fact, is doing good to a very small number of people and hurting everyone else in the process. That kind of stuff needs to go away, and innovation is the way to do it.
Good innovation is finding a better way to do things that makes life safer, easier, more enjoyable, or more tasty, like hot grits on a statue (just kidding!).
But, I would argue that some innovations will only push society along the path toward total commercialization, loss of identity, universal culture, and monopolization. A society built in this manner is weak, because everybody will share the same weaknesses... so if you can knock one man down, you can take control of the whole culture. Some significant amount of diversity is the best tool for survival and stability (in a big-picture sense)---nature shows us that.
So, really, anything which makes our lives more commercialized or monopolized, while it may appear at first glance to be potentially useful, might contribute to a major problem down the road of losing the diversity that makes us strong.
But, I could be totally off my rocker... after all, I am no longer rocking, and I can't seem to find the armrests on this here piece of carpet.
(Yes, I realize I am somewhat America/Euro-centric. Forgive me.)
--TheOrangeSquid Is it any wonder things seem so awry? We swim in a sea of confusion and don't have to think to survive
those have had wildcarded DNS for years now. sitefinder's nothing new.
"fools and their leaders, they have no doubts." --levellers, "believers"
The internet is not all about linux, unix, code etc. It is also about usability.....tell me, how else would they find what they want if they dont have a complete URL? Suppose you had a wrong URL or did not remember the right URL? How would you find out the right one? Its impossible without sitefinder.
What about the phone? I am sure that millions of people everyday dial a wrong number and have to do something about it. Most of us understand how to find phone numbers when we need them, yet we don't work for the phone company (NOTE: Author actually has worked for a Telco).
It is not impossible to find a site if you mistype it. I do that all the time, I just resort to typing a search term into my browser's search box and look for what I need.
If people have an implicit understanding of what to do and where to go for information, SiteFinder is redundant and useless. This is an issue of raising the technological savvy of a people at large, not obfuscating what is happening.
The slashdot article suggest that a standard was broken. It is not, and the editorial does not mention it. For the record, the Internet Architecture Board wrote:
Last, contrary to what VeriSign claims, it DOES break (parts) of the Internet. See all examples mentioned in the IAB advisory above. For example, consider what happens if you type "myprinter.mydoman.com" instead of "myprinter.mydomain.com" in your CUPS configuration. Without the wildcard, you get a simple message that you made a typo. With the wildcard, you have a hell of a job finding out why you can't connect to your printer.
They took something that worked to a well-established specification that's been around for decades and broke it. That is not good nor is it innovative.
But don't take my word for it. I will defer to this guy to elaborate and this guy to explain how stuff broke.
As many people have mentioned, you do not alter the functionality of core, Internet functionality in the global domain at the behest of some fools from marketing. If you want to make a change to how things work, propose a change or start your own network. Don't fuck with a service that billions of people use and depend on.
Join Tor today!
Two thoughts:
1) There's nothing wrong with SiteFinder. What was wrong was unilaterally changing the meaning of all DNS queries regardless of purpose, in order to force us all to go there whenever we fat-finger a URL, breaking the other 65534 Internet protocols in the process.
2) Oh, boy, let's also stop requiring manufacturers to make screws with standardized threads-per-inch and pipes in standard sizes. We've been crushing innovation. Let gas stations sell 30-octane fuel if they like -- shoot, don't even require it to be gasoline. Throw out those anti-business laws that forbid the "extension" of flour with sawdust. Eliminate the unnecessary burden that shoes must be manufactured in some specific size. Who cares if nothing fits or works, so long as we have Shiny New Products introduced every 28 nanoseconds?
While I agree with much of what you've said, I have to disagree that "there WAS advance notice".
If you shout your plans into a hole in the ground, that does not comprise advance notice. And since Verisign clearly can't tell assholes from holes in the ground, telling ICANN is... oh never mind.
I have been a DNS admin for well over a decade (I have a 3-character NIC handle) and they sure as hell didn't send me any advance notice!
What if your plans are on display at the planning office in the basement, in a locked filing cabinet located in a disused lavatory with a sign on the door saying 'Beware of the Leopard'?