Study Reveals How ISPs Responded to SiteFinder

penciling_in writes "During the 2+ weeks for which Site Finder was operational, a number of ISPs took steps to disable the service. A study just released reveals the details and analysis, including specific networks disabling Site Finder during its operational period. For example, the study reports China blocked the traffic at its backbone, and Taiwan's Chunghwa Telecom and Korea's DACOM also disabled the service. US ISPs have been slower to act, but US ISP Adelphia disabled the service September 20-22 before re-enabling it on September 23." That link is a summary; or cut straight to the study itself.

Comments

good to see someone doing something

[intermodal]

while I'm not a general fan of censorship, I don't see this as censorship. This was simply sitefinder's overlords abusing their position. Freedom of speech does not mean that you're free to make everyone listen. Same goes for network traffic. This is no different from me adding doubleclick.net in my /etc/hosts pointing to 127.0.0.1 in that I don't want to hear what they have to say, same goes for sitefinder.

Re:AAARRRGGG!!!

[Xerithane]

I don't get the big deal with this. OK, Verisign isn't the best company on the planet (I can think of one Utah based one that's much worse, and don't get me started on Redmond...), but this is insane.

They, in effect, registered every unregistered domain and pointed it towards their SiteFinder service. If you take into account the cost of registering all those domains, and how many there are (several trillion combinations, I would assume) they just "stole" service from every other .com register.

That's one argument.

Another argument is this. And this is real world, and it happened to me. I was setting up a host for a friends wife. She has two domain names, and needed DNS and email. I setup DNS, email, and verify that it works by doing a quick "ping" even though the host was down. So, I ping her domain, expecting it to resolve and have the icmp packets timeout. Well, it resolved, and with a different IP address. So, forgetting about this SiteFinder nonsense, I go back in and try to figure out how in the hell that was happening. It dawned on me 30 minutes later that my resolv.conf wasn't pointing at my DNS server, but my upstream, and the registrar hadn't refreshed. Verisign was reporting that domain belonged to the SiteFinder IP because it didn't clear registration yet.

People that are not like use geeks here (we know what a 404 means when we see it). I mean the other users.

You obviously don't know what a 404 means. 404 means that the server exists, but the document isn't found. This is replacing non-existent domains. Two totally different things.