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Verisign Considers Restarting Sitefinder
Rosco P. Coltrane writes "The Washington Post reports that VeriSign is considering reviving its infamous search engine. 'Site Finder was not controversial with users' says VeriSign's Tom Galvin, and VeriSign 'assured ICANN that it would give 60 to 90 days' warning to resolve any remaining technological problems.' Such as leaving the DNS service alone for example?"
Those who forget history are doomed to repeat it...
Visceral Psyche Films
You think we might be able to outsource VeriSign to India?
This is .org and .com! When does Verisign's lease expire? Can ICANN turn over the license to someone else?
When you type in a wrong address at the moment which doesn't exist, you are automatically taken to either a site search engine, which is pure crap.. or to the microsoft auto search.. (talking for users on School networks, with Windows terminals) which offers the option to use the great Hotmail (Spam Central), Shopping (at ridiculous prices, from the company which could afford to give us all we want free) etc.
tim
...that they would learn from past mistakes. But no, of course not.
The problem is, are ICANN going to back down this time and let it slide, or are they going to continue to give Verisign hell over this, and pressure them, as they should definitely do?
Are we likely to see another backlash from users and network admins?
And will there be the same sort of media coverage that basically gave Verisign quite a bad bit of PR for 2 weeks.
It seems like they have sneaked this out again with the minimal amount of fanfare in an attempt to try and stifle the opposition, but when you have so many people mistyping domains everyday, you cant really expect it to go unnoticed and not to piss people off.
TheHustler
http://www.elmarko.org/ - Useless bilge
http://www.asylum-games.co.uk/ - Co-Founder
'Site Finder was not controversial with users'
It wasn't controversial at all. Everybody agree it was a bad idea.
This space left intentionally blank.
Fast mirror here. Enjoy the Net exploatation !
Carefully crafted sig.
There's a difference. Microsoft only do it at the application layer, with a particular browser that they provide. If you don't like it (and I can't see why anyone would), you can always switch to one of the many alternatives. Verisign's site finder operates at the DNS level. It's not as if you can choose to not use DNS, or switch to another name service.
"The invisible and the non-existent look very much alike." -- Delos B. McKown
they take .com and .net out of verisign's hands the better. Its just unfortunate that this will misinform new people AND generate more needless traffic because of the returned page. Did the search page ever have preferences to certain websites? or was it truly independent? If i typed in server software would it bring up xxx penis extensions because some idiot put in metatags or would it bring up true results?
We played dungeons and dragons for 3 hours.....then i was slain by an elf
And firebird^H^H^H^Hfox does it for google ... it could be argued that's even worse than Microsoft, since there you get shot off on an I'm Feeling Lucky, while microsoft gives you a list of close matches and lets you choose one. I've had too many times when I mistyped a URL, got shot off to another page entirely, and then had to go back and do a "google URL" to find what I was looking for.
;)
Also, M$'s way sends you back to a Microsoft page - which is expected, since MS has a search service (along with one copy of every single other web application). But Mozilla choose Google fairly arbitrarily - why not use Yahoo? Or Wikipedia? And anyone who argues "it's the #1 search option" gets a free copy of IE, the #1 browser, from your good friends at Monopolysoft
On the other hand, what Verisign does, affects the operation of any application that relies on DNS to connect anywhere.
True, but that is a browser thing. It doesn't break well-written applications that don't use MSIE (isn't that redundant?), and doesn't affect Linux/Mac users at all. This, on the other hand breaks applications through no fault of the original developers, forces ads down ppls throats with no means of changing it, and exploits a publicly trusted position.
#define DRM chmod 000
That is fair enough.. but what about those of us unfortunate enough to be on a school network where we can't install a single thing (not even Mozilla Firefox, bird whatever..) And where we can't access settings. The other point was that for home users, many of whom do not know how to use the configuration to turn off M$ autosearch, it is just as bad as the Verisign is.
tim
And in other news, the US forces were crushed in Iraq, Mars Beagle did not go missing and has been transmitting pictures for many days, and these aren't the droids you're looking for.
But DNS is used for more than web look ups. If DNS returns spurious results for gethostbyname(), a typo in a SSH command, or nntp request will be seriously bjorked.
I've no problem with Firefox (or IE) sending me to a search engine when I try to connect to a typo-ed web page: this is a reasonable policy to set at the application level
Athletic Scholarships to universities make as much sense as academic scholarships to sports teams.
Unfortunately, as can be seen with Zeitgeist. Windows users on MSIE dominate the market. The majority of these the software auto searching for them is as bad, or actually as noticeable, as the DNS doing it.
tim
Thats a different issue entirely. Having a *browser* point you to a search engine is all well and good. You can modify this behaviour to suit yourself. But if the *internet* starts doing this stuff for you... well, it's not a pretty picture.
And in other news, techno soothsayers predict that verisign is going to be the target of a large DDos attack in the near future......
tom-george.comBecause geeks rate higher t
That's what we get by having corporations managing the Internet infraestructure instead of a public service. Some people talk about censorship, but if the corporations actually have the nerve to do something like this, whow long does it take until censorship sets in?
The full paragraph from the internal Verisign report reads:
"Studies in Outer Mongolia showed that our Site Finder service was not controversial with users of the Trans-Himalaya Yak Courier Service. Everyone else on the planet, including Arawoyo Pnu (34) from Upper Amazonia, found the service both useless and obnoxious. We therefore recommend renaming the Site Finder service to 'Yak Finder' in order to better exploit the Outer Mongolian market."
Ceci n'est pas une signature
Understood. I'm not trying to defend MS, but merely point out that with MSIE, there is an alternative in most cases. Whether or not this alternative is pursured, well, that's another matter. At anyrate, my only point is that it is possible to avoid MSIE, whereas it isn't possible to avoid Verisign short of: 1) using pure IP addresses w/o domain names, 2) using alternate DNS servers, or 3) raise enough bloody hell to give Verisign a run for their money.
#define DRM chmod 000
The complete wrongness of the way Verisign are going about it aside, I don't see why getting a search engine when you enter an incorrect domain is a bad thing in your web browser. I'd argue it's a feature. Sure, it could be a bit better labeled, but it's not like you were going to see anything else of use, was it?
-- Sorry, I can't think of anything funny to say here.
Seems to be a philosophy the PR flacks for VeriSign and SCO subscribe to wholeheartedly.
"You have to license your Linux installation from us." "Everybody likes Sitefinder." "I was singing in a church choir in Cucamonga when the murder happened." "I won't cum in your mouth."
Sheesh.
Start a happiness pandemic
Come on I dare ya.
Guess which site is the next potential target for the MyDoom virus??
This is the sig that says NI (again)
God will roast ICANN stomachs in hell at the hands of Verisign.
I can say, and I am responsible for what I am saying, that they have started to commit suicide behind our firewalls. We will welcome them with bullets and shoes.
I am sure, Microsoft wouldn't like that
Imagine a dispute between MS and Verisign. Kind of Dr. Evil Versus Minime.
Slashdot Sig. version 0.1alpha. Use at your own risk.
"Site Finder was not controversial with users, 84 percent of whom said they liked it as a helpful navigation service,.."
Hmm, I wonder how they selected those users ?
Something like this ?
Are you running Windows, Mydoom, Kazaa, and you don't care about privacy or legal issues ? Have we got a poll for you !
Dude I'm not too sure how accurate this is, since I haven't used IE in a long time, but there is a setting called "Search from address bar" in the IE preferences. You can turn it off. You can't turn off Verisign's.
If I were a shareholder, I wouldn't ask them to do this at all. Sure, it may boost short-term profits for them, but in the long-term, it could cause consumer rebellion against them and the revenue lost would probably far outweigh the short-term benefit. You can just look at the slashdot community and say that it could be potentially disastrous in the long-run. Sure, this community is a small subsection of the population, but these people are the gatekeepers for many aspects of the technological world and if you piss the gatekeepers off, all hell breaks loose.
can someone be blamed for doing a denial of service
to a site that Does Not Exist ?
how about some scripts to pump out requests to a fairly
limited set of known to be Non-Existent domains...
could this possibly cause an interesting burden on Verishit's servers?
would the name lookups themselves affect DNS too badly to
cause innocent collateral damage? i'd hope caching of a limited
set of non-existent names would avoid much dns load.
just curious, academic musing and all that...
Remember the times when microsoft and SCO had to change their web address to side step being attacked by DDOS for various worms?
If site finder goes up.. All falied DDOS going to old domain names will end up taking those attacks. Guess verisign will be the official decoy for outdated worms. =)
All slashdotters, espeically people that were seriously affected by sitefinder, please complain NOW. Let them know how controversial it is!
found here
I don't know about you guys, but this made troubleshooting a pain for me. Me: you are not able to access the server? User: But I can ping it??? Me:Is it giving back (Sitefinder IP - can't remember it) User: Yes - it is responding, why can't I access it???? Me: Well you see, DNS works by... User: I don't care, fix it Me: But........
Galvin said that the continued opposition stems from "an ideological belief by a narrow section of the technological community who don't believe you should innovate the core infrastructure of the Internet."
In our recent article a number of mistakes slipped past our content review processes. In this case "destroy" was incorrectly spelled "innovate". Also "ideological" clearly was meant be "correct". Likewise "narrow section" appeared instead of "all".
We apologise for these errors and any confusion they might have caused.
Yes, but that is only when you browse the web. When you mistype the address into anything else than a web browser (email address, ssh connection, ftp, vpn, ntp, Z39.50, any private protocol), the program is supposed to receive an error message, and handle it in some meaningful way. Instead the broken DNS gives you a sitefinder address, and your program tries to contact that. Most likely it will time out (in a few seconds), and report to the user that the server he wanted to contact is down. This causes lots of frustration among users, and lots of unnecessary support calls.
In Murphy We Turst
You can change the url to anything you like.
Just do a about:config and change the keyword.URL setting.
I set mine to http://www.google.com/search?btnG=Google+Search&q= which is a regular Google search.
*sighs* .. It's that I do not enjoy getting caught by a sysadmin (who is probably reading this as I write). Firebird is not the latest release anymore..
Firefox..
tim
When you type in a wrong address at the moment which doesn't exist, you are automatically taken to either a site search engine, which is pure crap.. or to the microsoft auto search [...]
Or you can just use the Microsoft created and provided TweakUI to change this to go whatever page or search engine you desire. The key is it's user-controlled (heck they can just use another browser), not a change to the core system as this Verisign shenanegans is.
And firebird^H^H^H^Hfox does it for google ...
Are you sure?
I just tried a domain name that doesn't exist, and instead of being taken to Google or any other place, I saw a "www.randomdomainname.org not found" dialog box instead. It doesn't even give me an option to feed it to a search engine from there.
IIRC, IE will take you immediately to a search engine without displaying any error message. This is the annoying and broken behaviour that the OP was talking about.
Perhaps you've installed a plug-in or extension that is doing this?
Also, M$'s way sends you back to a Microsoft page - which is expected
No, it isn't. I expect it to say "domain name not found". End of story.
Last time they were accepting emails to non-existant domains too. If everyone makes sure they have lots of web pages with long lists of email addresses in nonexistant domains then the spammers will spend a significant fraction of their bandwidth DOSing verisign instead of hassling the rest of us.
In your idea, remember to get the script to follow all the paid-for links. The advertisers will have to pay for the hit, and will soon realise they're getting bad value for money. And you can still identiy site-finder DNS entries easily, so you could just mis-spell random real web sites and see if they point to site-finder.
In soviet russia stale jokes recycle you!
I love the idea.
That would just put so much stress on BIND servers around the world. It can just very well bring down the internet for most of the world. That could easily cause a massive slow down in just looking up domain names since the caches can fill entire databases.
Actually, you can. But Slashdot would be awkward when called "66.35.250.150, news for nerds, stuff that matters" instead...
Hate me!
But the text in the headline made me almost yell, "BULLSHIT."
Non impediti ratione cogitationus.
Many sites cannot be reached by their IP address alone. Ever heard of shared hosting ("name based virtual hosting")?
Looks like they already have - www.nonexistentdomain.com ;-)
Am I the only one here who actually thought SiteFinder was good? I mean, quite a few times, if I was typing in a domain, like say Homestarrunner.com, and I misspelled it, I'd get a "no server found" error, have to go back into the URL and try and figure out where I screwed up. Not exactly a challenge, but still annoying. With SiteFinder, I just have to click the link that popped up. And it always popped up.
Why aren't major companies/monopolies/evil people with lots of money speaking out about this? Are they getting a cut? Seems you need $$$ to make a 'controversy'.
...is an "IntelligenceFinder" ?
Getting a search engine is fine, if that's within my control. That's a good *browser* feature. And with a good browser, you can configure such a feature to go where you want it to, or just to give an error message (my personal preference). The problem with Verisign's approach is that there is nothing to tell the browser that there was no DNS record, so you no longer have the choice.
Are you suggesting that Verisign are really alien lizards in disguise? That explains a lot. Including the yak-marketing.
Amor omnia vincit. Occasionally.
"Site Finder was not controversial with users"
Hm, let's see:
a) Right. It just was extremely controversial with those who didn't use it (i.e. everyone else, like 99% of the Internet users)
b) Right, it wasn't controversial. Everyone agreed that it's a bloody fucking stupid thing.
c) Right, it wasn't the Sitefinder page itself that we all hated, it was Verisigns "bend over, here we come" attitude of forcing it on everyone, whether they wanted to or not.
Now that's three ways how he's saying the truth. Can't really argue with that, can you?
Assorted stuff I do sometimes: Lemuria.org
Nice idea, but the domain system only really works if we all agree on a single set of authoritative root servers. Otherwise you are effectively introducing another level into the DNS - go to 'www.mydomain.com2' is not very useful if you also have to append instructions on how to change your DNS servers. I can just imagine the voiceover at the end of the radio ads - very fast, and in the style of 'terms and conditions apply'.
I can't find it in TweakUI (w2k). Where is it exactly?
you can, it's easily selectable from a list of search engines that are compatable.
microsoft chose not to allow you to do that.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
And as understand it some anti-spam programs does a lookup on the senders hostname to see if it's a valid hostname. If the lookup returns an error (not found) they send the mail directly to the trash.
But with this service you will always get a hit. Which in turn renders this anti-spam program ineffective.
Of course you could use other anti-spam tool, but this stops a lot of spam with fake hostnames.
On the sitefinder thing: NO THANK YOU.
We don't want it. It looks like one of those domain squater search engines where every link goes to gay oran utan porn. You all can keep it. I like my error messages better.
-- $G
I would be more impressed if Verisign restarted the Pathfinder instead of Sitefinder.
Yes.
Also, this community has lots of weight in the recommendation og technical solutions.
"Yes boss, we could use Verisign, but I spent some hours last night finding alternative solutions that are both better and cheaper. Here they are."
How many companies are looking to work with SCO these days?
The terms "public trust" and "corporation" are incompatible. What were they thinking?
sure, iraqi's don't count...wright...
Maybe you should join the forces...or is the couch to comfortable?
Can't we do something, I mean, something to legally make them pay for it?
Verisign has a long story of abuse with DNS, and we should be able to do something more than bitch about it or make technical workarounds (ie, patches to dns) about it.
Perhaps a petition to ICANN with enough signatures to make them revoke Verisign's contract?
sure, iraqi's don't count...right... Maybe you should join the forces...or is the couch too comfortable?
"The contractual inconsistencies include, violation of the Code of Conduct and equal access obligations agreed to by VeriSign, failure to comply with the obligation to act as a neutral registry service provider, failure to comply with the Registry-Registrar Protocol, failure to comply with domain registration limitations, and provision of an unauthorized Registry Service."
You do know that there's a lot more to the Net than the Web, right? And that having a website returned instead of the spec-ordered "No such domain" when you're using a different Net scheme (like email, or chat, or good ol' gopher) is fundamentally Wrong. If the Web were a distinct thing that had its own DNS then I doubt many would be grousing, save those whose profits just got diverted into VeriSlime's ShiteFinder pockets.
ObInsult: Ya Jughead!
Learn to spell: nickel, missile, lose, solely, amendment, speech, kernel, probably, ridiculous, deity, hierarchy, versus
Sorry, what? I was posting about how getting a search page back in your webbrowser was a good thing. I fail to see what this has to do with anti-spam systems. Sure, verisign's technique will cause the problems I think you're trying to describe, but I wasn't talking about the technique used. Hence why I said "The complete wrongness of the way Verisign are going about it aside".
-- Sorry, I can't think of anything funny to say here.
... where we can't install a single thing
If you can save files somewhere (most schools give you space on a central fileserver) then you can install Fire.* - download to filespace, unpack, run program. No full-blown Windows Installer access required.
And you're looking at the issue from the wrong perspective. Most admins couldn't care less what home users see when they type in the wrong URL: a search engine is a good as anything and probably the right thing to do for most people. What they do object to is the fact that wildcard DNS resolution breaks a lot of things end users never see but admins have to deal with on a daily basis - the resolution failure should be handled by the browser, not at the DNS level where there are times when you want a name that doesn't exist to not resolve.
10 February, 2004, 11:55 GMT
Car bomb kills many near Baghdad
As others have pointed out, that's not the same thing at all: what Verisign want to do is to usurp the basic look-up-a-name service.
In fact, I'd expect Microsoft &co to *strongly* object to this, since what it will mean is that dns lookups will eseentially never fail, so you'll never see the search page from IE &c. Essentially Verisign are going to start providing the service that MS now does for IE users, and google now does for Mozilla!
Heh. Well the debate is all about the way Verisign is going about it. No-one would care if Verisign released a 'Verisign Explorer' browser, with their Sitefinder feature built in. The problem is that they are abusing their monopoly position with .com and .net to shove this 'feature'^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H bug - and it truly is that - down people's throats.
60 to 90 days to patch every network utility out there to work around the DNS breakage. ROFL.
Oh, wait, that's NOT funny.
Please correct me if I got my facts wrong.
Obviously, since VeriSign has just proven they are not competent enough to use a calendar, clearly they are not competent enough to run DNS.
You are being MICROattacked, from various angles, in a SOFT manner.
"Firefox" will do an I'm Feeling Lucky search if you type in something it thinks isn't a URL. Type in, say, "slashdot" and Firefox will do an I'm Feeling Lucky search becuase it isn't a URL. Type in, www.dsfgsdfjghk.com and it will give an not found error because www.dsfgsdfjghk.com is a URL.
#include "sig.h"
The connection to anti-spam systems is there since it's done at DNS level. It messes up the way the internet works.
And you argued positivly for having this feature, so I thought I should mention the negative effect from it.
And on the point that we're not going to see anything else of use there...well I consider something like site not found a usefull response. Then I can set up something myself if I want to handle that response.
You are wrong, Windows users using IE has less than 50% of the market for programs that use DNS, which is what verisign is trying to break.
Outlook and Outlook Express have almost as many users as IE. And there are loads of IRC programs, and not to forget, Quake, Unreal Tournament and all the other online games.
Microsoft doing this stuff in the browser affects only people using IE, and even they can turn it off. Verisign doing this stunt with DNS affects everyone, not just web servers.
Thank you! I'd forgotten you had that screen and just found why keyword browsing had stopped working here!
I now have a happy browser again. Why they turned that off on the default config for Moz I don't know...
Greg
(Inside a nuclear plant)
Aaaarrrggh! Run! The canary has mutated!
Ah, I see. My text was clearly a URL. I guess this must mean I've never put anything else except a URL into the location field, as I've never noticed this before.
Anyway, I consider this behaviour being "on" by default to be a misfeature. I might raise it with the dev team. Still, as others have pointed out, it can be switched off or pointed somewhere else. Whereas, we're told, in MSIE can't be.
Would using alternative root servert also allow domains with just one part? E.g. slashdot instead of slashdot.org?
.org or .net TLDs), they are confusing (is the site for this norwegian company .no or .com?), most sites will want to have .com anyway, as it is sort of the de facto standard one, etc. So why don't we just dispose of the TLD, and the hostname, and call the website slashdot instead of slashdot.org?
I find the TLDs a bit silly, since the general purpose ones lost much of their meaning (commercial websites have
Please correct me if I got my facts wrong.
I seem to remember something about a big pile of tomatoes at the last NANOG meeting in Chicago, where Verisign defended sitefinder to a very hostile crowd of network admins. Was to be a symbolic gesture of our disdain for the system. What part of, "We don't like sitefinder, it breaks DNS standards, we think it sucks, and you need to die, or at least spend several weeks in a bed with tubes sticking out of you," did they not understand?
--Nuintari
slashdot : where an opinion can be wrong.
Especially since saying "...leaving the DNS service alone..." is redundant. DNS = Domain Name Service. That's like saying Domain Name Service service. Or like saying PIN number... or ATM machine...
Thank you google.
I'm with the general consensus who feel that this is a 'very bad thing'. However - ICANN made a big mistake in announcing it would undertake 'reviews'.
They should have simply given a big fat NO to Versign's Sitefinder in the first place.
Leaving the subject open for discussion was a big mistake, IMHO.
The annoyance factor and the outrage will be big pushes for the OpenDNS idea, especially once the cc people wise up and get on board to stop the extortion.
Maybe ICANN won't notice as everybody migrates away from their little empire of root servers until everybody's already used to the idea; that will eliminate the 'single point of political failure'.
Verisign is busy proving all over again that FLOSS has been demonstrating: when it comes to the Internet, the only people you can trust are everybody.
If I were a shareholder, I wouldn't ask them to do this at all. Sure, it may boost short-term profits for them, but in the long-term, it could cause consumer rebellion against them and the revenue lost would probably far outweigh the short-term benefit
You're absolutely right.
But.
I don't know how Verisign's top management is compensated, but a big problem in the last decade across corporations has been the practice of tying executive compensation to short-term stock prices.
In other word (and again, I don't know this to be a fact in Verisgn's case) it may be that it's very bad for long-term stock price, very bad for common shareholders, ultimately bad for regular employees (who end up being laid off when the chickens come home to roost), but still very good for top management.
Opinions on the Twiddler2 hand-held keyboard?
I *heart* corporate thinking.
The Slashdot Paradox: "100% Overrated"
IIRC, IE will take you immediately to a search engine without displaying any error message. This is the annoying and broken behaviour that the OP was talking about.
You recall incorrectly. If you type in a proper domain name, IE will just give you a "This page cannot be displayed - Cannot find server or DNS Error". It only tries to do a search if you type in non domain name type expressions. eg a phrase with spaces or a single word without any dots in it which doesn't match a local host.
I expect it to say "domain name not found". End of story.
That's exactly what it does say! Why do people keep confusing what happens if you type in *words*, with what happens if you type in a *domain*?
Please *try* these things before posting misleading rubbish that will only spark further trollish messages.
(I have tried all of the above in IE6)
In Firefox, you're redirected to Google if you type such things as "ugh" or "linux rulez". Those are obviously search keywords.
If you type "www.no-such-domain.com" you're not redirected to Google, as the parent post says.
-- Pedro
Why doesn't this work in Internet Explorer 6.0 under Windows XP Professional? Plz advise kthnx.
The Internet is a connected suite of protocols that work off of a similar top layer of technology, permitting multiple types of information transfer. Granted, the WWW, being the kick-ass application it is, is a very large part of this. However, what people ALWAYS fail to realize is that Electronic Mail, FTP, SSH, Telnet, Internet Gaming, X-Windows, ICQ, AIM, and every other Internet program under the sun utilizes DNS to try to get where it's going. When Verisign turns on its crappy service, what happens is that every OTHER program that relies on host names will be SCREWED UP. Why? Because instead of an error message that says you are trying to access a host that doesn't exist, you'll get a message that is much more similar to the fact that the host is unavailable! That means when you send an email message to dumbshit@verisiggn.com by mistake, instead of getting a response back immediately that you typed in a bad address, your message will sit in a queue for 3 days, and then you'll get an error message saying that your recipient couldn't be reached. This will cause you to contact your system administrator, and waste hours of his time, and time at other remote administrators because no one will catch the typo until after they've exhausted all the possible reasons your mail systems cannot talk to each other. System Admins RELY on error messages that make sense. When those are absent, answering user questions of 'It doesn't work - fix it' is VERY VERY DIFFICULT. This message is just for those of you who appear to not have a clue just how much frustration this causes, and who think that this makes even a modicum of sense to do.
It looks nice to me... :-)
Reminds me of the times when I was 4:900/763.1
Still, he added, it would be tough for VeriSign to win the public relations war because its opponents are highly regarded technologists.
Come again? Since when are "highly regarded technologists" given a second thought by the average user? Their thinking is...
"Let's see... www dot... oh, I hate these computers... where's the g? hootmaail.como... there! Wait, that's not my mail. This is... uh... oh yeah, silly me. I spelled it wrong. Yes, that's the one I want... I'll that... wait... online dry cleaning... I need THAT."
And that is the END of the thought process. They don't think about whether or not it's a helpful service unless a surveyor puts a gun to their head and makes them commit one way or the other. They certainly don't think about asking the "highly regarded technologists".
They're in disuise?
Anyone know where I can get the anti-Verisign patch for BIND?
WTF? I seem to remember tons of users complaining, as in the vast majority of them that knew what was going on. I'm a user, it was controversial to me!
It was controversial to the courts! It broke tons of in place software. It got them sued.... what part of all that isn't negative?
Clothes make the man. Naked people have little or no influence in society - M. Twain
I know this is troll bait, but I will bite.
.com/.biz domains, they have been given a monopoly. No other company can do this since they don't control the athoritative root for those domains.
Capitalism works on the premise of competition. Because they are the sole athoritative root for all
Beyond that it fundementally changes the way the internet works to the benifit of a single company. This is very anticompetitive.
If I were a shareholder, I would tell them to drop all of its plans for site finder since eventually it will lead to a loss of all of its domain registration revenues.
Shameless self promotion : The Misadvetures of the in
Sounds like a wonderful case to take to the Department of Justice.
"But Slashdot would be awkward when called "66.35.250.150, news for nerds, stuff that matters" instead..."
It would also not work, as all the links point back to the slashdot.org domain, so it requires a DNS lookup to follow any link
But Mozilla choose Google fairly arbitrarily - why not use Yahoo? Or Wikipedia? And anyone who argues "it's the #1 search option" gets a free copy of IE, the #1 browser, from your good friends at Monopolysoft ;)
Okay, how about because it's the _best_ search option?
Free Java games for your phone: Tontie, Sokoban
Please *try* these things before posting misleading rubbish that will only spark further trollish messages.
If I had Windows available here, I would have. That's why I put "IIRC" in there. I was certainly right, in that it *sometimes* (depending on some text analysis) whisks you off to a search page. That's what I was recalling.
I just wasn't able to replicate it in Firebird as I didn't understand that it (and MSIE) was differentiating between "proper text" and domain names.
However, I actually consider this behaviour to be bad in *both* browsers, so just take a deep breath and settle down a bit.
Many mail delivery systems will do something like the following (I know this from a black-box-user perspective, not someone who's implemented it). They'll look up the MX record for the domain, and if one is nonexistant, look for an A record. If there is an A record, it will attempt to directly deliver the email to any SMTP server running on the host.
I like this style of functionality quite a bit -- it means that I can simply send mail to user@static-domain-name. In any event, all those systems inevitably dump mail at SiteFinder.
May we never see th
According to the Washington Post, Galvin said that the continued opposition stems from "an ideological belief by a narrow section of the technological community who don't believe you should innovate the core infrastructure of the Internet." I think Galvin is missing the fact that we ARE for the innovation of the core infrastructure of the Internet - just not in the way he would hope. After all, I'm all for revoking Verisign's IP address reservations.
It is analogous to saying that if I put a detour sign in the middle of the freeway to direct traffic to my shopping mall, that I am obeying the traffic sign protocols.
The comment about "ninety-nine percent of the traffic is pure HTTP" is a shorthand way to sum up why it is not possible to communicate with Verisign's executives, and why they must be stopped and soon.
Because it wouldn't matter if one hundred percent of the traffic on the internet were HTTP, it still is not a reason to break DNS in order to insert advertising. The "service" they claim to be providing should be provided by the browsers, giving everyone a chance to implement their own solution to the problem of mistyped domain names. Then many possible solutions to this issue can be innovated. By breaking DNS to lie about the existence of domain names, they actually prevent anybody else from providing any solution. This is the exact opposite of innovation. And they are smart people at Verisign, they clearly and obviously know all this, and yet they are lying to every one about it. And that, in a nutshell is what makes me more furious about this than any other Internet legal issue has in a long long time, maybe ever, or at least since Network Solutions took the .com database
offline and made it their own private property.
There was a story I heard once, about a company (Novell ?) which implemented their own file transfer protocol over the network. They did not use exponential backoff on retransmit, which made their protocol look much faster than TCP/IP. It would in fact hog all the bandwidth, bumping out all the more polite and well behaved protocols. This was great for them, but in fact as the network approached saturation, the system would fail catastrophically, for reasons obvious to Internet protocol designers.
At some meta-level, this is what is happening to the Internet itself now. Verisign is itself like the bad protocol, which does not play well with others. It is taking advantage of an opportunity which gives it a short term advantage, while degrading the entire network protocol infrastructure.
There are good reasons for a hierarchy. Control is devolved, rather than concentrated in a single body. Each country has control of their own TLD, (excepting those that have sold it off) and believe it or not outside the US they *are* used, particularly for local businesses. And so on to the following levels: a domain owner has the freedom to set up as many third-level subdomains as they like (smtp.mydomain.com, pop3.mydomain.com, etc.). I don't know how this would work with a single-word system.
Anyway, many browsers *will* try .com on the end if you type in a single word, or you can just stick your favourite sites in your hosts file:
66.35.250.150 slashdot
How does that time period resolve privacy issues?
The sitefinder service has privacy issues. From mali sent to invalid domains to people mistyping a website address.
On a sidenote, there other's who run root servers. Why don't they get a chunk of the change generated by sitefinder to defray costs, and perhaps expand and add more servers for yet more redundancy.
You don't *NEED* to, you just have them configure their searchpath to go through 'blah.home.net' for example and if they type in 'foo' for example they'd poll 'foo.blah.home.net' first instead of foo.com/net/org
-- vranash
yes I have, thats irrelevant to if someone decides not to use DNS. they can always define the name in their hosts file, access the site correctly and still not use DNS.
dave
I think that you can change which search engine you would like to use in IE with "Tweak UI." It's been a while since I've run Windows, so I'm not entirely sure, but that seems to be right.
And the muscular cyborg German dudes dance with sexy French Canadians
ICANN should have followed up and yanked Verisign/Network Solutions off the net for that fiasco. The fact that they didn't means DNS will fragment as ICANN control is purely by committee. Anyone can set up a root server.
And I suspect many more will.
Thanks for the sites, will watch them grow.
"the domain system only really works if we all agree"
.com and others will grow.
Yes, but they are not listening. There is no agreement. You take it as they provide it or not at all. This will be the demise of
FireFOX is an install now actually.
I can't understand how anyone with half a clue could have deployed such an obviously broken service.
Mea navis aericumbens anguillis abundat
... that another company is going to force feed me it's propaganda... like a commercial on TV. I am deeply bothered by this.
What can we, the little people (thanks Rev. Horton Heat - That's Showbiz) do to avoid this? Instead of their $itefinder coming up, I'd rather see a close match, or at very least a random site. I'd rather see nothing like I do now.
There has got to be something. Open DNS?
"I'm not ashamed I can't function in society like I'm supposed to." - Paul Westerberg
Thought I'd share a real life example of sitefinder causing non-trivial trouble with something.
After sitefinder was originaly turned on, a number of players of an certain game were crashing when they entered the game's online matchmaking lobby.
Why?
The MOTD for the game was retrieved from a webserver and copied into a fixed length buffer before being shown.
At some point in the past the game's publisher started redirecting all requests to the webserver that had the MOTD page to another, much larger in size, page. Which overflowed the buffer and crashed the game.
One of the players decided to do something about it while waiting for things to be put back to the way they were. They modified one of the game files with a hex editor, munging the domain name to a non-existing one, and distributed the modified file to a number of other players.
This stopped the crashing, until months later, long after the company fixed the MOTD page, when sitefinder came along. Then the munged domain suddenly started serving up pages, and again the game was crashing.
Now granted, the problem was 100% a result of bugs in the game, but it was still triggered by sitefinder.
Makes me wonder how many other programs are out there with similar bugs.
--McVerne
We don't want your shit!
"Site Finder was not controversial with users, 84 percent of whom said they liked it as a helpful navigation service," said Tom Galvin, VeriSign's vice president of government relations.
That's because 84% of people didn't understand how it worked or why it was bad. It like asking people if they'd like to get 80 miles to the gallon in their car, but not telling them they would have to use fuel that's $10/gallon. Of course they'll say yes when they don't know all the facts.
Zero US soldiers died in Germany during the occupation. Same with Japan.
http://slate.msn.com/id/2087768/
This annoys the crap out of me... especially in regards to localhost. If I'm testing a web server on my local machine, and I'm screwing with the configurations so for whatever reason the localhost is down.... and I type in "localhost"... I would like to get an error message. Instead, Firebird I get directed to the extremely obnoxious website at http://localhost.net.au - which is a shill for search engine optimization software. I don't want to go to this stupid site, but it happens to be the number one site for a search on localhost for google. I guess their SEO software works....
If we have to be redirected - and I don't like THAT at all - I'd much prefer to go to http://www.localhost.com, which at least has a service to automatically redirect you back to 127.0.0.1.
One way to solve this, I think, is to knock the parasitic localhost.net.au from its top ranking for google "localhost" searches. To that end, please indulge me for a little bit of civic minded google bombing... localhost localhost localhost localhost localhost.
Mind you, I'm not associated with http://www.localhost.com, but I certainly appreciate their service!
SpyDock: Scientific Python in a Docker container
YHBT.
Don't blame me; I'm never given mod points.
Everybody knows what to expect when you mistype a DNS name - pages of porn!
----------------------------------- My Other Sig Is Hilarious -----------------------------------
You do realize that bug in the game would allow anyone to run any code on your system they wanted to just by altering the MOTD page. All an attacker would have to do is either register the munged domain name and put up a web server (if using the patch) or break into the original motd site and change the motd to exploit the buffer overrun condition.
Interesting. While the whole "DDoS-the-whole-Internet-thanks-to-SiteFinder" is an interesting concept, we can now technically consider them as a group of browser hijackers.
Can we tack them in with CoolWebSearch and their ilk now? Or is CWS slightly better than them?
Striking fear in the authors of godawful fanfiction, I am here, appearing in darkness, Tuxedo Jack!
http://opennic.org
You forgot "I was just helping that sheep over a fence." (AKA the "Great Scottish Lie" :o)
Here's a fix to ensure that you don't have to use Sitefinder: Type domain names in correctly.
In fairness, it's not a troll, there *is* a smiley immediately after the domain name. Also, if you actually look at the text on the destination page, you might notice that rather than being a simple duplication of Sitefinder, it is making a comment on Verisign's potential aims with such a service.
he was arguing for the web browser popping up a search engine, not a DNS redirect.
What if every slashdotter was to a launch cyber-squatting claim against them? Or better yet, launch a *huge* number of claims against them.
...
Think about it:
yourdomain.com <---- the only valid name
yuordomain.com
yyourdomain.com
yourdomian.com
yoordomain.com
There are nearly unlimited possibilities.
Do you think they would learn a lesson then? I think they might...
I say no. That the core is dumb is one of the reasons the internet is available to everyone. That the core is dumb is one of the reasons it is so reslient. That the core is dumb is the reason we can assign stewardship - not ownership - to Verisign, and yank it away from them when they misstep.
Keep the core dumb. No innovation is necessary or wanted.
Edith Keeler Must Die
Telnet to port 80 at the target IP, issue a valid http 1.1 GET and don't forget to pass the Host header in your request. Viola! Like magic.
Skiers and Riders -- http://www.snowjournal.com
There are plenty of reasons, but one big one was that Bill Clinton changed tax law so that only 1 million of a CEO's (or other eexecutive) salary could be considered a business expense. A $12 million salary would now cost $3 million extra in taxes. However, a $1 million salary with $11 million of stock options wouldn't "cost" extra.
Should CEO's get exorbitant pay? You probably don't think so, but they do sign a paycheck for thousands of employees and contribute to our economy.
Meanwhile, it's not unusual for a hollywood movie star to make $20 million for 3 months of work, with only a temporary employment opportunities for the "little guys". Yet it's deductable as a business expense.
You can actually configure IE to disable the autosearch feature or select one of several other popular search engines. Open the search sidebar and click customize -> autosearch settings. This is a feature I don't mind having at the browser level.
Not to promote IE, but it also has an option to disable the autosearch "feature."
Evil is the money of all root.
Try http://localhost:8888/; it is a real URL, but Firebird 0.7 (I haven't upgraded yet) will take you to an SEO company via www.localhost.net.au if you are not running a local web server on that port. It will do this even if you follow it as a link, it is not limited to things explicitly typed in the address bar.
I think "keyword.enabled" should be 'false' by default. You can at least switch the feature off if you do not want it; there will be no such switch if VeriSign deploy their service.
I generally dislike features where someone else has decided what they think I ought to want to happen if something does not work. "I was only trying to be helpful" is a feeble excuse for covering up the first warning that something is wrong.
URL entered: www.nochancethisisreal.comN SAS&q=www.nochancethisisreal.com
Result: Redirected to ninemsn.com.au search engine. Specifically, http://search.ninemsn.com.au/dnserror.aspx?FORM=D
URL entered: http://www.nochancethisisreal.com
Result: Cannot find server or DNS error.
Draw your own conclusions.
I don't know if it is still active, but on their (rather optimistic) PR accouncement from September of last year Verisign lists sitefinder@verisign-grs.com as an address for feedback. Back then, they said they "invite additional comments". I wonder if it still works?
Mine doesn't do this. I guess it must be configurable somewhere?
Using IE does redirect to http://search.msn.com/dnserror.aspx?FORM=DNSAS&q=w ww.u90asdfwa.com, but that's hardly what you claimed - and it doesn't apply to all windows users.
to figure out how to rape the Internet and steal more stuff from the naive geeks who built it in good faith and for all humanity.
Sitefinder is like discovering your receptionist has decided to redirect all wrong phone numbers to her cousin's "dial-a-psychic" service, and the janitor's been putting ads for his brother's body shop on everyone's desk.
Verisign doesn't own the "product" they're selling, they're just operating it for ICANN. This is no more a legitimate business than, oh, the original Napster was.
Bullshit.
"Thanks to our new Productfinder service, when you can't find what you're looking for and you put a can back on the shelf its RFID will automatically locate the product you really wanted and deliver it to the store (for a small fee, which you agreed to electronically when you put he can back on the shelf) so it will be waiting for you when you check out!"
Changing IE's default search behaviour
I went to Autosearch settings, and changed the setting to "Do not search from the address bar". Now I can type in "flafflemuffins" and it'll try to go to http://flafflemuffins/
I'm still staying with Opera, but this could come in handy for testing URLs on a local LAN with IE.
Dude your userid is pretty low (not as low as mine hahaha ok nevermind I am too lazy to log in), anyway, you should know how this works on /.
Imagine what it would be like trying to remember addresses under ipv6...
It's configurable, at least in IE. Tools -> Internet Options -> Advanced -> "Do not search from the address bar".
(I use Mozilla, not Firebird, so I can't help with that one)
It's official. Most of you are morons.
my conclusion is that you didn't change the default behavior...."Do Not Search From The Address Bar" is an option under settings.
It's not returning a web page, though. Your DNS resolver asks for, and receives, the numerical address to which the domain name is bound. Now, the fact that it's your browser using the resolver means that your browser goes out and retrieves a web page under false pretenses (because Verisign lied and said the domain name you typed exists when it doesn't); it's not like DNS said "Here's a web page in response to your query".
I'm not saying I disagree with your sentiment, just that it's wrong for a whole bunch of other reasons. Imagine an "intelligent" (for want of a better word) Yellow Pages that happens to display phone numbers for phone-sex services (who are paying YP for the redirection) whenever you look up the wrong company. Or the local crank that gives people directions to the nearest crack house when they ask him how to get to the mall.
If anyone remembers, the Internet was originally created as a defense network, able to withstand a nuclear explosion *snicker* ...and if that doesn't really apply, then we can file an antitrust suit: VS is a monopoly in this field; they have no right to enforce sitefinder if nobody else can compete
Somebody can just accuse VeriSign of tampering with the internet in such way that it may stop being a reliable communication network
tell me why i'm full of it to svist^at$hotmail*com
Did you know that "FTW" ("for the win") is a direct translation of "Sieg Heil"?
[i]"Site Finder was not controversial with users"[/i]
The other thing to keep in mind is the small percentage of internet users who are tech-savy enough to realize the implications of SiteFinder. Joe and Jane Sixpack don't care, or even notice, given that all they do is send and recieve email, check movie times, etc. If they mis-type a URL, and sitefinder comes up, they'll think nothing more of it than if their computer were infected with searchhook spyware, which would return some random page in place of "Cannot Find Server."
It really puts geeks in a tough position, considering we understand virtually everything about the internet and it's internals, yet comprise a surprisingly small percentage of the world's online population.
Therefore, if the majority of internet users don't notice, VeriSign doesn't see a problem. It's not controversial if the majority doesn't care.
#!/bin/bash
1 460
/dev/null http://`dd if=/dev/urandom bs=80 count=1 2>/dev/null | tr -d -c '[:xdigit:]'`.com/ ; done
# Fuck up the Verisign SiteFinder DNS Hijacker system
# created from collaboration on slashdot:
# http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=80714&cid=711
while true; do wget --tries=1 --timeout=5 -O
Buford "Mad Dog" Tannen
In otherwords, they didn't just enact "sitefinder.verisign.com" and make it a VOLUNTARY SERVICE, like they should have in the first place, rather than having it resolve to (nxdomain) and fsck up DNS.
This sig no verb.
Site Admins
Problem: IE is displaying its own error documents and thinks it knows better than you about your own site.
Solution: Make the error document larger than 512 bytes
"If the facts don't fit the theory, change the facts." -Albert Einstein
Karma? There's a serial modder out there.
You'll probably see proxy DNS servers and DNS libraries that first look up the DNS record, then try to connect to the web server on the address they find, and finally return a corrected DNS record depending on whether the web server is Verisign's or not.
As a result, Verisign will be serving a lot of useless pages and eating up a lot of extra bandwidth. Eventually, that's going to cost them. Let's hope it will cost them enough that they will stop this nonsense.
Surely defining the name in a hosts file is still using DNS?
Not controversial with users? Maybe we didn't shout loud enough,
WE HATE SITE FINDER
I think we should all drop them an email saying "controversial is an understatement, we find it repulsive"
just a thought
And the punishment for downloading a binary and running it is? Please provide a link to the acceptable use policies of your school. I'd like to see what school prohibits browser choice in such a draconian manner.
$5 / month hosted VPS on linux = awesome!
If you don't like it, you don't even need to change browsers. You can also configure it to use whatever search engine you want, or not to search at all.
Trees can't go dancing
So do them a big favor
Pretend dancing stinks!
When I do that I just get a Not found error...
But I do agree with you that that should definitely be a GUI pref (and I don't mean about:config).
#include "sig.h"
Who used sitefinder? It was one of those ambiguous sites we all hate which claimed to be the 'portal to everything'. It should stay dead. I don't want to be redirected to sitefinder everytime I mistype a url. The only 'users' they had were misled into thinking they found what they were looking for. Once they realized they had stumbled across a useless 'portal', they usually would go hit google.
TallGreen CMS hosting
How, exactly, would one "work around" breakage that can't be programmatically detected? It's not like in Hollywood movies, where the packets come back tainted and twirling little mustaches and giving shifty glances.
Query: "Is foo.bar.com a valid address?"
DNS answer: "Yes. It resolves to a.b.c.d."
Now tell me how to decide whether it really is valid, or whether it's an advertisement. Without actually contacting a.b.c.d on port 80 to see what comes back.
You cannot apply a technological solution to a sociological problem. (Edwards' Law)
Huh? That is definitely not what Firebird does. Not by default anyway.
Everyone seems to be able to say something Informative or Insightful on this topic. Come on. It's just too easy, folks.
Having web browsers perform a search when a domain that doesn't exist is typed is a good thing. But implementing it at the DNS level is the worst possible way to do it. For one, nobody can choose anymore - instead of being able to change a browser setting, my browser's search code will never be invoked, because everything will redirect to sitefinder. And it breaks many other things - reverse DNS for spam. It's like taking cyanide for a headache: your dead, but at least your head doesn't hurt!
So instead I'll have to say this: Lord I'm one, Lord I'm two, Lord I'm three, Lord I'm four, Lord I'm fi-ve hundred yocto-zepto-atto-fermi-pico-nano-micro-milli-centi -deci-deka-hecta-kilo-mega-giga-tera-peta-exa-zett a-yotta-angstroms away from home. Away from home awway from home....
Eat at Joe's.
That's not what Verisign is doing at all - if a domain name doesn't exist, they're sending you the IP address of a machine that has a web server and stub email server. That has different effects on different protocols, and all of Verisign's PR fluff about "Customers like it" addresses the friendly fuzzy web user interface, not the atrocious misbehaviour for email and other protocols:
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
A DDOSer who wanted to annoy Sitefinder could do random downloads from their site, and unless they've improved on the original Sitefinder, those downloads are 17KB of singing dancing Javascript instead of ~1KB of simple clean html text. If this has a big enough impact on Sitefinder's bandwidth cost, it will encourage them to provide simple clean html instead of their current potentially-dangerous dreck.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
Bizarre. I guess I really *did* enter a URL, and it went to a search engine, as I recalled.
I guess, if nothing else, this effectively illustrates the problems with taking actions based on what is basically a guess.
If we can't figure out what it's going to do, and get what appear to be contradictory results, what chance does the average user have? The right way to do this is to have a separate text field for searching, which is linked to a search engine that you can select. Then there would be no more guessing games, and no more unintended and annoying behaviour.
I'm equally annoyed that Firefox does this. If anything, their mistake is worse as now there's even a search field next to the URL field. Since that's sitting right there, I *don't* expect the URL field to be doing searches as well.
If it's going to do this, it should pop up a dialog the first time, explaining what it's doing, and give you the chance to turn it off right then and there.
Really?
Other people have had similar results. It's worth noting that this guy, like me, appears to be in Australia (he was taken to ninemsn.com.au). So perhaps the guessing that IE does has been altered slightly for our version? I'll try it next time I get the chance.
Anyway, this is all right here, posted long before your "contribution", so perhaps you should have read that and so been better informed before you over-reacted?
"Remember, these are the guys that think a "dot porn" and a "dot kids" TLD will actually fix anything."
.kids or .students or some form of TLD that is managed would work well, especially if it were handled right. Right now, school districts are forced to try to filter the whole Internet to prevent pornographic materials (and I'm not talking art, I'm talking Tawnee Stone, god bless her soul:) from being easily accessible. If a heavily restricted .kids or .elem or the like domain were created, schools could trust the content of the domain. It'd be similar to the .museum domain. An organizational body could punish or retract domains based on abuses, and the body could work to establish actual guidelines for acceptibility. Granted, it'd be just as political as anything else bodies do, but at least there'd be a chance for it to work right.
I disagree with you to a point on the lack of merit to this idea. I think that a
The trouble with trying to make porn domains is that states could enact laws that prohibit ISPs from allowing traffic to sites that are so easily identified, which would be censorship. It would also be difficult to get pornographers to make use of the domain anyway, since a lot of content mirrored isn't exactly staying within copyright guidelines, and I would imagine that someone engaging in copyright violations wouldn't want to make themselves stand out that clearly.
Do not look into laser with remaining eye.
Maybe Ai would (although she gets bonus points for bubbles), but you've got to admit Nozomi's cheerfulness (a salute!) in the face of...well, her face...is just adorable. I'd give her a hug if that stuff didn't belong to other guys. (she's a smart girl too, that looks like a raincoat she's wearing)
Firebird/fox doesn't use Google because it's the #1 search engine, they use it because it's the best search engine.
It's hard to be religious when certain people are never incinerated by bolts of lightning.
Under IE6, entering "www.randomdomainname.org" into the URL field takes me to:
= DN SAS&q=www.randomdomainname.org
http://search.ninemsn.com.au/dnserror.aspx?FORM
If you type in a proper domain name, IE will just give you a "This page cannot be displayed - Cannot find server or DNS Error". It only tries to do a search if you type in non domain name type expressions. eg a phrase with spaces or a single word without any dots in it which doesn't match a local host
= DN SAS&q=www.randomdomainname.org
This doesn't appear to be true.
If I enter "www.randomdomainname.org", I get:
http://search.ninemsn.com.au/dnserror.aspx?FORM
Please *try* these things before posting misleading rubbish
Looks like it wasn't rubbish at all, doesn't it? And other people report exactly the same thing.
that will only spark further trollish messages
The irony is killing me. Now, since I'm not a reactionary zealot, I'm not going to assume you are being deliberately misleading, but that there's some difference between versions of MSIE and the guessing games they play with the URL field.
Ack! Doesn't anyone get it??? The web browser is not the only DNS client that "asks for the numerical address to which the domain name is bound".
When the SMTP server goes to check the e-mail senders alleged domain, it does not want to get a bogus answer just because VeriSign wants to muck with the system in search of some profit!
"Send an Instant Karma to me" - Yes
Not to mention, not all MS users are IE users. I, for instance, use Opera, which simply errors on an unknown URL.
Regardless, you're claim is that they redirect and don't even tell you they did it. Quote "IE will take you immediately to a search engine without displaying any error message." - posted by Alien_Blueprint.
Again, I call bullshit. Tell the truth, and you won't get pissed off when people say "That's not true".
Regardless, you're (sic) claim is that they redirect and don't even tell you they did it
Look at the URL. It clearly takes you to search.ninemsn.com.au. That is the fundamental problem. Understand? Try it with something where the search succeeds, and you won't even see an error. But error or not, going to another page is behaviour that is just broken.
Again, I call bullshit. Tell the truth, and you won't get pissed off when people say "That's not true".
Honestly I don't have time to respond to this nonsense if you can't behave like a grown-up person. I refuse to waste my time on clowns, so spew your vitriol in your reply if you like, but I won't be responding.
not at all. DNS == Domain Name Service ie a server generally contactable on port 53/udp somewhere that you query for info. a hosts file is a text file on your system (you knew this of course). now admittedly both are accessed by the resolver libraries but they also access NIS as well can't it, and other information services if correctly complied to do so.
I'd say you're not using DNS until you send a DNS query packet. it's like you're not using dns if you log into a DNS server and read the zone files by hand.
or am I wrong?
dave
Yes, it does. And when you read the page it takes you to it clearly states We can't find "www.randomdomainname.org". That doesn't fit with your previous claim "IE will take you immediately to a search engine without displaying any error message", which was the post that I called BS on.
IE does take you to a search engine - but it does display an error message. And MS doesn't do it to all windows users, as the subject line claims - they do it to IE users, a subset of windows users. Many (most?) of those users probably find it useful.
This is a browser issue that has nothing to do with Verisign/Sitefinder. Don't like how IE handles it? I don't blame you. There are other things I don't like about IE, which is why I use Opera. However, disliking MS or IE is no reason to make up fiction and try to pass it off as truth.
BTW, I'm not a clown - just a juggler. :^) I'm a grown up with a bad attitude about people who just make things up. If you are going to get upset when people point out that what you are posting is, in fact, not true, perhaps you should be a bit more honest when you post in the first place. I'm not trying to piss you off, but what you said is simply not true.
This is a browser issue that has nothing to do with Verisign/Sitefinder. Don't like how IE handles it? I don't blame you. There are other things I don't like about IE, which is why I use Opera. However, disliking MS or IE is no reason to make up fiction and try to pass it off as truth.
:^) I'm a grown up with a bad attitude about people who just make things up. If you are going to get upset when people point out that what you are posting is, in fact, not true, perhaps you should be a bit more honest when you post in the first place. I'm not trying to piss you off, but what you said is simply not true.
I never made stuff up, or tried to pass it off as truth. You need to go back, and see that I said "IIRC" before that all-important (too you) sentence. I honestly only remembered it jumping to the search page - perhaps that time I'd done a typo like "slashdotorg" or something. If you do something like that, you go straight to a search results page.
You shouldn't jump to conclusions about whether I'm trying to bash MS for fun. I don't particularly hate MS or IE. I just prefer Unix-like systems, as that's my background and I find it a nice developer environment.
I was only trying to work out what Firefox was doing, in fact, which is what this whole thing was about for me. That's all I was really interested in - I only mentioned IE's behaviour because I didn't think Firefox did that and was trying to work out why the poster thought it did.
BTW, I'm not a clown - just a juggler.
Again, I did say "IIRC". "If I recall correctly." I could only remember it going off to some search site or other - I *thought* that was fairly clear. I wasn't just making stuff up for fun or out of hatred of Redmond or whatever - that's what just I remembered, but since I couldn't check I stuck IIRC in front, so I consider that statement to be completely honest.
An aside - IE *still* goes off to another site in order to display this "error message" though. That's just as bad as rushing off to a search results page to me. It shouldn't go to *any* site, but just display an error dialog!
Tools, Internet Options, Advanced, and in the section titled "Search from the Address Bar" click on "Do not search from the address bar" and you'll get that result.
That works under Win98/IE6.0. I dunno about other OS's or other versions of IE.
...and I didn't like Sitefinder! Please, Verisign, don't bring it back!
-Rich
Wouldn't that require some sort of space-time anomaly? Those are hard to come by.