Slashdot Mirror
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?"
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
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
All slashdotters, espeically people that were seriously affected by sitefinder, please complain NOW. Let them know how controversial it is!
found here
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.
Many sites cannot be reached by their IP address alone. Ever heard of shared hosting ("name based virtual hosting")?
DNS is used by a variety of applications, not just the web. By returning bogus data instead of "NXDOMAIN" (non-existant domain) to applications, applications are unable to easily detect legitimate errors.
Many/most web-browsers already allow you to configure them to go to a search engine in the event of a problem. People actually complain about IE doing it, and IE is the most installed/used webbrowser on the planet, so at most maybe 5% of people, who use browsers other than IE, whose browsers do not support searching for bad domains, would find this "hack" useful.
Additionally, a web browser knows basic information such as what language you speak. SiteFinder didn't. The impact of SiteFinder is such that it replaces an error message everyone can read with a page that many people cannot.
It's bad, and redundant, for web browsers. And it breaks everything else. What's the up-side?
You are not alone. This is not normal. None of this is normal.
I have to think you're trolling, but I"ll bite anyway. You're falling into the common trap of only thinking of DNS as affecting Web traffic. What about email? If you fat-finger your friend's email address, don't you *want* that email to come back, rather than dissappearing into the void that is Verisign? The wildcard they're putting into the DNS isn't just about web traffic. It's *all* DNS queries...that's going to affect email, ssh, nntp, everything. Once of the basic spam filters, for instance, is a check to see if the sender's domain exists. With the wildcard, *all* domains exist, causing you to get more spam.
SiteFinder the search service is fine. The DNS wildcard to *force* you to SiteFinder is what makes people angry.