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Verisign's SiteFinder - An Engineer's View
ixs writes "CircleID has an interesting article by David Monosov about Verisign's plans to reintroduce Sitefinder.
The article presents the thesis that the Internet engineering community is partly to blame for Verisign's ability to mess with the .com and .net root zones. According to the author we spend too much time with our systems and not enough with politics. The writeup was previously posted to NANOG and received a favorable response from Paul Vixie."
It's not easy for someone sophisticated in technology just 'step into' these politics. These are still big companies, and those who make the decisions just consult geeks if they want to - and believe them - if they want to.
-el
The tone of the summary makes it seem like Monosov is advocating leaving Verisign alone and letting them do whatever they want.
.com,.net, and .org registration from capitalist companies, and give it to a more global entity. Then, use those funds to help the Internet infrastructure further instead of lining the pockets of the already-rich.
In fact, the article is exactly the opposite and states that we should wrest control of
People often use metaphors to describe things like this, which sometimes bugs me because people then get into arguments about the metaphor, which is totally pointless. We are all smart enough to discuss this directly, I should hope.
In any event, I did think of one, and I thought I'd share it with y'all because I have nothing better to do.
It would be like the government contracting out road work to a private company, and then having that company put huge advertising over the signs, or printed right on the road. And then having the CEO going out and saying "It's time someone started making money off infrastructure." When in fact what they are doing is making things worse for everyone else to benefit themselves, and doing it with something that they have only by coincidence, rather then any real work.
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.
What Verisign doesn't understand is that the public will put up with it's monopoly if we can use the internet day to day without seeing the verisign logo. This company has somehow cheated the system to become the overlord of the internet. As long as everyday consumers aren't aware where their meat comes from, they'll eat it. But if the harsh truth faced them every day, nobody would touch a big mac. In the same way, Verisign can get away with it's monopoly because nobody cares where the internet comes from. I hope sitefinder changes this. Let sitefinder be the 21st century "The Jungle."
Quid festinatio swallonis est aetherfuga inonusti?
Africus aut Europaeus?
Verisign put a DNS wildcard in to sell their search service and generally piss off the world.
We put in a bind patch to prevent DNS wildcarding on top level domains.
We don't need to play brain-dead political games with these losers. It's our internet, not theirs. We have the right to totally ignore any and all of ICANN's setup and use our own DNS servers without notice and without asking for their permission.
Countries and corporations are both run by people whose primary job is politics. It is extremely difficult to go up against these people without becoming one of them.
Not many engineers want to become politicians, even if it means fighting for something they value. They want to do their job, which is designing stuff.
N4st0r, trixx0r h0bb1tz0rz! Th3y st0l3 0ur pr3c10uzz!
I mean, if they can get away with this, what's to stop them from doing things like shutting out other registrars, etc?
.com and .net registry was setup and honoured all existing third level domains.
We are. There is only a minor edit to resolv.conf between having a monopoly and having nothing.
ICANN could be forced to revoke verisigns status if an alternate
Isn't Google enough service to look for sites?
SiteFinder will only be of help if you misspell the hostname, if you have a typo in the path you'll get the usual 404 anyway. And I guess you will start not liking it when you misspell hostnames in mail addresses. The Internet is more than just HTTP and SiteFinder is messing up the rest a lot.
Another thing is that the way they implement this SiteFinder is breaking other stuff on the net. Internet is more than just Web, you know.
And it certainly did not help that they ran an SMTP server aswell. God knows what it collected before it dropped the connection, and the server was also RFC ignorant with programmed responses.
I was tempted to mod you a troll, but figured all the answers you would get would be quite informative on the issue.
Correct. The problem is not in the service, it is in the implementation. Doing this in DNS has side effects on all other protocols that utilize DNS, not just HTTP. I have no problem with a browser feature that does a similar thing only for HTTP. Many browsers already do this in fact, just try typing "slashdot" into your browser. That's not a valid (internet) hostname, but I bet you end up where you expect. With sitefinder you would end up on sitefinder, not slashdot.org. That's a simple case, but there's no reason the browser (or plugin) could not account for typos, etc and query a service to find the best match.
Putting it simply, I think the present organisation works this way: people with power (government) and people with money (corporation) get together so that some of the power can be used to generate more money. The corporation is happy because of easy money; the government can use the threat of taking the money away to influence the behaviour of the corporation, which is happy to appease its master so long as the money is there. Both parties are happy. Everyone else doesn't really figure in on the equation unless the corporation does something to rile the general public, at which point the government may be obliged to take steps which make it look like it's doing its job.
Suppose the government delegates control of the GTLDs to a non-profit organisation which has a mandate to ensure the smooth operation of DNS infrastructure, and can be relied upon to do a good job of that. What's in it for the government? They can't easily coerce the organisation into doing things in a manner which leaves them in control (governments thrive on control), since there's no greed to manipulate. Further, no filthy lucre means no pork for the politicians to direct back to their electorate. What's in it for the politicians?
How do you sell a politician on an idea when the best you can come up with is, "this is obviously the Right Thing to do." What you really need is a P.R. headline which emphasises how it's good for employment, or the economy, or security, or will save the children, and a subtle undergirding of, "this will make you (politicians) more powerful and/or popular and/or provide economic benefits to your constituents."
So what we need is some very creative P.R. spin, and I'm not very talented at it. Any suggestions?
proof, n. A demonstration that a conclusion is implied by certain premises and axioms.
I agree that the tech community has traditionally been averse to playing politics, and this is evidenced in many areas. Nowhere is this more poignant than in the issue of SPAM, which is now more of a political than a technical issue. The tech community needs to form a hardcore lobbying group to force the Federal Authorities to do their job and prioritize the prosecution of spammers and other groups who are stealing, breaking into and destroying resources. The ineffectiveness of anti-spam efforts nowadays is the perfect testimonial to the much-needed aggressive politicking the tech community needs to do to solve this problem.
On the other hand, the business community is also being too political and not technical enough. Tens, perhaps hundreds of thousands of businesses do not have secure networks and related policies and 99% of the larger operations are not fully-exploiting the technology available to them.
Likewise, the mainstream business community is excessively political and seems to have had the common sense, as well as technical insight, sucked out of a majority of their business models. The whole "dot bomb" implosion was the result of too many companies relying exclusively on hype and politics to drive their business model.
While the tech community can stand to be more political, I think the mainstream business community even more desperately needs to get technical.
We don't need to play brain-dead political games with these losers. It's our internet, not theirs. We have the right to totally ignore any and all of ICANN's setup and use our own DNS servers without notice and without asking for their permission.
While a shift is not as trivial as you make it, I do agree with on major point.
Paul Vixie has been running around trying to ensure that nobody acts "immaturely" or engages in name-calling with Verisign. He's desperate to be taken seriously.
That's ridiculous. Verisign, not the engineers criticising them, is the side lacking respectability. The engineers run and design the networks and control the systems that Verisign uses. Verisign is a comparatively tiny collection of a few people who have buddies in politics, scientists, and engineers.
Nobody should feel constrained in their online conversation for fear of "sounding respectable". The engineers who run the networks need prove nothing. They are running things. The only organization that has to worry about image at all is Verisign, which must seem at least impartial and benevolent enough to keep ICANN from axing their monopoly, which could be done.
Verisign was granted a special, unique opportunity to get money for doing almost no work (some bandwidth and adding an entry to a database). Yes, they *can* be expected not to play hardball, as would be accepted in a general business arena, as they are not operating as a regular business. They have a monopoly that was granted to them that they do very well off of. If they want to continuously test their limits and see how much additional money they can soak people for, ICANN and other engineers are under no requirement to keep granting Verisign the right to continue making vast amounts of money for almost no effort.
Verisign has clearly indicated that it is not currently willing to operate a public trust in good faith. They have continued to spout what most engineers consider to be bullshit, and have ignored frusterated feedback. Unfortunately, we have only one remedy, aside from formal complaints from ICANN (which have already been tried), and that is threats against and ultimately termination of Verisign's special privileges. Doing so will mean work for a lot of systems around the world, temporary service interruptions, bad blood at Verisign (and with political buddies of Verisign) and the risk that nobody else will be willing to step up after Verisign (given that their role might be terminated). Verisign is gambling that the Internet's collection of network engineers do not have the balls to actually terminate their role with a certain amount of bad behavior on their part. I am increasingly wanting to see Verisign's gamble proven wrong.
Shifting to OpenNIC or similar has its own set of problems -- can the same level of service be provided? What happens when an name schisms start appearing?
However, it may be better to be safe than sorry. Every day, Verisign makes it harder and harder to extricate them from a position where they can feed on vast amounts of technology money. This is acceptable, as long as they operate in good faith, which they have not done. Verisign's management has tried deceptive renewal forms sent to Verisign competitors. They have tried mucking about with fundamental components of the Internet. They may not be at a point where they must immediately be replaced, but I think that they are at a point where they must be made to modify their behavor or be terminated.
May we never see th
I'd also be interested in the opinion of NANOG and of certain USENET groups. They'd probably have at *least* as much weight as Slashdot.
May we never see th
...this article is stating somethi8ng that isn't a new concept, but certainly one that needs to be paid more attention to.
Geeks in general have been absent from the political process, or at best mediocre at bitching in online fora and sending boilerplate emails as if having your meager feeling of involvement is somehow truly the best use of your collective intellect. A handwritten letter is usually worth 1000 emails (that is a comparison I have heard enough times to conbsider it fairly valid).
The people currently most likely to be active at a grass roots level (wrt technology) seem to either abject Luddites or simply big commercial concerns that have more pecuniary motives than anything else...and profits do not always equate to innovation or the best interest of the public at large. Technology Policy these days is being largely defined by non-technical cadres of lawyers and politicos who can barely spell SSH let alone know what it does. These are people who willingly purchase questionable products for elections from Diebold, who have had convoluted and inane encryption laws (here is the genie...it's out of the bottle...deal), not to mention have propped up such fucktarded laws as the DMCA and UNITA and left the state of Intellectual Property laws to go pretty much on the liberal side of imbecilic).
I would guess that the vast mobs of AOLers and their ilk have never even heard of Verisign or SCO, nor care particularly. As long as they can fumble their way to whatever site they like, it doesn't matter to them.
A non-profit organization was set up to run Internet name assignments, with international participation, representation of major infrastructure players, and even a nascent direct interested-person representation system.
It was called the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers, and it's the organization that went ahead and so solidly entrenched VeriSign in the first place.
Merely passing along control to another NGO is not, in itself, a solution; there is no reason to expect it won't be politicized and turned into another ICANN.
I'd just like to ask, "where's the beef in this article?". To my eyes, it reads like a general complaint on life in general. Should he have titled this article, "My rant" ? There's nothing, I repeat, NO THING, in this article that wasn't already said, more eloquantly, in yesterday's slashdot article: What the Internet Isn't"
-- I'd give my right arm to be ambidextrous
Agreed! :-)
So let's find out the UN's new URL:
www.united-nations.nyc.ny.us for the HQ. ...
Oh, wait, they have dependencies elsewhere:
www.united-nations.wien.at
www.united-nations.geneva.ch, www.united-nations.geneve.ch, www.united-nations.genf.ch,
Or how's about, say, www.apache.org, slashdot.org, ...?
cpghost at Cordula's Web.
Sometimes I misspell URLs and I actually *like* having a service that attempts to find the site I'm looking for.
Hey, good point! You can't type, so we should break the internet and one of the few effective anti-spam techniques, so that you don't have to retype "www.hot-mokney-porn.com".
By the way, I'm a fat slob with a heart condition, but I can't keep my fat ass out of McDonalds, inhaling lard-burger after lard-burger. I'd actually like a service that shut down all McDonalds and inconvenienced everybody else who can manage to control their compulsion to have evry meal at McDonalds.
By the way, I'm an alky; I jus' can't stay awy from dat ol' demon rum. Howsabout we Prohibit all alcohol, jus' 'cause I can't figure out how to stop after two drinks?
By the way, I get really afraid of Ay-rabs, and I don't understand why anybody would mind being on camera 24/7 unless they had something to hide. Can we tear up the Fourth Amedment and let John Ashcroft read your mail and tap your phones in order to give me a spurious sense of security?
I mean, that would be really convenient to me if we could do these things. I don't care how it would inconvenience you, becuase I, just like Verisign, am in the business of offloading my costs onto the community, in order to increase the personal profits I keep all to myself.
Opinions on the Twiddler2 hand-held keyboard?
i like Vixie - but mostly from an engineering perspective .. the whole issue is way too political - picture a younger Richard Stallman fighting against a Gates-wanna-be and I think you get the rough picture on the battlelines.
.. what you really need is a messiah to organize nanog, strip out the key underpaid engineers from Verisign Registry, and provide a valid and fair compensation model to maintain, grow, and implement the appropriate changes.
If these are the choices, I don't think there is a good choice either way
I have yet to see a peer-to-peer framework that solves one problem, though:
Spam bad. What happens when the spammers stop selling email and start selling hits to websites? ie, they set up hundreds of computers which report DNS entries back incorrectly, so that maybe www.linux.org goes to www.someotherplace.com. Then there is the issue of all of the zombie viruses, instead of opening relays they could instead edit DNS listings on computers they infected that were responding to peer-to-peer requests.
The current system works, unfortunatly a major company is taking advantage of their system to change how it works. Maybe we should give management of those TLDs back to Network Solutions...
Whee signature.
There is only trademark infringement if the usage is likely to cause confusion. Generally, the usage needs to be within the same industry or product category. It is unlikely that people will confuse SiteFinder with your site. Simply having a database that takes in a trademarked keyword and returns results related to that keyword is legitimate -- even if some of the result refer to competitors.
May we never see th
They appeal to the most social outcasts in our society who are pretty much worthless to the functioning of the country at large. For example, they promise welfare, universal free health care and tax cuts to people who contribute absolutely nothing to the prosperity of the country.
I'd like to hear you say this when you can't get the gas tank on your monster SUV filled, your laundry dry cleaned, or there's nobody to serve you your biggie shake and biggie fries at the local Wendy's. The functioning of the country depends on these "social outcasts" doing the menial, thankless, below poverty level jobs that you are so quick to shit on them for doing.
They wage a class war for their own political gain by facing the "rich" (i.e. families of 4 making more than $50k/year by their own definition) against the "poor". The haves vs. the have-nots.
Once again I'd like to know why it's called waging class warfare if you push for the interests of "the little guy", but if your benefactor is a rich CEO or somebody else in the upper tax bracket, it's not class warfare. I will agree with your point that what the Democrats do is pretty sleazy, but not because they speak up for those on the lower rungs on the ladder; it's because they say they're the party of the common man when in reality they're more interested in those same CEOs, upper class families, and big businesses as the Republicans. At least when the GOP votes for a big tax cut to help their Fortune 500 buddies and screw the working man you expect it, because that's what they stand for. It's scandalous when the Dems do it because from their rhetoric you'd expect them to be better about it.
And this is where I will have to part company from the author of the article as well: if every geek is as politically ignorant as you are, I would just as soon prefer that they stay out of politics, as it's obvious that whatever your technical competence may be, you would only manage to do more harm than good.
fuck you.