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."

Comments

A Solution

[1s44c]

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.

Engineering vs. politics

[BitwizeGHC]

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.

Re:ICANN?

[1s44c]

I mean, if they can get away with this, what's to stop them from doing things like shutting out other registrars, etc?

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 .com and .net registry was setup and honoured all existing third level domains.

Re:I kind of like SiteFinder

[tyldis]

If you want that then you can use a browser which supports it and sends you to a search page of *your* liking. If I don't want it, I can configure my browser to display an error instead. This is freedom of choice. SiteFinder did not seem to find the best webpage matching your search, but the company that paid them the most to match.

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.

it goes both ways

[humankind]

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.

Re:I kind of like SiteFinder

[orthogonal]

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.