Slashdot Mirror
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."
ICANN threatened to sue them, and 'revoke' their registry status last time, and they relented. Is there any indication that ICANN intends to do the same thing again? My guess is that Verisign isn't as stupid as SCO and wouldn't go forward with this if they thought they would lose out on what's basically a huge free money engine over this. Have they made a deal with ICANN? Do they think they can win, and own the entire domain system for .COM and .NET, ICANN be damned?
I mean, if they can get away with this, what's to stop them from doing things like shutting out other registrars, etc?
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.
What Verisign will learn is that the kid has already gone outside into the world and cannot be kept under thumb.
Also, does anyone remember, speak of the devil, Microsoft's viewpoint on this? They essentially do the same thing on the lower level with default browsers for their search engine. Any insight?
Let's keep in mind that patents are in place to keep lawyers employed and keep them litigating. -CatGrep
for a distributed decentralized DNS using JXTA,
which is the Java peer-to-peer framework.
The basic idea is to trust your peers,
rather than the centralized system now.
Of course that raises all kinds of questions;
still it's compelling to consider the approach.
The O'Reilly introduction is HERE
Cheers, Joel
Just throwing out an idea... There has been a lot of talk about whose laws should apply in cyberspace. One thought is that maybe it should be made explicit whose laws are applying by making the country explicit in the domain name. Ditch all .com, .org, .net, etc domains and just keep the country top level domains.
.com redirect to .com.us in the US, .com.au in Australia, etc. Those names would only be useful as shorthand for people to type and would be deprecated as published URLs (because they would no longer mean the same thing everywhere).
.us site from Canada, the same laws apply as if I poked a stick over the border while standing in Canada.
.us).
As an ease of use measure you could make
When I access a
Moreover, it removes the problem of VeriSign playing with the TLDs (at least for the rest of the world, I don't know who administers
Pity it'll never happen.
The suggestion that the generic TLDs should be administered by a non-profit organisation (with international representation, I would add) is entirely reasonable and seems like the Right Answer.
In theory it sounds good. However, in practice, I can't say I've ever come across a well-organized non-profit that wasn't constantly having to sacrifice its ideals to stay afloat, or wasn't teeming with epic ego-battles among the people involved.
I hate to admit it, but I think government agencies are traditionally better run and organized than the vast majority of non-profits.
Well now, if we are going to have urls and dns, we need someone to sit on the database of who has what assigned to where.
......
meet Verisign...
Ok, so we are sitting on the afforementioned database with the required info for the internet presence for millions if not billions of people,
what shall we do?
I know, lets break it all and try to break into the search engine business! Every page anyone looks for on a domain that no longer exists will be our domain!
All your leftovers are belong to verisign!
Now to me this just seems like an abuse of power by the people who look after the database for us.
(veri-lame)
If they had mentioned that they would do this in the future then i'm most likely we wouldn't have picked verisign to look after our data, or we would have made sure they couldn't use it as a gun to our heads further down the road.
If they were going to break all the RFC's and the like, again, we would have put blocks in place.
but instead they are free to claim they own every domain that was ever that doesn't have a paying owner right now. Not that verisign are paying to squat on that domain mind, they just control the database.
so i say again
All your leftovers are belong to verisign!
Who do they think they are? I don't want to use their substandard search engine anyway.
much more useful would be a link to the domain as it was last known on internet archive or some other internet backup site. Not whatever it is verisigns ill thought out search routines are going to return.
This site is a little conspiratorial, but at the time many of the people in the know agreed that Abovenet and MAPS blackholed ORBS by using dirty tricks little advertising low cost (hop count) routes to ORBS and then blackholing the traffic. See here among others.
He seems fond of making everything two tiered, pay for BIND support, pay for access to the MAPS *BLs now. There was the situation where the patches for BIND were only available to those who paid. This was a huge deal at the time.
There also seems to be denials of the connections between ISC and the other money making businesses that Paul and his employees are involved with.
This is not a guy who want to share power and take the opinions of others into account, he and his companies also have a history of attacking overtly (DJB) and covertly (ORBS) people or groups who cross them. They scare me more than a bumbling giant corporation... Paul has companies/domains like Men in Black Hats and New World Order, these guys have very high opinions of themselves. I and many others would never speak out publicly against him, his employees/"volunteers" or companies because of the power they wield and their willingness to exact revenge on people who speak out against them. Those who do speak out are immediately branded as spammers or worse.
Some Paul quotes:
If Varisign can tinker with DNS responses provided by their DNS, why can't every other downstream DNS server act in kind, when forwarding a query, taking the ersatz advertising responses from Varisign and substituting their own advertising website, or better yet, substitute the responsible "usual" behavior?
Indeed, if Varisign does this, wouldn's such a response be inevitable, for good and for ill?
What I will be most amused by when that happens are the frivolous lawsuits Varisign will raise when that happens.
Engineer has an idea. Engineer implements the idea. Engineer is happy. Engineer's peers are happy. Non-engineer picks it up and uses it to get a lot of money, tarnishing the original idea in the process. All engineers are outraged.
The article states that engineers should be more aware of politics. That's bull.
An engineer that takes politics into account will accomplish nothing, because he is battling windmills. Trying to protect your inventions against corporate meddling is impossible. The problem is that those who invent simply do not have the power to enforce the "right" use of their invention. Being aware that that power lies with people who are mainly interested in squeezing money out of ideas will only make you despressed.
And there are reasons that this is the way it is. The two main ones are (1) the innovators are the grease-monkeys of the corporate and political worlds; and (2) the fact that innovations can generate money is the catalyst that allows engineers to innovate.
These two reasons lead to three possible solutions for the described situation.
Solution 1: More engineers become politicians, thereby gaining influence on law-making and getting the ability to bend the laws to idealistic purposes. Unfortunately, engineers (just as scientists and artists) do not want to be politicians. It's a frustrating job, especially if you are idealistic. If someone is only interested in money and power, it can be a fulfilling job, but I don't expect idealistic law-making from such a person.
Solution 2: Engineers refuse to work for corporations and develop their ideas for themselves. Unfortunately, this will mean that they do not have the funding to work on their interesting ideas, and even if they succeed, a big corporation will notice them and run away with them.
Solution 3: Engineers do not create inventions that can be or need to be exploited for money. Translated: Engineers won't innovate at all.
Conclusion: All three solutions won't work in practice. Since that is a depressing thought, perhaps you better not read this comment.
Too late.