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Verisign Recommended to Keep .com & .net
An Anonymous SAIC Employee writes "The 'independent' company hired by ICANN to advise them on who should run the .com and .net registry has recommended that Verisign (fact sheet) should be chosen to continue to run the registry. Is it any surprise? Telcordia was owned by SAIC (Fact Sheet) during the time the study was conducted. SAIC bought Telcordia (fact sheet) (then Bellcore) in Nov. 1997 and sold it March 15, 2005. Network Solutions was bought by SAIC in 1995 and sold in 2000. Also, Telcordia worked with Verisign on the ENUM project. Is the fox guarding the hen house?"
Technocrat had this story yesterday - probably have a bit more discussion about it on Slashdot, but we'll have to see about the signal-noise ratio ... ;-)
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It's about other things. For example, as the article says, in 2003 when VeriSign directed 404 errors to their own search engine.
Correction: VeriSign directed NXDOMAIN ("domain does not exist") DNS errors to their own search engines.
That links to a last measure site.
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.
SAIC might be crazy for hens like a fox. But who is this "An Anonymous SAIC Employee"? There's Slashdot UserID like that. Sure, the facts and interpretations of this incestuous relationship stand on their own (possible) merits. But what else is going on with this Slashdot story? Are we all just being used as a propaganda market again, in another infowar between rivals for the same government contract?
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make install -not war
This is NOT a trivial correction, either.
The GP makes it sound like it affected only web access. This was certainly not the case.
As an example, all sorts of DNS based tests around if a sending domain really existed started failing, removing one of the spam-blocker's methods of determining if a message is legit (IE: reject from unknown domains).
NXDOMAIN is in the spec for a reason, and Verisign hardly even got their hand slapped for breaking it.