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F-Secure Calls for '.safe' TLD
Rajesh writes "According to F-Secure, ICANN (Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers), the organization responsible for the global coordination of the Internet's system of unique identifiers, should introduce a .safe domain name to be used by registered banks and other financial organizations."
I don't advise clicking that link.
... I don't think it will work, at least not how they think.
Many worms change your HOSTS file and there's also the good ol' DNS poisoning, so this ".safe" thing can't be 100% trusted. And if it can't be 100% trusted, we might as well stick to what we (don't) have.
It is not the same thing. This proposal calls for whitelisting. In contrast the joke required that bad people blacklist themselves.
d itorials/dumb/
.endworldhunger
Enumerating badness is a bad idea from a security point of view:
http://www.ranum.com/security/computer_security/e
Enumerating goodness might work, but raises many issues. Who does it, based on what criteria and how are the criteria enforced?
Why do people keep demanding the DNS to solve all the problems in the world? It's just an address book, not the solution to world hunger. Oh, maybe that is the next TLD proposal:
This has already happened: Hacked Chinese Bank Server Phishes for US Banks.
Bogtha Bogtha Bogtha
Why is it that everyone seems to think a company that transfers money and holds money in accounts is a bank? Your utility companies do that, credit cards are issued by non-banks all day, et cetera. You might as well argue that Final Fantasy Online is a bank - you can purchase in-game currency, give it to someone else, then have it converted back to real currency. Do rechargeable, releaseable gift cards make every store in the mall a bank? Is my cellular phone company a bank? My cell phone can make payments for me, even.
Bank regulations aren't about little-guy money transfers, and wouldn't help in virtually any of the "omg paypal skrooed me" situations (which, I might note, I've never actually seen be anything other than the fault of one of the two end-users. Yes, PayPal freezes accounts too easily, but frankly, if you can't tolerate a several-day money lag, you shouldn't be transacting online at all.) Bank regulations are about the investment of held capital and so forth, to prevent messes like the 1914 commodity crash or the 1980s savings and loan scandal. Say what you will about PayPal, but their back-end investments are safe, conservative and shrewd. No bank regulations would affect PayPal in any way that the end users would find significant, other than to increase existing rates (not by enough to affect most transactions, but it would kill the micropayment system dead.)
The next time you go complaining about regulations, maybe you should name the specific regulation you want. That way, when people read what you say, they won't do what I did, and assume you're some clueless whiner who just wants to repeat what everyone else says to sound smart, when bitching about an online business that they heard screwed a friend of a friend of a friend.
Of course, that'd require knowing what you were talking about.
StoneCypher is Full of BS