Why do you seek to portray Verisign as such a sleazy company?
They are doing that on their own. We are just pointing it out.
AFAIK they have allways delivered a decent service at decent price to their customers.
Then you don't K very F. They charge more than everyone else and provide the worst customer service of any major player in the business. They are able to get away with this only because of their name recognition and because of whatever respectability rubs off on them due to their contract to manage the.com and.net roots.
As a long time customer I must say that they are nice to deal with compared to many of those unethical companies that you find on the internet that just want to scam you.
I'll rephrase your statement for you and state my agreement: "Yes, there are other lying scammers out there who are even sleazier than Verisign."
All I can say is that you must have very low expectations.
What is it with their offer to route misspelled domain names that you hate so much?
The fact that you describe it in those terms makes it clear that (A) you've bought their propaganda hook, line, and sinker, and (B) you have no idea what you're talking about from a technical perspective.
They aren't "rout[ing] misspelled domain names". They are hijacking ALL unregistered.com and.net domain names, and they are lying to DNS resolvers about which names are registered and which aren't. This breaks all software that depends on being able to verify the existence of a domain, or which follows a specific fallback procedure in the absence of a domain's successfully resolving. It is costing the business world millions of dollars in time spent reconfiguring systems and patching DNS software. I would hope to see the worst-affected organizations suing them to recover these costs. Or perhaps a class-action suit is in order, given the widespread damage they have caused.
It's called an anarchy, and I personally don't think it is the best form of goverment.
That's because you haven't been to Somalia, the Libertarian Paradise.
There, everyone is free to pursue their economic dreams without any government interference whatsoever. It's even a meta-libertarian paradise: Contract enforcement itself is provided by contract, with each participant in a transaction hiring its own band of thugs to ensure that the other participants stay honest.
Someone being awarded damages for burns from a liquid that is expected to be hot is asinine, no matter what temperature McD's kept it at.
I don't agree at all. People make rational risk assessments based on reasonable expectations.
I expect the water in a hotel shower to be hot. So before I step in, I wave my hand under the stream. If the water is so hot that doing that causes the skin on my hand to blister, I am going to hold the hotel responsible - even though I "expected" it "to be hot". I didn't expect it to be that hot.
Likewise, she took a calculated risk in placing the coffee between her legs. She should have known that if it spilled, it could be painful or even cause a mild burn. However, at the temperature at which coffee is normally served, she would not have received a third-degree burn, and there was no evident reason to plan for that possibility.
That this just happens to scare off any upstart competitor to Symantec and MacAfee's control of their market, is, I'm sure, a purely unintended consequence of the fight against terrorism and the terrible threat to our nation of a haxored box adding a few hundred more spam emails to the torrent already flowing in from China.
You're right on the nose here (I entered this article to post what you've already said, so since I've already gone through the trouble, I'm offering a me-too).
This is purely an anti-competitive effort. They want to clamp down on open-source competition by making public collaboration on these issues illegal.
They have no interest in stopping the development of viruses, because without those, they lose their income stream.
This is transparent as glass. It's a craven and manipulative appeal to public fear, aimed at getting themselves legislated into a near-monopoly.
At least one FSU country I was in had a bandwidth to the Internet of 64KB. Yes, that is the country. Own sattelite dishes require a lot of paperwork. The US embassy has one, the World Bank has one but I don't think that any of the other diplomatic missions do.
When, in 1995? I'm not aware of any countries at this time with such limited bandwidth.
Also keep in mind that the State Dept IT infrastructure is horribly backward and is no barometer of anything except for how little funding Helms let slip through that year (RIP his chairmanship). A few years back I was posted to a prominent US embassy that had no internet link at all (except for a modem in the USIS library that always had a waiting list). After befriending some folks from the Canadian mission at a party (the US did throw better parties) I made a deal to come over and use their high-speed link for research. Meanwhile a nearby (but not as near as the canemb) US military facility had bandwidth galore. I've seen this pattern repeated again and again.
In Kyrgyzstan we use AsiaInfo which provides pretty decent service (I think they have a 1M connection). In Tajikistan we use Telecomm. Their latency is killer (no VoIP except Push-To-Talk style) but the bandwidth is definitely more than 64K as we've been able to saturate multiple 56K modem links. The other countries are obviously well-connected.
With the g.729 codec you can get the bandwidth requirement down to around 8Kbps.
This may not be the best answer given the criteria in the article, but when I have this need I use a $5 phone (which I bought at a drugstore on the way to the airport one time) plugged into a Cisco ATA-186 box that is in turn connected to a Linux laptop running Asterisk. The laptop connects using IAX-over-SSH to a server back here in Washington that in turn connects to the office phone system. From there the calls get routed to local extensions, out to POTS, or to other Asterisk systems, as required.
In addition to being reasonably secure, it saves a lot of money. Hotels usually charge a flat daily rate for broadband in the room. For that amount I can make and receive all the international calls I want.
The problem with the dnscache (djbdns) patch is that it filters based on IP addresses. While this is the obvious solution, I don't think it is the best solution. I think BIND's approach is to list the domains that should be delegate only, and that is a better approach because that way they can't just change the IP every day to avoid getting blocked.
The djbdns approach actually seems better, to me.
With the BIND approach, Verisign just has to switch from directly handing out an A record, to handing out a delegation to one of their name servers, and then have that one hand out the A. Then the BIND patch is useless.
However, with the djbdns approach, all they can do is move around to new IP addresses. But these are easy to find. Have a daily cron job generate 10 or 20 long, random domains and issue queries. If it gets the same address on more than a few, add it to the ignoreip file and svc -t/service/dnscache, and you're good to go, once again protected against Verisign's poisoning of the DNS. This could even be done on a distributed basis ala razor. IP space is finite, so while Verisign can run, they can't hide.
The interesting bit about the guy trying to work in India, is that they don't allow foreigners in to work, i.e. it is fine for all the Indian's to go to other countries and leach work, but it is not ok for people to go to India to get work. Capeche?
That part is not interesting to me, because having worked as a foreigner in India, I know it not to be true.
Also, "leech work" is a fairly one-sided description. They are also providing low-cost high-skill labor that increases the efficiency of our economy. Proper social policy will derive from a dispassionate weighing of these competing interests.
The voice training at the call centers seems to be going downhill. Time was I could barely pick out the Indians. Now I'm getting obvious hints of Indian accents almost half the time I call a bank, airline, etc. It's fun to greet them with "namaste" and listen as they get flustered and then recover.
I haven't heard of any barrier for foreigners working in India. Anyone care to cite some relevant Indian law, rather than a few words at the tail end of an article?
I have legally worked in India. I think someone was being overly glib.
Yep you are exactly right. I am a US citizen and my company had to get a work Permit to send me to England. I don't get why this should be on Slashdot.
Read the article more carefully. The guy tried to get a job with Tata Consulting, an Indian-owned firm operating in the USA that places staff at USA-based clients. They apparently refused to hire him for this work in the USA because they do not hire Americans. Only then did he try to work in India, which is the less interesting aspect.
That, to me, tells me you're arrogant, rude and not as smart as you think you are. I'm sure you'll go far.
Ah, but I already have.
What you haven't learned yet is that arrogance is a lot more important than smarts when it comes to going far. Rudeness, well, you can play that either way.
If I leave a relay that I am responsible for open, but don't actually do the spamming, why should I be held responsible? I didn't spam anyone, why are you blocking me?
The difference is night and day. There are basically no parallels.
When the RIAA takes collective action, it is using the legal system and coercive power of the the state. Furthermore, it is reaching beyond its own organizational boundaries to exert force on other parties.
When I block SMTP connections based on a blacklist, I am doing so solely using resources that I own, and I am not doing anything to anyone that is not attempting to "enter" my virtual property.
Now, if you unintentionally leave open an SMB share, does anyone have a right to access it? Not really. Slashdot's army of Internet libertarians will probably disagree, but an SMB share is not, by itself, an invitation, any more than an unlocked door is an invitation - the intent behind leaving the port open is ultimately what would determine whether the share was public, or private with poor security.
This seems all the more true as long as people are being prosecuted for "hacking" offenses that really amounted to poking around wide-open systems.
It's a minor quibble, I know, but you should know the difference between classes and how to tell which is which, otherwise you may look clueless to someone important.
Anyone who's still hung up on classful addressing is too clueless to be important.
Well...I'd want the default subnet mask to be correct, so barring other concerns, I'd choose the IP range that has the subnet mask correct.
Well, it's been many years since "default subnet mask" was a useful concept, but I'll keep that in mind in case I'm ever swept back to 1985 by a time vortex.
Oh, wait, you learned networking from an MCS"E" study guide, right? Because I don't think anyone else is still teaching that paleolithic stuff.
For those of you who like to throw DMCA around like a big, evil boogeyman, last time I checked, reverse-engineering for the purposes of interoperability is allowed by the DMCA.
That must come as a tremendous relief to the people who distributed DeCSS source code for watching DVDs under Linux.
Slashdot Mirror
They can't back out now - they've already given themselves pay raises based on projected Sitefinder revenue.
They are doing that on their own. We are just pointing it out.
Then you don't K very F. They charge more than everyone else and provide the worst customer service of any major player in the business. They are able to get away with this only because of their name recognition and because of whatever respectability rubs off on them due to their contract to manage the .com and .net roots.
I'll rephrase your statement for you and state my agreement: "Yes, there are other lying scammers out there who are even sleazier than Verisign."
All I can say is that you must have very low expectations.
The fact that you describe it in those terms makes it clear that (A) you've bought their propaganda hook, line, and sinker, and (B) you have no idea what you're talking about from a technical perspective.
They aren't "rout[ing] misspelled domain names". They are hijacking ALL unregistered .com and .net domain names, and they are lying to DNS resolvers about which names are registered and which aren't. This breaks all software that depends on being able to verify the existence of a domain, or which follows a specific fallback procedure in the absence of a domain's successfully resolving. It is costing the business world millions of dollars in time spent reconfiguring systems and patching DNS software. I would hope to see the worst-affected organizations suing them to recover these costs. Or perhaps a class-action suit is in order, given the widespread damage they have caused.
That's because you haven't been to Somalia, the Libertarian Paradise.
There, everyone is free to pursue their economic dreams without any government interference whatsoever. It's even a meta-libertarian paradise: Contract enforcement itself is provided by contract, with each participant in a transaction hiring its own band of thugs to ensure that the other participants stay honest.
I don't agree at all. People make rational risk assessments based on reasonable expectations.
I expect the water in a hotel shower to be hot. So before I step in, I wave my hand under the stream. If the water is so hot that doing that causes the skin on my hand to blister, I am going to hold the hotel responsible - even though I "expected" it "to be hot". I didn't expect it to be that hot.
Likewise, she took a calculated risk in placing the coffee between her legs. She should have known that if it spilled, it could be painful or even cause a mild burn. However, at the temperature at which coffee is normally served, she would not have received a third-degree burn, and there was no evident reason to plan for that possibility.
You're right on the nose here (I entered this article to post what you've already said, so since I've already gone through the trouble, I'm offering a me-too).
This is purely an anti-competitive effort. They want to clamp down on open-source competition by making public collaboration on these issues illegal.
They have no interest in stopping the development of viruses, because without those, they lose their income stream.
This is transparent as glass. It's a craven and manipulative appeal to public fear, aimed at getting themselves legislated into a near-monopoly.
When, in 1995? I'm not aware of any countries at this time with such limited bandwidth.
Also keep in mind that the State Dept IT infrastructure is horribly backward and is no barometer of anything except for how little funding Helms let slip through that year (RIP his chairmanship). A few years back I was posted to a prominent US embassy that had no internet link at all (except for a modem in the USIS library that always had a waiting list). After befriending some folks from the Canadian mission at a party (the US did throw better parties) I made a deal to come over and use their high-speed link for research. Meanwhile a nearby (but not as near as the canemb) US military facility had bandwidth galore. I've seen this pattern repeated again and again.
In Kyrgyzstan we use AsiaInfo which provides pretty decent service (I think they have a 1M connection). In Tajikistan we use Telecomm. Their latency is killer (no VoIP except Push-To-Talk style) but the bandwidth is definitely more than 64K as we've been able to saturate multiple 56K modem links. The other countries are obviously well-connected.
With the g.729 codec you can get the bandwidth requirement down to around 8Kbps.
This may not be the best answer given the criteria in the article, but when I have this need I use a $5 phone (which I bought at a drugstore on the way to the airport one time) plugged into a Cisco ATA-186 box that is in turn connected to a Linux laptop running Asterisk. The laptop connects using IAX-over-SSH to a server back here in Washington that in turn connects to the office phone system. From there the calls get routed to local extensions, out to POTS, or to other Asterisk systems, as required.
In addition to being reasonably secure, it saves a lot of money. Hotels usually charge a flat daily rate for broadband in the room. For that amount I can make and receive all the international calls I want.
The djbdns approach actually seems better, to me.
With the BIND approach, Verisign just has to switch from directly handing out an A record, to handing out a delegation to one of their name servers, and then have that one hand out the A. Then the BIND patch is useless.
However, with the djbdns approach, all they can do is move around to new IP addresses. But these are easy to find. Have a daily cron job generate 10 or 20 long, random domains and issue queries. If it gets the same address on more than a few, add it to the ignoreip file and svc -t /service/dnscache, and you're good to go, once again protected against Verisign's poisoning of the DNS. This could even be done on a distributed basis ala razor. IP space is finite, so while Verisign can run, they can't hide.
That part is not interesting to me, because having worked as a foreigner in India, I know it not to be true.
Also, "leech work" is a fairly one-sided description. They are also providing low-cost high-skill labor that increases the efficiency of our economy. Proper social policy will derive from a dispassionate weighing of these competing interests.
The voice training at the call centers seems to be going downhill. Time was I could barely pick out the Indians. Now I'm getting obvious hints of Indian accents almost half the time I call a bank, airline, etc. It's fun to greet them with "namaste" and listen as they get flustered and then recover.
I have legally worked in India. I think someone was being overly glib.
Read the article more carefully. The guy tried to get a job with Tata Consulting, an Indian-owned firm operating in the USA that places staff at USA-based clients. They apparently refused to hire him for this work in the USA because they do not hire Americans. Only then did he try to work in India, which is the less interesting aspect.
Sounds like fun. How are the hours? Full bennies?
Okay, fine, a broadcast address can't end in zero unless you are using extremely obsolete software.
In which case, I guess you can either upgrade or - check the URL - spend your time suing people who have developed more modern software.
Ah, but I already have.
What you haven't learned yet is that arrogance is a lot more important than smarts when it comes to going far. Rudeness, well, you can play that either way.
The difference is night and day. There are basically no parallels.
When the RIAA takes collective action, it is using the legal system and coercive power of the the state. Furthermore, it is reaching beyond its own organizational boundaries to exert force on other parties.
When I block SMTP connections based on a blacklist, I am doing so solely using resources that I own, and I am not doing anything to anyone that is not attempting to "enter" my virtual property.
This seems all the more true as long as people are being prosecuted for "hacking" offenses that really amounted to poking around wide-open systems.
Fair enough. I missed that context ("10.0.0.*").
Wouldn't it be faster still in the long run to set up a local name server and give your machines short names?
Actually it's 256 class C networks.
Anyone who's still hung up on classful addressing is too clueless to be important.
There's no particular reason why 10.0.0.255 should have to be a broadcast address.
An IP ending in 0 (or any even number) can't be a broadcast address.
Well, it's been many years since "default subnet mask" was a useful concept, but I'll keep that in mind in case I'm ever swept back to 1985 by a time vortex.
Oh, wait, you learned networking from an MCS"E" study guide, right? Because I don't think anyone else is still teaching that paleolithic stuff.
That must come as a tremendous relief to the people who distributed DeCSS source code for watching DVDs under Linux.
Pointy-haired boss. It's a character from the Dilbert comic strip, that in certain circles has come to be the generic term for any clueless manager.