Verisign's SiteFinder - An Engineer's View 159
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."
It's not easy (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:It's not easy (Score:1, Interesting)
Not whatever it is Verisigns dodgey search routines are going to return.
Re:It's not easy (Score:1)
ICANN? (Score:5, Interesting)
I mean, if they can get away with this, what's to stop them from doing things like shutting out other registrars, etc?
Re:ICANN? (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:ICANN? (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:ICANN? (Score:4, Insightful)
I'd like to hear you say this when you can't get the gas tank on your monster SUV filled, your laundry dry cleaned, or there's nobody to serve you your biggie shake and biggie fries at the local Wendy's. The functioning of the country depends on these "social outcasts" doing the menial, thankless, below poverty level jobs that you are so quick to shit on them for doing.
They wage a class war for their own political gain by facing the "rich" (i.e. families of 4 making more than $50k/year by their own definition) against the "poor". The haves vs. the have-nots.
Once again I'd like to know why it's called waging class warfare if you push for the interests of "the little guy", but if your benefactor is a rich CEO or somebody else in the upper tax bracket, it's not class warfare. I will agree with your point that what the Democrats do is pretty sleazy, but not because they speak up for those on the lower rungs on the ladder; it's because they say they're the party of the common man when in reality they're more interested in those same CEOs, upper class families, and big businesses as the Republicans. At least when the GOP votes for a big tax cut to help their Fortune 500 buddies and screw the working man you expect it, because that's what they stand for. It's scandalous when the Dems do it because from their rhetoric you'd expect them to be better about it.
And this is where I will have to part company from the author of the article as well: if every geek is as politically ignorant as you are, I would just as soon prefer that they stay out of politics, as it's obvious that whatever your technical competence may be, you would only manage to do more harm than good.
Re:ICANN? (Score:2, Interesting)
Unfortunately companies doing bad things, often get noticed only by small pockets of people. If they don't stand up and talk, no one even bats an eyeli
Re:ICANN? (Score:2)
This is nothing new. Many corporations have been adopting this sort of approach to dealing with various issues throughout time. But we have just started to notice now, because it is in the tech sector (traditionally a fairly ethical bunch), and the media likes to pick up on this kind of stuff more
Re:ICANN? (Score:5, Insightful)
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
named.ca (Score:2)
I was trying to think of the further ramifications of recommending this change: increased load on the remaining servers (which we can do little about... except maybe by creating a commercial service where we hijack users enquiries and... no wait), increased latency for some users querying some domains, and marginally increased vulnerability to DDoS attacks.
It brings to mind the famous quote:
"The Internet interprets ce
Re:ICANN? (Score:2, Interesting)
Speaking of SCO (Score:1)
Sitefinder will simply become the internet's new blackhole ('cus
Competition (Score:2, Interesting)
They can hold us over a barrell and all we can do is sue them. We've seen how long lawsuits take. A week of we're-screwed-time is too long.
While it would take forever to get every incompetant sysadmin to change root DNS servers, the bulk of us could be changed over in days.
We just need
A. someone to do it (set up new root servers and maintain them)
B. a massive insult and pain in the ass like the reinstitution of site-finder to prod sysadmin
What? (Score:4, Funny)
enough time (Score:5, Funny)
Ok. Who watches CPAN here? Time to throw out our congressmen(and women) and take their places on capitol hill.
And make our congressmen code monkeys. Don't be surprised if you frag down your senator on CS then.
Re:enough time (Score:5, Funny)
Does CSPAN support regexes?
Re:enough time (Score:1, Offtopic)
Re:enough time (Score:5, Funny)
(BTW, it's CSPAN [cspan.org]. I know that and I'm even Canadian.)
Soko
Re:enough time (Score:5, Funny)
Re:enough time (Score:3, Funny)
Re:enough time (Score:2)
$law
}
That can't be Perl... I can understand it!
Actually, I guess that means it can't be law either.
Re:enough time (Score:1, Troll)
I'm so sorry for you.
Re:enough time (Score:1)
I do. I've spent many, many good hours watching C-SPAN. I once wrote a letter to the editor asking the cable company to carry C-SPAN2!
Wow! Worst summary for an article ever? (Score:4, Insightful)
In fact, the article is exactly the opposite and states that we should wrest control of
Monosov (Score:1, Interesting)
Thank you Comic Book Guy (Score:2)
politics (Score:5, Funny)
From the Article: ISC (Score:2, Funny)
Re:From the Article: ISC (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:From the Article: ISC (Score:4, Interesting)
This site [dotcomeon.com] 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 [google.com] 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:
Re:From the Article: ISC (Score:3, Insightful)
If these are the choices, I don't think there is a good choice either way
Really? (Score:5, Funny)
No shit, Sherlock. That's why we're engineers.
Mike
One free metaphor (Score:4, Insightful)
In any event, I did think of one, and I thought I'd share it with y'all because I have nothing better to do.
It would be like the government contracting out road work to a private company, and then having that company put huge advertising over the signs, or printed right on the road. And then having the CEO going out and saying "It's time someone started making money off infrastructure." When in fact what they are doing is making things worse for everyone else to benefit themselves, and doing it with something that they have only by coincidence, rather then any real work.
Re:One free metaphor (Score:1)
It's more like they diverted the road by several hundred feet every couple of miles to bring it closer to property they own, thus lowering the effectiveness of the road to line their own pockets and causing the majority of users of the road unnecessarily long commutes to get to their destination.
They shouldn't draw attention to themselves (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:They shouldn't draw attention to themselves (Score:5, Interesting)
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?
Re:They shouldn't draw attention to themselves (Score:5, Informative)
The big thing is that the MS search-integration features don't break anything. They might interfere with their users seeing certain errors, but nothing's busted. SiteFinder breaks shite left right and center.
Re:They shouldn't draw attention to themselves (Score:4, Insightful)
You said it yourself...
If people didn't like it the moz project would fork, so in reallity they can't.
That's the nice thing about it...
Re:OT: Your sig (Score:3, Interesting)
I had that problem as well for a while. But the key line there "And to the Republic for which it stands".
And with any luck, the Ninth Circuit will be upheld, and "Under G-d" will go away.
Re:OT: Your sig (Score:2)
And I guess that everything the parent said about the pledge of allegiance [restorethepledge.com] is still true.
It kinda makes America look like the land of the not so free...
Re:They shouldn't draw attention to themselves (Score:2)
What Verisign is doing is *not* end-user configurable, and as you say messes up a whole lot more than just typoing web site addresses.
Re:They shouldn't draw attention to themselves (Score:5, Insightful)
All verisign are trying to do is steal the revenue that MS get with their 90+ share of the browser world. But MS wont like, and will come up with a workaround, like a 'critical' IE patch.
but in the meantime, everyone whose app uses DNS suffers, not just web browsers. Web Services -programs hitting servers for their own posts and gets- really suffer, because any configuration failure now results in really obscure messages (bad mime type), (307: not supported), instead of ones that users are vaguely familiar with ('not found), and that makes diagnostics and support worse. Once people start patching their DNS, a lot worse, as replication gets harder.
That is what irritates me: Verisign are screwing up every network application other than a web browser to get advertising $.
Re:They shouldn't draw attention to themselves (Score:1)
If you've ever lived on a farm, you get used to it very quickly. It isn't a petting zoo.
Re:They shouldn't draw attention to themselves (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:They shouldn't draw attention to themselves (Score:2)
A Solution (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re:A Solution (Score:2, Interesting)
I'd pay $10/year for good no-nonsense DNS service, and I think I could talk my company into $10/year/workstation if there
Re:A Solution (Score:2, Insightful)
The existing problems are caused by who is running the technology, not the technology itself.
It's all ready to go, All we need is a few zone transfers and a few huge servers with insane bandwidth. And I guess a few people to keep the thing updated.
Re:A Solution (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:A Solution (Score:5, Insightful)
Or better yet, a decetralized, p2p like DNS. one where there aren't A-M servers, but just peers with their DNS caches. It would become what the internet was meant for: a network of computer systems that can communicate with one another even after a significant portion of them are taken offline(due to attack or otherwise).
Re:A Solution (Score:1)
Re:A Solution (Score:2)
Re:A Solution (Score:1, Informative)
Re:A Solution (Score:2)
No system is perfect, by why have
Verisign, not the engineers, lacks respectability (Score:5, Insightful)
While a shift is not as trivial as you make it, I do agree with on major point.
Paul Vixie has been running around trying to ensure that nobody acts "immaturely" or engages in name-calling with Verisign. He's desperate to be taken seriously.
That's ridiculous. Verisign, not the engineers criticising them, is the side lacking respectability. The engineers run and design the networks and control the systems that Verisign uses. Verisign is a comparatively tiny collection of a few people who have buddies in politics, scientists, and engineers.
Nobody should feel constrained in their online conversation for fear of "sounding respectable". The engineers who run the networks need prove nothing. They are running things. The only organization that has to worry about image at all is Verisign, which must seem at least impartial and benevolent enough to keep ICANN from axing their monopoly, which could be done.
Verisign was granted a special, unique opportunity to get money for doing almost no work (some bandwidth and adding an entry to a database). Yes, they *can* be expected not to play hardball, as would be accepted in a general business arena, as they are not operating as a regular business. They have a monopoly that was granted to them that they do very well off of. If they want to continuously test their limits and see how much additional money they can soak people for, ICANN and other engineers are under no requirement to keep granting Verisign the right to continue making vast amounts of money for almost no effort.
Verisign has clearly indicated that it is not currently willing to operate a public trust in good faith. They have continued to spout what most engineers consider to be bullshit, and have ignored frusterated feedback. Unfortunately, we have only one remedy, aside from formal complaints from ICANN (which have already been tried), and that is threats against and ultimately termination of Verisign's special privileges. Doing so will mean work for a lot of systems around the world, temporary service interruptions, bad blood at Verisign (and with political buddies of Verisign) and the risk that nobody else will be willing to step up after Verisign (given that their role might be terminated). Verisign is gambling that the Internet's collection of network engineers do not have the balls to actually terminate their role with a certain amount of bad behavior on their part. I am increasingly wanting to see Verisign's gamble proven wrong.
Shifting to OpenNIC or similar has its own set of problems -- can the same level of service be provided? What happens when an name schisms start appearing?
However, it may be better to be safe than sorry. Every day, Verisign makes it harder and harder to extricate them from a position where they can feed on vast amounts of technology money. This is acceptable, as long as they operate in good faith, which they have not done. Verisign's management has tried deceptive renewal forms sent to Verisign competitors. They have tried mucking about with fundamental components of the Internet. They may not be at a point where they must immediately be replaced, but I think that they are at a point where they must be made to modify their behavor or be terminated.
Re:Verisign, not the engineers, lacks respectabili (Score:1)
Re:Verisign, not the engineers, lacks respectabili (Score:2)
An idea? (Score:1)
No, silly (Score:5, Funny)
Re:No, silly (Score:1, Funny)
You're right. There's already enough pasty, sexless geeks in the D.C. area. We wouldn't want to scare away its female population.
Engineering vs. politics (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Anyone remember when Postel tried... (Score:5, Informative)
http://web.archive.org/web/20000818212505/www.iii
"There will be up to one-hundred-fifty (150) new iTLDs allocated to as many as fifty (50) new registries, with no more than one half (1/2) in the same country, created in 1996, and chartered to operate for up to five years.":a .org/lists/newdom/current/0518.html [archive.org]
http://web.archive.org/web/20000818221119/www.iii
Tell me what was wrong with this again?
Distributed Decentralized DNS using JTXA (Score:5, Interesting)
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 [onjava.com]
Cheers, Joel
Re:Distributed Decentralized DNS using JTXA (Score:3, Insightful)
Spam bad. What happens when the spammers stop selling email and start selling hits to websites? ie, they set up hundreds of computers which report DNS entries back incorrectly, so that maybe www.linux.org goes to www.someotherplace.com. Then there is the issue of all of the zombie viruses, instead of opening relays they could instead edit DNS listings on computers they infected that were responding to peer-to-peer requests.
The curr
Re:Distributed Decentralized DNS using JTXA (Score:2)
Verisign swallowed Network Solutions whole four years ago, so Verisign is Network Solutions. This is the same bunch of crackheads that fought the idea of competing registrars. TLD management needs to be managed by a big, wasteful, government funded and/or non-profit entity. I can stand a little inefficiency when it's not a big fat corporate monopoly doing it.
Why have non-country specific TLDs at all? (Score:4, Interesting)
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.
Re:Why have non-country specific TLDs at all? (Score:2, Interesting)
Many multinational organizations and companies wouldn't be happy to be forced to use ccTLDs. Heck, even some individuals would be upset, because they see themselves as world citizens, rather than belonging to a country (and I'm not even talking about people with multiple nationalities). Forcing ccTLDs as IMHO a Bad Thing(tm).
We don't, in general (Score:2)
Re:Why have non-country specific TLDs at all? (Score:2)
It's a little like parceling up Antarctica or the moon merely fo
Re:Why have non-country specific TLDs at all? (Score:4, Insightful)
Agreed! :-)
So let's find out the UN's new URL:
www.united-nations.nyc.ny.us for the HQ. ...
Oh, wait, they have dependencies elsewhere:
www.united-nations.wien.at
www.united-nations.geneva.ch, www.united-nations.geneve.ch, www.united-nations.genf.ch,
Or how's about, say, www.apache.org, slashdot.org, ...?
If I ever go to make politics... (Score:1, Funny)
All this mess is caused by people that try to maximize their profit. Just imagine a world without money, nobody would need to send spam mails because there is no profit to make. Ok, sorry, was just kdding.
But I hope you see the point. I guess the price we have to pay for globalisation and outsourcing important infrastructure things from governments to private companies is that those things might get abused by morons that want to get a maximum profit.
B
Not wrong, but naive (Score:5, Insightful)
Putting it simply, I think the present organisation works this way: people with power (government) and people with money (corporation) get together so that some of the power can be used to generate more money. The corporation is happy because of easy money; the government can use the threat of taking the money away to influence the behaviour of the corporation, which is happy to appease its master so long as the money is there. Both parties are happy. Everyone else doesn't really figure in on the equation unless the corporation does something to rile the general public, at which point the government may be obliged to take steps which make it look like it's doing its job.
Suppose the government delegates control of the GTLDs to a non-profit organisation which has a mandate to ensure the smooth operation of DNS infrastructure, and can be relied upon to do a good job of that. What's in it for the government? They can't easily coerce the organisation into doing things in a manner which leaves them in control (governments thrive on control), since there's no greed to manipulate. Further, no filthy lucre means no pork for the politicians to direct back to their electorate. What's in it for the politicians?
How do you sell a politician on an idea when the best you can come up with is, "this is obviously the Right Thing to do." What you really need is a P.R. headline which emphasises how it's good for employment, or the economy, or security, or will save the children, and a subtle undergirding of, "this will make you (politicians) more powerful and/or popular and/or provide economic benefits to your constituents."
So what we need is some very creative P.R. spin, and I'm not very talented at it. Any suggestions?
Re:Not wrong, but naive (Score:4, Interesting)
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.
it goes both ways (Score:5, Insightful)
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:it goes both ways (Score:3, Insightful)
>political, I think the mainstream business
>community even more desperately needs to get
>technical.
There's a nice commentary on how it is difficult to separate social from technical concerns. [link] [shirky.com]. Perhaps that should be extended to the economic space as well.
What Verisign is trying to do is simple, enclose the entire DNS space. One solution in rejecting their governance is to support alternative domains ([AlterNIC] [wired.com]) but in some ways thi
bout time really... (Score:2, Insightful)
Geeks in general have been absent from the political process, or at best mediocre at bitching in online fora and sending boilerplate emails as if having your meager feeling of involvement is somehow truly the best use of your collective intellect. A handwritten letter is usually worth 1000 emails (that is a comparison I have heard enough times to conbsider it fairly valid).
The peopl
You know, his suggestion was already tried . . . (Score:5, Insightful)
It was called the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers, and it's the organization that went ahead and so solidly entrenched VeriSign in the first place.
Merely passing along control to another NGO is not, in itself, a solution; there is no reason to expect it won't be politicized and turned into another ICANN.
Veri-lame (Score:4, Interesting)
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.
Where's the Beef? (Score:3, Insightful)
I'd just like to ask, "where's the beef in this article?". To my eyes, it reads like a general complaint on life in general. Should he have titled this article, "My rant" ? There's nothing, I repeat, NO THING, in this article that wasn't already said, more eloquantly, in yesterday's slashdot article: What the Internet Isn't"
A new kind of spamming (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
This is terribly old news (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
Re:This is terribly old news (Score:3, Interesting)
Of course, since I'm responding, I don't think that the logic is perfect.
This is how a
Re:This is terribly old news (Score:1)
Do you really believe there ISN'T a comparable Old Boys network in academia? Dollar bills are not the only form of currency.
Trademark issues? (Score:2)
Since Verisign receive a payment for each registered .com domain, they can't argue that my employer should register al
Re:Trademark issues? (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Trademark issues? (Score:2, Informative)
Depends what you mean by legitimate. Various search engines, including Google, have gotten into hot water over serving up paid sponsor links to competitors of a given trademarked search term. Dunno if any actually reached the legal arena, the search engines normally cease and desist. And let us not forget the brouhaha over MicroSoft's Smar
Re:Trademark issues? (Score:2)
The confusion will arise when SiteFinder gets ads.
The gloves are off, in case you hadn't noticed (Score:3, Interesting)
There is an interview with Stratton Sclavos,CEO of Verisign, at http://news.com.com/2008-7347-5092590.html
Here are some highlights of the Q&A which particularly make my blood boil. This guy is both doing a smear campaign against the opposition to SiteFinder, and either has such a warped understanding
of how Internet protocols are developed and operate that he is incompetent to be in charge of the root DNS for
, or else he is a cynical liar. I believe the latter is the more likely. His comments about a "cultural divide" are true, but not
in the way he intends. The cultural divide is between the fair, decent, ethical, and technically responsible people and
the people such as himself.
*
*
*After a couple of weeks on the hot seat, VeriSign CEO Stratton
Sclavos is turning up the fire on his company's severest critics.*
*The Site Finder controversy
criticism. What's the next step?
The reason Site Finder became such a lightening rod is that it goes
to the question of are we going to be in a position to do innovation
on this infrastructure or are we going to be locked into obsolete
thinking that the DNS was never intended to do anything other than
what it was originally supposed to do?
Still, a lot of people in the Internet community were quite
surprised by Site Finder--and then you had complaints surfacing that
it was not complying to approved standards.
Let's break the argument down: The claim that Site Finder was
nonstandard and that we should have informed the community we were
doing something nonstandard--excuse me: Site Finder is completely
standards-compliant to standards that have been out and published by
the IETF (Internet Engineering Task Force) for years. That's just a
misnomer. The IAB (Internet Architecture Board) in its review of
Site Finder said the very same thing--that VeriSign was adhering to
standards.
What we're seeing are predetermined opinions masquerading as
processes where the outcome is predetermined.
The second claim, that we brought it out without testing--Site
Finder had been operational since March or April and we had been
testing it with individual companies and with the DNS traffic at
large. Ninety-nine percent of the traffic is pure HTTP, and so it
handles it the way it should. Just so you know, our customer service
lines went from 800 or 900 calls on the first day to almost zero
right now. Every customer who had a Site Finder issue, the
remediation took less than 12 hours.
*You temporarily suspended Site Finder in reaction to widespread
criticism. What's the next step? *
The reason Site Finder became such a lightening rod is that it goes
to the question: Are we going to be in a position to do innovation
on this infrastructure, or are we going to be locked into obsolete
thinking that the DNS was never intended to do anything other than
what it was originally supposed to do?
*
You're hinting at a cultural divide? *
I think that there is. I don't think it's an intentional divide, but
it's drifting apart of the day-to-day usage from the folks who did
great steward's work in the early days and were asked to define all
the standards to make it work.
*And those are the people who still dominate the standards bodies? *
They're speaking out of both sides of their mouth right now. It's
not OK to say standards are important, un
World of Ends (Score:2)
Re:I kind of like SiteFinder (Score:5, Informative)
No problem, just set your browser to send you to a search engine of your choice when you get a 404. If your browser doesn't do that bug the developers.
DNS wildcarding isn't the way to this. It breaks other stuff.
Re:I kind of like SiteFinder (Score:5, Informative)
Re:I kind of like SiteFinder (Score:1)
I won't do it again.
Re:I kind of like SiteFinder (Score:2, Insightful)
Isn't Google enough service to look for sites?
SiteFinder will only be of help if you misspell the hostname, if you have a typo in the path you'll get the usual 404 anyway. And I guess you will start not liking it when you misspell hostnames in mail addresses. The Internet is more than just HTTP and SiteFinder is messing up the rest a lot.
Re:I kind of like SiteFinder (Score:1, Insightful)
Re:I kind of like SiteFinder (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re:I kind of like SiteFinder (Score:4, Informative)
VeriSign running a bogus SMTP server was very bad from a privacy point of view. Even if they didn't accept the message body (did they? I don't remember), they collected a lot of information that could've been used for traffic analysis. It's none of VeriSign's business to know that I mistyped an email address: they could find out what the real address was. It's none of VeriSign's business to know that I mistyped a URL: they could find out what the real URL was (hamming distance usually 1 or 2). Why should they collect so much information about my email or surfing habits anyway? If I believed in conspiracy theories, I'd suspect that they may be in cahoots with the NSA [nsa.gov] (I don't think so).
Re:I kind of like SiteFinder (Score:5, Informative)
Sometimes I misspell URLs and I actually *like* having a service that attempts to find the site I'm looking for.
That's not an accurate requirement.
- Sometimes - when? I assume when you type it in your browser, you are not speaking email here?
- having a service - well, more like having something, you dont really bother what it is as long as it works, dont you?
So your requirement becomes : When I misspell an URL in my browser, I like it when something attempts to find the site I'm looking for.Fine with everyone. There is such a feature in IE, and this is the right place for such a feature to be.
Why we are against SiteFinder (and if you had read Slashdot before you would know this) :
You simply cant. Not even with cookies or so, as there is no such thing for DNS. But you can opt-out if the same service is implemented in your browser. (change browser/deactivate feature)
AND you will get a wrong message : "recipient not known" instead of "server not know".
It may annoy you, but you can adapt quickly. But there is also software that needs DNS lookup to function properly (most prominently, spam filter). And software doesnt adapt itself, it has to be rewritten, thus generating costs in various other companies. If SF was an opt-in service that would be less problematic, so that only software that wants to use this feature had to be rewritten, but this isnt the case.
It is written : "when the domain does not exists, you return a does not exist message". But suddenly Verisign decides to return "it's Verisign".
Like the idea? Then get IE, misuse google for it, or hack mozilla/write a RFE. But SF is A Bad Thing (TM).
Re:I kind of like SiteFinder (Score:2)
Waitasec... Never thought of it from this angle before, but doesn't that mean SF would tend to cause Verisign to receive a lot of spam?
I mean, I get a thousand per day, and find it nearly overwhelming (I've finally started just using a whitelist, which I find unpleasant, but a necessity). Imagine, every spammer just randomly spewing out crap in the ho
Re:I kind of like SiteFinder (Score:5, Insightful)
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.