The great thing is that if voters type in the wrong vote, Verisign has the technology to point them in the right direction.

Accenture puts Verisign in charge of US Internet voting Remember Verisign? The incompetent crooks who have abused their monopoly over .COM and .NET, betraying the trust of every Internet user, continuing on a long history of abusing their customers and the Internet?

They've been tapped to secure the US's Internet voting technology. They were given the contract by Arthur Andersen consuluting, now using the post-felony-fraud alias Accenture Accenture (Accenture split from Arthur Andersen before the Enron scandal, thanks, Jamais!). This beggars the imagination. I'm going to be sick.

VeriSign announced Monday that it will provide key components of a system designed to let Americans abroad cast absentee votes over the Internet.

The contract was granted by consulting firm Accenture, which is working with the U.S. Department of Defense on a voting system known as the Secure Electronic Registration and Voting Experiment. When completed, the system will allow absentee military personnel and overseas Americans from eight participating states to cast their votes in the 2004 general election.

Link

Verisign claims that Sitefinder doesn't violate any technical standards and therefore, there is no cause for concern. But, the question that they are avoiding is whether or not they feel that they have violated the trust relationship with the community that they have been appointed to serve.

In most respects, RFC 1591 has been obsoleted by service contracts and zone delegation agreements. It no longer defines how these types of relationships work. But, it did define community expectations when Network Solutions received their original grant to operate .com and .net - do we still feel this way today?

What follows is a digest version of the relevant parts of 1591 that I still expect a registry operator to follow when operating the zone that we have entrusted them with.

...excerpts from 1591

The major concern in selecting a designated manager for a domain is that it be able to carry out the necessary responsibilities, and have the ability to do a equitable, just, honest, and competent job.

These designated authorities are trustees for the delegated domain, and have a duty to serve the community.

The designated manager is the trustee of the top-level domain for both the nation, in the case of a country code, and the global Internet community.

Concerns about "rights" and "ownership" of domains are inappropriate.  It is appropriate to be concerned about "responsibilities" and "service" to the community.

The designated manager must do a satisfactory job of operating the DNS service for the domain. That is, the actual management of the assigning of domain names, delegating subdomains and operating nameservers must be done with technical competence. In cases when there are persistent problems with the proper operation of a domain, the delegation may be revoked, and possibly delegated to another designated manager.

As Darryl pointed out here first on a Tucows internal blog, this Eliyon thing just doesn't work at that well - unless I somehow missed the period of time that Kobe Bryant and Mac Astronomica were on Tucows' board of directors.

Eliyon Technologies.  This company is building a database of people in corporate America via search technology and the Web.  The good news is that a directory like this has never been built.  The bad news is that it in combination with other data sources (financial etc.), this could be very dangerous.  Bruce Sterling's data pirates in "Islands in the Net" ($0.50 on Amazon) added a twist to this:  they bought up data from defunct online firms to find out what people were using for passwords, etc. 

"To stupidity and beyond!"

Indeedy.

In a move that has fooled no one, VeriSign refuses to budge on redirection bodge, but has committed to creating a technical review board that will consult with, not make recommendations to, Verisign regarding Sitefinder. Verisign, despite having some of the finest minds in the business on their payroll, seems intent on making a fool of the internet community and themselves before everything is said and done.

In a letter to ICANN, Rusty Lewis, the head honcho in Verisign's registry operations (and quite a nice guy actually), stated that "...all indications are that users, important members of the Internet community we all serve, are benefiting from the improved Web navigation offered by Site Finder...  As to your call for us to suspend the service, I would respectfully suggest that it would be premature to decide on any course of action until we first have had an opportunity to collect and review the available data. After completing an assessment of an it would be premature to decide on any course of action until we first have had an opportunity to collect and review the available data."

Rusty needs to hear two things. First, users being confused by the service - end users, developer users, operator users and registrar users. EVERY single internet user is somehow being negatively affected by the implementation of this "service". Putting a dress on it and calling it "an enhanced navigation service" doesn't means that its benefits outweigh its drawbacks. Rusty also needs to hear is that Verisign has absolutely no right to arbitrarily change the way that the internet's core infrastructure works before *we*, the community, "first have had an opportunity to collect and review the available data" prior to the introduction of any service that monkey's with the way that my internet works. None. This isn't about what the contracts or the RFCs say, rather, its about the moral obligation that Verisign has to the community to provide the service that we expect.

ICANN's solution can be very simple. Require that DNS resolution be run separately by a not-for profit entity that receives its policy directly from ICANN. In this environment, the registry protocol interface could be modified in such a way that the registry operator becomes an unnecessary artifact. I've discussed this option with other registrars - we believe that it could technically work. Will Verisign push the community far enough that consensus would view this as a viable alternative to the current regulated monopoly infrastructure?