Random Bytes...by Ross Rader

Monday, September 15

[05:16PM EDT]

An example of a conversation between a webhosting company and one of their "oh-so-happy-with-Sitefind" customers that hasn't occurred - yet.

[SCENE: An average webhoster customer service center.]

Tech Support: Thank you for calling, how can I help you?

Happy Customer: [VERY UPSET] You guys suck! You told me that if I transferred my name to you, that there would be no danger of losing my domain. Now someone has stolen my domain and is pointing it to a search engine!!

Tech Support: (takes time to check out the situation...)

Tech Support: your name has expired and Verisign has borrowed it until you renew it. You still have 40 days to renew.

Happy Customer: LIAR! I just did a Whois on my name and it shows that it doesn't expire for about a year. I sent in 3 transfer requests and none of them worked. I've spent at least an hour on the phone with you to get this thing worked out. You guys don't know what the hell you're doing!

Tech Support: The reason that the expiration date appears to be a year later than the actual date is in their infinite wisdom, verisign displays your expiration date a year later than it is once it expires... the reason the transfers didn't work is because Network Solutions, a division of Verisign does whatever they want and didn't process your request.

Happy Customer: What?! None of this makes sense. You guys are idiots. I want my money back.

Tech Support: I'm sorry sir, we can't offer you a full refund. You see, Verisign has this policy....

[FADE TO BLACK]

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[05:01PM EDT] There's been a lot of "much to do" regarding the Verisign "typosquatting" service. Not least of which is what this will do for applications that use the DNS to check whether or not a domain exists ("checking availability" in industry parlance). Verisign has apparently made accomodations for application developers that have this need - get accredited and use RRP.

"It has come to our attention that some registrars and/or some large wholesale domain name purchasers may be conducting name availability checks by doing DNS queries against the VeriSign g-TLD servers. Conducting queries in this manner is not an accurate method for determining name availability, as the zone file does not reflect the complete listing of registered domain names. In addition to this method being flawed, it will now yield inconclusive results as nonexistent domain queries will return our Site Finder response page. Therefore, Registrars need to use the RRP CHECK command when conducting domain name availability searches. Registrars should also contact their reseller partners and ensure they are aware of this as well."

[- 09/15/2003 VGRS Bulletin to Accredited Registrars]

I find it amazing that registries would, one month, make an appeal to application developers and ISPs for broader cooperation and support and the next, completely slay them with something like this. The level of apathy regarding the "filtering problem" and the level of cynicism surrounding this launch is completely understandable.

I'll take "Things that break the 'net for $500 Alex."

Last thought - I wonder if Klensin is going to update "User Interface Evaluation and Filtering of Internet Addresses and Locators -or- Syntaxes for Common Namespaces" (whew!) to take into account this type of "best guessing"?

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[02:48PM EDT] David Akin has been fiddling with Blogware and has penned a decent entry detailing his observations and best of all, problems, with the tool so far.

Changing to a custom URL is pretty straightforward with Blogware (even if I haven't written that part of the documentation yet ;). Simply go to the Settings tab in your control panel and change the "Blog URL" to whatever hostname you iwsh. Note that this will a) have the effect of forcing all inbound links to your blog to break - which isn't an issue this early into the blog's lifespan (unless you count this post). And b) that you must have a DNS server that can serve records for the URL that you've set up. If you are using a blogware.com subdomain, we take care of this for you. If you want to use something custom at a domain name that you own (like blog.davidakin.com) you must create a CNAME that points blog.davidakin.com to users.blogware.com (wherein we take care of the rest). If you don't create a CNAME on the DNS server that is authoritative for davidakin.com, then your blog will no longer resolve.

As far as the demonic behavior of the help files goes, I believe that a quick Javascript exorcism this morning has solved the problem. We've lost the dynamic tree control, but stand to gain a lot of nice new Mac using friends.

Lastly, auto-excerpts can indeed be changed to suit the publisher's preference. We default it to twenty words, but if this is too few or too many, you can modify the default from the main Settings tab. Scroll down to near the bottom - there's a text entry box labelled "Excerpt Word Size". Changing this value will change the number of words (not characters as the page incorrectly notes - we'll fix that!) generated when Blogware generates excerpts on your behalf. C | T (94) | #