Random Bytes...by Ross Rader

Tuesday, September 16

[11:04PM EDT] Jeff Neuman, inhouse counsel for Neulevel urges ICANN to "keep an open mind" when it comes to studying Sitefinder. Surprisingly, he has put forward a technically flawed argument that does little to support his points. On a day when half of the internet's smartest engineers are pointing out dozens of different applications and processes that have been broken by Verisign's actions, its hard to believe a lawyer that is arguing the opposite.

[excerpted]

"Do those who use MSN browser "choose" to get an MSN search redirect rather than an error message? And what is to stop other browsers from doing the same thing. Lets get past emotion and get the true real concrete facts out on the table. Yes, there are applications out there that depend on the error message. However, these applications can easily be updated to accomplish the same functionality. There are two sides to every coin. Are you also examining the benefit to the common Internet user that may be looking for a place to go on the Internet and cannot find his or her way? What about the benefits of a search engine to make the Web more easily navigable? The VeriSign service has been alive and well for 24 hours? Did the Internet break? One last note.....to show that the MX records are still returning errors, I have attached an error e-mail message which took less than 4.5 seconds to get returned to my inbox (yes, I did time it). I would say the Internet as we know it is alive and well."

First and foremost, of course browser users have a choice. Mozilla and Opera are still alive and well and definitely not supporting the exact same feature set as Microsoft. Second, breaking applications without prior notice "just because" is simply unacceptable behavior for a registry operator. These are the same registries that just recently complained that application developers weren't interoperable with new TLDs. I guess interoperability just isn't important this month. Lastly, we're not worried that mail exchangers are returning error messages, we're worried that they're not returning the right error messages.

Shall we even get into whether or not focusing on "web navigation" (which has precisely what to do with DNS resolution?) should be done at the expense of applications developers, network managers, intellectual property holders and average users everywhere? The internet isn't alive and well. Until registry operators start behaving like they are part of the internet and start working within it, the internet is terminally ill. C (3) | T (57) | #

[10:38PM EDT] My first car was a 1973 Pontiac Safari station wagon. This thing was sooo big that it had three ashtrays in the front seat - one for each person because there was no way that you could reach far enough to use the ones in the driver side and passenger side doors. It came with two interior lights and could seat thirteen people comfortably. It consumed roughly fifty cents per kilometre in gas and starting it required me to crawl underneath and bang on the starter with a crowbar while someone else held the ignition key in the start position. It cost me more to insure ($207/yr) than it did to buy ($200) and lasted me only six months. I sold it to my next door neighbor who just happened to be one of the school bullies. He blew the engine about two weeks later.

Mine had the both the power rear window and power lift-gate that was operated by two switches on the dashboard. For grad, I painted the lift gate up like a big mouth and chomped the gates up and down through $30 in gas. C | T (12) | #

[09:37PM EDT] Swerve has an interesting take on Verisign and the short, medium and
long-term options that the community has for dealing with Sitefinder.

--excerpt--

> Yeah, and lets ask the UN to ... ah, yeah, tried that for 14 years..
> Anyway.

14 years is a drop in the bucket when you take a long term view of things.

Here's my short term view about this. Dump Verisign.
Here's my medium term view about this. Dump Verisign.
Here's my long term view about this. Dump Verisign.

[via discuss-list@opensrs.org]

C | T (11) | #

[06:30PM PDT] - from the "you-aint-seen-us-copy-nothin'-yet" dept.

Guess which one I'm using? C (3) | T (33) | #

[02:00PM EDT] Jeremy Zawodny continues with the rally against Sitefinder with a hearty...welll, I'll leave it to you to follow the link and find out what his rally cry is. ;)

He also notes how average users can participate in the protest. Verisign is quickly going to become part of a very large hole in the fabric of the internet if this keeps up.

(PS - Welcome to OpenSRS Jeremy! - hopefully I'll see you at Bloggercon...) C | T (24) | #

[11:24AM EDT]

I'm beginning to think that the internet community isn't too crazy about Sitefinder. Anti-Verisign sentiments have quickly moved from "Verisign Sucks" to "Verisign Countermeasures" over the last 48 hours. The last thing a zone operator needs is a bunch of pissed off ISPs and Network Operators applying "countermeasure" patches to their DNS infrastructure in response to badly functioning gTLD zone service.

Next countermeasure? New.net becomes a reasonable alternative choice for DNS operators to make.

C | T (52) | #

[08:09AM EDT] Hijacked!

Verisign's Sitefind "service" completely trods on the intent of Appendix K of their contract with ICANN which is intended to prevent the registration of a special list of domain names. My read of the intent of this document was that it was always intended to prevent the *use* of (and therefore the ensuing confusion) of a special class of names.

Other registries that allowed for the use of reserved names have required special dispensation in the past. For instance, SITA uses two character airline designator codes in the second level domain of the structure of .aero. This caused some discussion, but it was widely felt that this was reasonable given that the IATA codes that SITA was proposing to use "...have been in use in the aviation community for about 50 years. They are a well established coding system within that community. The chances that these two-letter code elements can be mistaken for ISO 3166-1 Alpha-2 code elements are thus quite small."

C | T (39) | #

[07:47AM EDT] Just give us your traffic.

Mohammad Haque has posted a decent overview/rant by Jason Garman about "Sitefind" entitled, " Evil VeriSign".

Power corrupts. Absolute power lets you do cool things with the root. C | T (37) | #