PS. I am excited - Vixie as a co-conspirator... Vixie, you can be proud -:).
i'm not, though. not proud, and not a co-conspirator. this whole thing makes me want to puke. the worst thing is, the people i know inside verisign seem to wish i wouldn't take it so personally. but if their stock options go up in value as a result of this lawsuit, then it's blood money, and it's on their hands. anyway, today i was given a courtesy copy of verisign's "final ssac response", which i've converted from pdf to a number of other more-greppable formats, and put online. url's are as follows: http://sa.vix.com/~vixie/sitefinder/Final SSAC Response.doc http://sa.vix.com/~vixie/sitefinder/Final SSAC Response.html http://sa.vix.com/~vixie/sitefinder/Final SSAC Response.pdf http://sa.vix.com/~vixie/sitefinder/Final SSAC Response.rtf http://sa.vix.com/~vixie/sitefinder/Final SSAC Response.sxw http://sa.vix.com/~vixie/sitefinder/Final SSAC Response.txt here are some tidbits: Moreover, the Report appears primarily to have been composed and/or contributed to by persons who are opponents of Site Finder and/or competitors of VeriSign, a fact the Report fails to acknowledge. For example, Paul Vixie, a member of the committee who is cited three times as evidentiary support for the Committee¡Çs conclusions, fails to disclose that he is the president of Internet Systems Corporation ("IS C"), which released the BIND software patch discussed in the Report as one of the technical responses to VeriSign¡Çs wildcard implementation, and competes with VeriSign in other relevant respects, including the provision of DNS services and as a potential TLD registry operator. The Report also fails to identify that Suzanne Woolf, an employee of ISC, K.C. Claffy, an associate of Paul Vixie, and Mike StJohns as members of the committee who were added to the committee by SSAC¡Çs committee chair, specifically for the purpose of rendering conclusions about Site Finder. Ms. Woolf an employee of ISC, K.C. Claffy, an associate of Paul Vixie, and Mike StJohns as members of the committee who were added to the committee by SSAC's committee chair, specifically for the purpose of rendering conclusions about Site Finder. Ms. Woolf and Ms. Claffy's association with Mr. Vixie suggests they were added for the purpose of packing the committee with Site Finder opponents. [...] ... For example, the Report relies heavily on the opinion of Paul Vixie, an outspoken critic and competitor of VeriSign, on the issue of Internet stability following the implementation of VeriSign's wildcard. Yet the Report fails to include a conflict of interest statement for Mr. Vixie, even though he is the president of ISC, which released the BIND software patch discussed in the Report as one of the technical responses to VeriSign's wildcard implementation. Ironically, Mr. Vixie's BIND patch was a primary source of the "incoherence" described in the Report. ... On May 19, 2003, Paul Vixie wrote: "speaking for dnssac, [I] don't think we have standing. [D]ns is a distributed, reliable, autonomous, hierarchical database system. The key word for this purpose is `autonomous'. Delegating something to somebody and then telling them what they can and cannot put into it is false (and I might add, offensively so.)" ... As stated above, SSAC was unable to fault Site Finder on security or stability grounds. Indeed, SSAC member Paul Vixie has expressly admitted as much. In response to an email stating that "I think recent events prove pretty well that VeriSign GRS no longer gives a crap about stability. Have we forgotten *.COM so quickly?," Mr. Vixie conceded: [I] was ... publicly critical of *.COM and *.NET, butthat¡Çs a policy problem, not an operational problem. [V]eriSign has a very good record for name server uptime both at the TLD and root level. [Email message posted by Paul Vixie to nanog@merit.edu dated June 17, 2004 (emphasis added). A copy of this email is attached as Exhibit H.] anyway, the whole thing is worth reading, and not just for history buffs. (and if the idea that kc or woolf could be depended upon to parrot somebody else's point of view caused you to laugh so hard you spewed coffee all over your keyboard while reading the above tidbits, then send the repair bill to verisign, not me. i'm just the messenger.)