Ouch. -------- Original Message -------- Subject: [IP] VeriSign to revive redirect service Date: Thu, 16 Oct 2003 02:38:14 -0400 From: Dave Farber <dave@farber.net> Reply-To: dave@farber.net To: ip@v2.listbox.com Delivered-To: dfarber+@ux13.sp.cs.cmu.edu Date: Wed, 15 Oct 2003 23:30:44 -0700 (PDT) From: Joseph Lorenzo Hall <jhall@SIMS.Berkeley.EDU> Subject: VeriSign to revive redirect service To: Dave Farber <dave@farber.net> --- http://news.com.com/2100-1038_3-5092133.html VeriSign to revive redirect service by Declan McCullagh VeriSign will give a 30- to 60-day notice before resuming a controversial and temporarily suspended feature that redirected many .com and .net domains, company representatives said Wednesday. Speaking before an unusual gathering of technical experts in Washington, D.C., VeriSign said its own re-evaluation of its Site Finder redirection service found "no identified security or stability problems." When it was active, Site Finder added a "wild card" for .com and .net domains that snared queries to nonexistent Internet sites and forwarded them to VeriSign's own servers. That confused some antispam filters and other network utilities, a side effect that VeriSign downplayed on Wednesday by arguing that Site Finder's benefits to end users--a search screen instead of a an error message--outweighed the costs to network administrators. "One of the segments of the community that has not been looked at in this whole issue, in my opinion, is the user community," VeriSign Vice President Chuck Gomes said. "They're very relevant." In a presentation, VeriSign said that 35 companies were confidentially briefed about Site Finder before its debut and they reported "no issues" or problems before its launch on Sept. 15. Its own expert group--including the chief technology officers of Brightmail and Morgan Stanley--reviewed Site Finder and decided that most issues were "minor or inconvenient," VeriSign said. Before resuming Site Finder, VeriSign said it would address specific criticisms by adding foreign language support to Site Finder and tweaking the way e-mail to nonexistent domains worked. [...] ----------------------------------------------------------------- Joseph Lorenzo Hall Graduate Student http://pobox.com/~joehall "When life gives you SARS, make sarsaparilla." --Cory Doctorow, http://www.craphound.com/ -------------------------------------