From: "Patrick W. Gilmore" <patrick@ianai.net> Date: Mon, 9 Nov 2009 18:24:52 -0500
On Nov 9, 2009, at 3:00 PM, Paul Vixie wrote:
i loved the henry ford analogy -- but i think henry ford would have said that the automatic transmission was a huge step forward since he wanted everybody to have a car. i can't think of anything that's happened in the automobile market that henry ford wouldn't've wished he'd thought of.
i knew that the "incoherent DNS" market would rise up on its hind legs and say all kinds of things in its defense against the ACM Queue article, and i'm not going to engage with every such speaker.
Paul: I completely agree with you that putting wildcards into the roots, GTLDs, CCTLDs, etc. is a Bad Idea and should be squashed. Users have little (no?) choice on their TLDs. Stopping those is a Good Thing, IMHO.
However, I own a domain (or couple hundred :). I have a wildcard on my domain. I point it where I want. I feel not the slightest twinge of guilt at this. Do you think this is a Bad Thing, or should this be allowed?
Also, why are you upset at OpenDNS. People _intentionally_ select to use OpenDNS, which is clear in its terms of service, and even allows users to turn off the bits that annoy you. Exactly what is the issue?
And lastly, DNS is not "truth". DNS is the Domain Name System, it is what people configure it to be. You yourself have argued things like responding with "192.0.2.1" for DNSBLs that are being shut down. That is clearly NOT "truth".
I find it mildly amusing that my first contact with Paul was about 25 years ago when he was at DEC and I objected to his use of a wildcard for dec.com. The situations are not parallel and the Internet was a very different animal in those days (and DEC was mostly DECnet), but still I managed to maintain a full set of MX records for all of our DECnet systems. That said, I really, really get annoyed by the abuse of the DNS system. -- R. Kevin Oberman, Network Engineer Energy Sciences Network (ESnet) Ernest O. Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) E-mail: oberman@es.net Phone: +1 510 486-8634 Key fingerprint:059B 2DDF 031C 9BA3 14A4 EADA 927D EBB3 987B 3751