Of imminent interest to the operations community.... FYI, - ferg ---------- Forwarded Message ---------- The IAB is ready to ask the RFC-Editor to publish What's in a Name: False Assumptions about DNS Names draft-iab-dns-assumptions-02 as an Informational RFC. This document reviews the potential assumptions that may be made based on domain names, as well as the potential implications (and pitfalls) of those assumptions. The IAB solicits comments by March 29, 2005. Please send comments to the IAB (iab@iab.org), or to ietf@ietf.org. The document can be found at http://www.ietf.org/internet-drafts/draft-iab-dns-assumptions-02.txt

From the Abstract:

The Domain Name System (DNS) provides an essential service on the Internet, mapping structured names to a variety of data, usually IP addresses. These names appear in email addresses, URIs, and other application layer identifiers that are often rendered to human users. Because of this, there has been a strong demand to acquire names that have significance to people, through equivalence to registered trademarks, company names, types of services, and so on. A danger of this trend is that the humans and automata which consume and use these identifiers will make assumptions about the services that are or should be provided by the hosts associated with these identifiers. This document discusses this problem in more detail and makes recommendations on how it can be avoided. Leslie Daigle, For the IAB. _______________________________________________ IETF-Announce mailing list IETF-Announce@ietf.org https://www1.ietf.org/mailman/listinfo/ietf-announce -- "Fergie", a.k.a. Paul Ferguson Engineering Architecture for the Internet fergdawg@netzero.net or fergdawg@sbcglobal.net