September 2003

ICANN has published an advisory on Verisign's DNS abuse:

[–––] ICANN has called upon VeriSign to voluntarily suspend the service until the various reviews now underway are completed.

Either these reviews are all completed or, more likely, Verisign is simply ignoring the request.

On 2003-09-20, the day after the ICANN advisory, IAB published a commentary on the issue:

Proposed guideline: If you want to use wildcards in your zone and understand the risks, go ahead, but only do so with the informed consent of the entities that are delegated within your zone.

My guess is that the informed content of the entities within the .com and .net zones does not want Verisign to use wildcards the way they do now.

Someone said let the lawsuits begin.

According to Business Wire, Netster.com parent company Popular Enterprises LLC has filed a $100 million dollar lawsuit against VeriSign, Inc.

The article continues:

According to Popular Enterprises, the Sitefinder service allows VeriSign to monopolize unregistered .com and .net domains, and to profit by redirecting all Internet traffic for these sites to pay-for-placement sites controlled by VeriSign. If they are allowed to operate Sitefinder, VeriSign will now profit from Internet traffic directed to all unregistered domain names, including thousands of domain names that VeriSign has refused to allow the public to register.

A small but significant change has been made to the Verisign controlled .com and .net servers. Queries that would (and should!) normally return NXDOMAIN, i.e. a nonexistent domain, now returns an IP-address controlled by Verisign. Common Internet technologies depend on the fact that there are such things as nonexistent domains. Jonathan de Boyne Pollard has description of what has just happened.

Verisign is not the only operator of TLDs doing this so the problem isn't really new, but perhaps the popularity of .com and .net names makes a difference. There's a petition taking place here that you should sign.

Read the description of what happened, read the petition, sign it—it might make a difference.

Just found firestuff.org. A lot of code to play with. I like code. Perhaps a candidate for Aaron's UNIX Software artists?

Gotta go to bed...