data request on Sitefinder

Mon Oct 20 21:21:37 UTC 2003


> A number of people havce responded that they don't want to be forced to
> pay for a change that will benefit Verisign.  That's a policy issue I'm
> trying to avoid here.  I'm looking for pure technical answers -- how
> much lead time do you need to make such changes safely?

	You can't separate them. How long something takes to do depends upon who is
paying for it and how much they are paying. With a blank check, I can do
almost anything in a week. On the other hand, if it's an unexpected expense
without an accompanying unexpected source of funds, the same task can take
years. If the beneficiary is not paying, things take very much longer.

	In any event, this question is currently impossible to answer from a purely
technical perspective because we don't know what Verisign intends to change.
For example, what will be the new correct way to determine whether or not a
domain exists in the DNS, say for purposes of spam filtering? Will the
wildcard A record be guaranteed to always point to the same, single address
or not?

	We don't know what the target is, so we don't know what's involved in
hitting it. When Verisign releases a specification, then we can talk about
what's needed to meet it.

	DS