COM/NET informational message

Fri Jan 3 21:58:53 UTC 2003

On Fri, Jan 03, 2003 at 12:26:05PM -0800, just me wrote:
> Am I the only one that finds this perversion of the DNS protocol
> abhorrent and scary? This is straight up hijacking.

I find Microsoft blatantly sending out UTF-8 and 'another local encoding' to
nameservers interesting too. 

The real question is why they don't move to the proposed 7-bit clean
mappings themselves. Microsoft are supposed to have quite warm relations
with Verisign, even after the certificate spat.

Wrt to the stunt that Verisign has employed today, well, they are in this
thing to make money, we all know that, and it isn't that bad. They capture
wrong queries and fix them up so they can sell more domains.  Sure, it looks
suspicous and like something that should've been discussed more (I really
like announcements about something that will happen on January 3rd on
January 3rd). But downright evil? 

Any query with a >127 character in it is bogus after all. Furthermore, it is
a query for '.COM' which they host anyhow. It's not like this is about
queries that would otherwise have not ended up at them. No new.net-style
tricks.

Evil would've been to just start selling UTF-8 domains and force flag day
upon the nameserver and mailserver world.

Reiterating, the real issue is that this needs a plugin. What happens in
that plugin is also very interesting. I suspect source isn't available,
who knows what is going on in there. Potentially, the i-Nav plugin hands
Verisign the keys of the internet, or at least the keys of Internet
Explorer, which is a slightly different thing. 

Regards,

bert

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