Verisign vs. ICANN

Tue Aug 10 00:38:52 UTC 2004

> PS. I am excited - Vixie as a co-conspirator... Vixie, you can be proud -:).

i'm not, though.  not proud, and not a co-conspirator.  this whole thing
makes me want to puke.  the worst thing is, the people i know inside
verisign seem to wish i wouldn't take it so personally.  but if their
stock options go up in value as a result of this lawsuit, then it's
blood money, and it's on their hands.

anyway, today i was given a courtesy copy of verisign's "final ssac
response", which i've converted from pdf to a number of other
more-greppable formats, and put online.  url's are as follows:

    http://sa.vix.com/~vixie/sitefinder/Final SSAC Response.doc
    http://sa.vix.com/~vixie/sitefinder/Final SSAC Response.html
    http://sa.vix.com/~vixie/sitefinder/Final SSAC Response.pdf
    http://sa.vix.com/~vixie/sitefinder/Final SSAC Response.rtf
    http://sa.vix.com/~vixie/sitefinder/Final SSAC Response.sxw
    http://sa.vix.com/~vixie/sitefinder/Final SSAC Response.txt

here are some tidbits:

    Moreover, the Report appears primarily to have been composed and/or
    contributed to by persons who are opponents of Site Finder and/or
    competitors of VeriSign, a fact the Report fails to acknowledge. For
    example, Paul Vixie, a member of the committee who is cited three
    times as evidentiary support for the Committee¡Çs conclusions, fails
    to disclose that he is the president of Internet Systems Corporation
    ("IS C"), which released the BIND software patch discussed in the
    Report as one of the technical responses to VeriSign¡Çs wildcard
    implementation, and competes with VeriSign in other relevant
    respects, including the provision of DNS services and as a potential
    TLD registry operator. The Report also fails to identify that
    Suzanne Woolf, an employee of ISC, K.C. Claffy, an associate of Paul
    Vixie, and Mike StJohns as members of the committee who were added
    to the committee by SSAC¡Çs committee chair, specifically for the
    purpose of rendering conclusions about Site Finder. Ms. Woolf an
    employee of ISC, K.C. Claffy, an associate of Paul Vixie, and Mike
    StJohns as members of the committee who were added to the committee
    by SSAC's committee chair, specifically for the purpose of rendering
    conclusions about Site Finder. Ms. Woolf and Ms. Claffy's
    association with Mr. Vixie suggests they were added for the purpose
    of packing the committee with Site Finder opponents. [...]

    ...

    For example, the Report relies heavily on the opinion of Paul Vixie,
    an outspoken critic and competitor of VeriSign, on the issue of
    Internet stability following the implementation of VeriSign's
    wildcard.  Yet the Report fails to include a conflict of interest
    statement for Mr. Vixie, even though he is the president of ISC,
    which released the BIND software patch discussed in the Report as
    one of the technical responses to VeriSign's wildcard
    implementation.  Ironically, Mr. Vixie's BIND patch was a primary
    source of the "incoherence" described in the Report.

    ...

    On May 19, 2003, Paul Vixie wrote: "speaking for dnssac, [I] don't
    think we have standing. [D]ns is a distributed, reliable,
    autonomous, hierarchical database system. The key word for this
    purpose is `autonomous'. Delegating something to somebody and then
    telling them what they can and cannot put into it is false (and I
    might add, offensively so.)"

    ...

    As stated above, SSAC was unable to fault Site Finder on security or
    stability grounds. Indeed, SSAC member Paul Vixie has expressly
    admitted as much. In response to an email stating that "I think
    recent events prove pretty well that VeriSign GRS no longer gives a
    crap about stability. Have we forgotten *.COM so quickly?,"
    Mr. Vixie conceded:

	[I] was ... publicly critical of *.COM and *.NET, butthat¡Çs a
	policy problem, not an operational problem. [V]eriSign has a
	very good record for name server uptime both at the TLD and root
	level.

    [Email message posted by Paul Vixie to nanog at merit.edu dated June
    17, 2004 (emphasis added). A copy of this email is attached as
    Exhibit H.]

anyway, the whole thing is worth reading, and not just for history buffs.

(and if the idea that kc or woolf could be depended upon to parrot
somebody else's point of view caused you to laugh so hard you spewed
coffee all over your keyboard while reading the above tidbits, then
send the repair bill to verisign, not me.  i'm just the messenger.)