Sitefinder II, the sequel...

Thu Jul 13 14:48:06 UTC 2006

On Thu, 13 Jul 2006, Patrick W. Gilmore wrote:

>
> That said, no one has yet said why it is necessary, or even
> desirable, to have a completely homogenous view of the world.
>

I'd use one example reason of why: "Customer Service issues"

So If grandma Jane goes to fobar.com (which gets
corrected/redirected/blah) to foobar.com and sees some content she really
likes she may tell grandma June. Grandma June goes to fobar.com and gets
the IE error message saying 'site does not exist. She calls her ISP to
find out why the site is down.

This is a very oversimplified example, I admit. It does show a simple
example though of inconsistency and why that could be 'bad' or atleast
problematic. (It might also argue for universal adoption of this
technology, which I still 'just dont like', which also might be the crazy
pills)

In general inconsistency is troubling to folks, I think, and in recursive
DNS it's especially difficult to see as 'good' since that 'service' is not
universal (not all owned/operated by one entity). In the case of
authoritative DNS though, you are (or anyone, not just Patrick) free to
goof with responses as you (or anyone) see's fit... you are afterall
'authoritative' for the record. In the recursive land it may be viewed as
'rude' or 'out of spec' (perhaps this is paul's issue?) to fake answers
to questions.

I wonder about performance and impact and the legittimacy of replying to a
'typo' that isn't really a 'typo' ? The claims to 'fix phishing' (phishing
protection) that is doing things like knowing what a phishing name is,
I presume this works on some list of names currently in use (from
antiphishing.org for example) Is there a timeout on these entries? What
about names that are the shared host for lots of users? (members.aol.com
for instance)  There are a host if issues here, simple typo correction
isn't going to find/solve/know about most of them.

At the right level of the hierarchy this service certainly could be 'nice'
(or not objectionable) the choice part is a big 'nice' for the service, I
admit. I find it hard to believe an enterprise or MSO would offer this
as a blanket answer though, again crazy-pills might be acting up again
though.

-chris