Pants Full of Unix

Nobody likes having their cock munched, now do they?

This is the latest from VeriSign.

Basically, for those who haven't been following along, the deal is this. It used to be (and always has been) that if you typo'ed an address (like, say, typing www.livjournal.com), your web browser would be told that the host name didn't resolve (a result code referred to as NXDOMAIN, for “no such domain”), and that would be that.

Then a bunch of morons, assholes, and pranksters started buying up domain names that were typos (or likely alternatives) to commercial sites, and squatting on those domains, at first to make a political statement against the owner of the properly-spelled domains (guess who wins in court on these!), and then later to put up exactly the sort of “service” that VeriSign is spewing at us now (guess who never filed suit over these!).

Now VeriSign has effectively domain-squatted on every single unclaimed address in .net or .com by pointing a wildcard entry at their own search service. They're getting for free what other people have to pay at least about $6 a year for… and they're getting it a nearly infinite number of times (there's a limit to how long a second-level domain name can be, but the number of possible combinations is astronomically high). I'll grant I don't like those other people very much either, but at least they're paying for the privilege to advertise to me when I typo.

So, but, really, why's this a problem? Well, let's say you tried to send email to grumpy_sysadmin@livjournal.com. If you'd spelled it right, it would forward to my real email address. Until VeriSign pulled this stunt, you'd get a bounce because of the typo. Now, you might get a bounce. Unless VeriSign decides they'd like to start reading email (mis-)addressed to other people. Yeah, eek.

Then there's the fact that, historically, if the source address for an email wasn't a valid domain name, it was a pretty sure bet that that email was spam. But now EVERY DOMAIN NAME is valid. So the heuristic is useless. Thanks, assholes.

So but now, the limp-wristed ICANN (Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers), who ostensibly controls DNS (even though VeriSign is, in fact, authoritative for most things you'll usually run into except for .edu and the CCTLDs… that is, they're authoritative for the TLDs .net and .com) has asked VeriSign to stop breaking a de facto standard, please.

And VeriSign says no. Fuckknuckling cockmunchers.