No Such Weblog

Here's an illustration of what I mean when I complain about corrupting error diagnostics: During the past 20 minutes or so (it's now 1:38 a.m. GMT+0200), the address which is returned by the registry in response to queries for unregistered domain names was unreachable. The result? Instead of a quick message that I've mistyped the domain name, I get a timeout after waiting for quite some time. That's a highly misleading error diagnostic, and it's making the user experience much worse.

Which brings us to another problem with this: Verisign has been careful to put work-arounds in place that are supposed to mitigate the effects of the DNS change for individual protocols. These work-arounds depend on the availability of Verisign's infrastructure in order to work, though. Once this infrastructure is unreachable, users have no possibility to discern a non-existing domain name from an unreachable host.

Talking about user experience, I'm also sure that users of Asian localized software will very much appreciate getting English-language error messages from Verisign instead of localized and translated error messages from the software they are running.

SiteFinder is now also active in .com.

Meanwhile I haven't seen a single mailing list posting anywhere that would welcome this change -- but a lot of furor across the board, and some thought on how this can be stopped: People are modifying name servers that serve as resolvers to replace Verisign's sitefinder A records by the correct NXDOMAIN response.

Mike Palage (now an ICANN board member) on some mailing lists: Some Wild-Card Questions, about the specific impact of the Sitefinder service.

This AP story makes it sound as if sitefinder helps against porn typosquatting à la Zuccarini. Of course, it doesn't.

The At-Large Advisory Committee has released a Statement on Sitefinder. The statement explains why sitefinder is bad for individual Internet users, and urges ICANN to stop it.