[IP] VeriSign to revive redirect service
Delivered-To: dfarber+@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
Date: Wed, 15 Oct 2003 23:30:44 -0700 (PDT)
From: Joseph Lorenzo Hall <jhall@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Subject: VeriSign to revive redirect service
To: Dave Farber <dave@xxxxxxxxxx>
---
http://news.com.com/2100-1038_3-5092133.html
VeriSign to revive redirect service
by Declan McCullagh
VeriSign will give a 30- to 60-day notice before resuming a
controversial and temporarily suspended feature that redirected many
.com and .net domains, company representatives said Wednesday.
Speaking before an unusual gathering of technical experts in
Washington, D.C., VeriSign said its own re-evaluation of its Site
Finder redirection service found "no identified security or stability
problems." When it was active, Site Finder added a "wild card" for
.com and .net domains that snared queries to nonexistent Internet
sites and forwarded them to VeriSign's own servers.
That confused some antispam filters and other network utilities, a
side effect that VeriSign downplayed on Wednesday by arguing that Site
Finder's benefits to end users--a search screen instead of a an error
message--outweighed the costs to network administrators. "One of the
segments of the community that has not been looked at in this whole
issue, in my opinion, is the user community," VeriSign Vice President
Chuck Gomes said. "They're very relevant."
In a presentation, VeriSign said that 35 companies were confidentially
briefed about Site Finder before its debut and they reported "no
issues" or problems before its launch on Sept. 15. Its own expert
group--including the chief technology officers of Brightmail and
Morgan Stanley--reviewed Site Finder and decided that most issues were
"minor or inconvenient," VeriSign said. Before resuming Site Finder,
VeriSign said it would address specific criticisms by adding foreign
language support to Site Finder and tweaking the way e-mail to
nonexistent domains worked.
[...]
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Joseph Lorenzo Hall
Graduate Student http://pobox.com/~joehall
"When life gives you SARS, make sarsaparilla."
--Cory Doctorow, http://www.craphound.com/
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