This has been all over Slashdot and theNANOG mailing list, but for those of you that don’t visit either, Verisign has hijacked the Internet. Well, not really, but kinda.
Verisign is the company in charge of the .com and .net top level domains. Actually, the US government made Network Solutions (which used to be a non-profit organization) in charge, but Verisign bought them out several years ago.
Verisign has now decided to put in what’s known as a wildcard A record for the .com and .net top level domains. In English, this means that every domain will now resolve to an ip adress, whether that domain is registered or not. Again, in English, this means that every .com or .net domain is now valid regardless of registration status.
What does this mean? Example:
If someone tries to go to yahoo.com (which does exist), but they mis-spell yahoo (it’s happened) and they type in mandoisthegreatest.com (which, unfortunately, does not exist), they used to get an error message saying something to the effect of “Cannot find server”, or something like that. The person now knows that they mis-typed yahoo.com and can do something about it.
Now, with Versign’s new wildcard A record in palce, if the same thing happens, Verisign will kindly redirect them to sitefinder.verisign.com, which is an search engine. Sleazy? No doubt. Hijacking? Possibly.
But that’s not really the biggest problem here. The big problem is that one of the primary anti-spam measures is domain validation. Simply put, before a mail server receives an email it verifies that the sender’s domain is valid. Sure, it’s a simple check but every little bit helps. Now, this is totally useless as every .com and .net domain is now “valid”.
Hopefully this will be the straw the breaks the camel’s back. Verisign has done some pretty slimy things in the past and with any luck this will finally create a long and serious discussion about DNS and who’s really in charge around here.
According to the Washington Post, ICANN has no comment. Really. Wow. I’m so surprised I could die from not suprise. What a bunch of weak losers. Those people are nothing but a bunch of yellow-bellied geeks playing important.