October 31, 2003
October 25, 2003
Fire Season
October is fire season here in Southern California and this year looks like it will rank up there with the worst in history. We are located about 50 miles south west of the nearest fires, however we are feeling the effects thanks to the Santa Ana winds. There was an eerie orange glow today from the smoke overhead with white ash that is reminiscent of snow as it falls from the sky and lands on our cars. Tonight the smell of smoke is everywhere. It's the first thing you notice when stepping outside. In fact its so strong, you don't really notice anything else.
I'm watching the news right now and they are reporting that over 200 homes have been lost today. It's hard to imagine what it would be like to lose everything. In fact I wouldn't want to imagine it.
October 27th is the 10 year anniversary of the Laguna fire. We lived in Huntington Beach at the time, just 20 miles up the coast from Laguna Beach. We experienced the same ash fall and smoke smell as we are today. Hopefully it will be another 10 years or longer before something like this has to happen again.
October 23, 2003
Salt Lake 2002
A sampling of our photos from the Salt Lake 2002 Winter Games is available in the new blogNation example Photo Album.
New Blog Service
blogNation powered by Tucows next generation Blogware service is now live and offering free trials of the blog accounts for a limited time.
October 17, 2003
Freedom of Choice
At the ICANN Security and Stability Advisory Committee on Wednesday, Verisign said they would address specific criticisms by adding foreign language support to Site Finder and tweaking the way e-mail to nonexistent domains worked.
Verisign argued that Site Finder benefits end users by displaying a search screen instead of an error message. "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."
Okay Chuck, I'm an end user. What about user choice? Currently a user can choose what happens when they try accessing a non-existent domain. They might really want to receive the NXDOMAIN error and allow their web browser to do whatever it has been configured to do when that error occurs--display a "friendly" error page, display a search engine page of their choice, ring a bell, hit them over the head, or whatever. The point is the user has a choice. The .com and .net wildcard takes away this freedom of choice.
Personally, as an American, I value my freedom. I don't want a Verisign dictatorship telling me what they think is best for me. Yes Chuck, the user's opinion is very relevant. When are you going to start listening to end users?
October 08, 2003
Fallout from Sitefinder
The Register has an article about MP3.com forgetting to renew their domain name MP3S.com (which redirects to MP3.com). The Register doesn't realize that there is a bigger link to Verisign's Sitefinder than what the article reports.
The domain MP3S.com expired on 26 Sept 2003 and wasn't renewed until 6 Oct 2003 meaning it had been inactive for 10 days. The expiration most likely went unnoticed due to Verisign's wildcard record in the gTLD for .com. Verisign removed the wildcard record from the .com gTLD at 00:00 UTC on 5 Oct 2003 and as soon as DNS resolver caches expired the wildcard entry, the true nature of the problem for MP3S.com was exposed.
I wonder how many more seemingly unrelated incidents will eventually be linked to the Sitefinder fiasco.
October 07, 2003
October 05, 2003
Verisign's Sitefinder "disservice"
I've been a bit quiet lately but I just couldn't resist responding to Verisign's blatant lies in their latest PR about the Sitefinder disservice.
Verisign's PR is in response to ICANN's demand that the wildcard entries be removed from the .com and .net gTLD servers.
Let's see what lies the "Value of Trust" company is spewing now. From their press release:
"Without so much as a hearing, ICANN today formally asked us to shut down the Site Finder service."
Sorry, ICANN did not ask you to shut down your site finder service. They demanded that you return the .com and .net gTLD zones to their prior status by removing the wildcard entries. You want a hearing? What kind of hearing did you give to the Internet community prior to implementing the wildcards?
"During the more than two weeks that Site Finder has been operational, there is no data to indicate that the core operation of the Domain Name System or stability of the Internet has been adversely affected."
Sorry, there have been plently of examples of the problems the wildcards have been causing. What planet has Verisign been on?
"ICANN is using anecdotal and isolated issues to attempt to regulate non-registry services"
A non-registry service? If this is a non-registry service, why did you modify the .com and .net gTLD zones?
"The service has been well received by millions of Internet users who appreciate getting navigation tools as opposed to the 'dead end' of an error message"
Wrong answer. Try again. Thanks to your wildcard service, millions of Internet users have been confused when mistyping a domain name, have received spam that would have been blocked, had their e-mail delivery delayed when mistyping the to address, etc.
A custodian of a World asset should be held to higher standard. It is all about the value of Trust. Are you listening Verisign? I didn't think so.