[wildcard-comments] Stop that.
Hallo, The abuse carried on by verisign should be stopped immediately for a number of reasons: Technical issues: a) Breaks the policy of most MTA to reject mails from unexisting domains (this scaled up spam and virus propagation by a factor of 10, I can provide the statistics of mailservers hosting several thousands mailboxes as a proof, the total SMTP traffic at our routers scaled by by a factor of 3) b) Breaks any internal/localized policy about bad hostnames in http, our users expect our proxy to respond in the local language for mistyped addressess (and also do a similarity search on the sites most accessed through the same proxy) c) Breaks the way error messages are received by mistyped addresses in email: our users expect our server to bounce the message with a comment in local language explaining that the wrong part is in the domain name etc. Then the moral and political considerations: a) Is a formal abuse: verisign "claims" the ownership of domains they have not registered b) It's cybersquatting: you mistype www.google.com and land on a page with verisign's logo. This is a form of abusive advertising. c) It's privacy violation: verisign can collect sensitive information about the part of the URLs beyond the hostname, the sender address of the emails, the destination address, etc, etc. d) Even if the thing was used for "good" reasons it is being done by a private company, without having asked FIRST the opinion of the internet community, acting as if Verisign owned the two TLDs, breaking any rule of competition, causing a direct damage to the internet community for a private interest. It's disgusting, and I sincerely hope icann takes some serious action against this abuse, where "serious" is not taking more time or hiding behind words like "we are monitoring community reaction". The community opinion is clear and straight if you can read any mailing list or newsgroup around: this is a criminal action and must be stopped. NOW. Regards, A. |