[wildcard-comments] some observations on the wildcard

[dracon@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx (shari l brooks)]

to whom it may concern:

I wanted to voice a few comments regarding the wildcard service
Verisign deployed in the middle of last month and which ICANN
today demanded be withdrawn.

firstly, and most important, the immediate impact our domains
have felt as a result of the addition of the wildcard is a
tremendous upsurge in spam and virus email.  the particularly
strongest effect is from "worm" types of emails, which often
have spoofed domains that BIND now returns as valid.  

secondly, I note with dismay that many DNS servers remain on
BIND 8, which the ISC is not going to patch to mitigate the
adverse effect of the DNS change Verisign implemented.  they
have on their website a recommendation to forward to root
servers which are so patched; but this will result in an
overall slowdown of network traffic, as more requests are
sent than otherwise, and those servers queried will queu up
under load.

thirdly, I strongly feel that Verisign has in effect proven
that a fundamental conflict of interest has arisen in that
as a for-profit registrar, Verisign is tasked with managing
.com and .net as a neutral party.  their position offers the
unscrupulous a tremendous competitive advantage and this
situation has shown the tempation is too great.  I would urge
ICANN to transfer oversight of the neutral TLDs to an entity
that is not also serving as a registar.

and lastly, I noted with even more dismay that the SiteFinder
service is setting thirdparty cookies in users' browsers, to
track the usage patterns once they hit the sitefinder pages.
it is but a small step to translate the data thus collected
into sales calls to the domain owners of the destination sites,
which I consider a vast abuse of Verisign's position as manager
of the .net and .com TLDs.

I am sure as an organization, ICANN has received many comments
along the lines of the above, probably both more technically
accurate and eloquently stated.  however, even though ICANN has
demanded that Verisign desist its SiteFinder service, a typo in a
browser still takes me there and subjects me to the receipt of
intrusive, un-useful, unwanted cookies.  thus I thought this was
important enough to add my voice as well to the throng of complainants
about Verisign's abrupt and irresponsible imposition of a service
that changed the very operation of core DNS.

thank you for your time,
-- 
   --------> shari brooks <--------      |       dracon@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx
 generic site maintenance, WonderLand    | http://www.wonderland.com/~dracon/
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If you blow fire against the wind, take care not to get the smoke in your eyes.