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[wildcard-comments] A vote against the wildcard DNS

  • To: wildcard-comments@xxxxxxxxx
  • Subject: [wildcard-comments] A vote against the wildcard DNS
  • From: simon farnsworth <simon.farnsworth@xxxxxxxxxxxx>
  • Date: Thu, 16 Oct 2003 16:01:39 +0100
  • Sender: owner-wildcard-comments@xxxxxxxxx
  • User-agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.0.2) Gecko/20021120 Netscape/7.01

Dear Sir,

While I can understand Verisign's wish to use their control of .com and .net to make money, I would like to object to the use of a wildcard DNS entry to do so. This objection is not based on technical concerns, which I wish to leave to more qualified individuals, but on business concerns.

During the period when Sitefinder was operating in a wildcard fashion, I took the effort to read and review their Terms of Service and their Privacy Policy. Having done so, I decided that I was not prepared to accept either the Terms of Service or the Privacy Policy, and therefore contacted Verisign, informing them that I had rejected their Terms of Service, and therefore did not wish to receive the Sitefinder service unless the conditions could be changed.

Verisign's response was unacceptable; they told me that I could not stop using their service despite my express wish not to do so. Further, they were not prepared to consider amending their terms to my satisfaction, and they would count any use, intended or otherwise, of their service as acceptance of the published terms, despite my explicit refusal to accept those terms.

I do not feel that it is reasonable practice to refuse to stop providing a service I have not asked for under conditions that I find unacceptable; however, I have no way to avoid using the Sitefinder service when a wildcard DNS record is used.

Further, some of my Internet applications, including my web browser, had Sitefinder-alike functionality that was broken by the wildcard record; the applications detected an NXDOMAIN DNS result, and redirected me to a search page. Sitefinder prevented this from working.

I hope that you will take this view into account,

Simon Farnsworth




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