What does it mean to say that "64.94.110.11" is or is not certified by .com as the address for bad-example-12345.com , or that something else is? Is it really the same as a wild-card that points to real sites? Your Best Practices says that
At this point it is immaterial what Verisign will or will not do. They followed the predictable course based on their capabilities and the assessment that the response from some imaginary "community" is irrelevant. The actual damage is breaking network diagnostic procedures and spam filtering, increasing chance of undetected lost e-mail (their SMTP does not always bounce) and increased danger of mistyped domain names - as now such typo in http client leads to exposure to possibly adversarial html (which is why they started it all in the first place.) By this time it should be obvious to everyone that in the near future they will establish targeted advertizing depending on what the mistyped URL looks like - and probably sell or rent the "typo name space" - ie. Airborne Express could buy *f?*e?*d?*e?*x?*.com address space, so fredex.com would lead to airborne's web site. And then there is a very small step from there to schemes where, for instance, for basic $15-25/yr name rental your domain will be yours only in 90% of cases. Other 10% will be sold. For $100/yr you will be guaranteed 99.5% of the ownership. Of course, only platinum premium accounts, at $100K/yr, will have 100% ownership. That is the problem when a centralized technical solution relies on the legal system (and they almost always do.) What is important is how and if will this accelerate alternate solutions for name space management. ===== end (of original message) Y-a*h*o-o (yes, they scan for this) spam follows: __________________________________ Do you Yahoo!? Yahoo! SiteBuilder - Free, easy-to-use web site design software http://sitebuilder.yahoo.com