[ga] Verisign to revive redirect service

[Jeff Williams <jwkckid1@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

All,

  Things, they are a changing eh!

  FYI:  http://news.com.com/2100-1038_3-5092133.html?tag=nefd_top

VeriSign will give a 30- to 60-day notice before resuming a
controversial and temporarily suspended feature that redirected
many .com and .net domains, company representatives said Wednesday.

Speaking before an unusual gathering of technical experts in
Washington, D.C., VeriSign said its own re-evaluation of its Site
Finder redirection service found "no identified security or stability
problems." When it was active, Site Finder added a "wild card"
for .com and .net domains that snared queries to nonexistent Internet
sites and forwarded them to VeriSign's own servers.
That confused some antispam filters and other network utilities, a
side effect that VeriSign downplayed on Wednesday by arguing that
Site Finder's benefits to end users--a search screen instead of a an
error message--outweighed the costs to network administrators. "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."

In a presentation, VeriSign said that 35 companies were
confidentially briefed about Site Finder before its debut and they
reported "no issues" or problems before its launch on Sept. 15. Its
own expert group--including the chief technology officers of
Brightmail and Morgan Stanley--reviewed Site Finder and decided that
most issues were "minor or inconvenient," VeriSign said. Before
resuming Site Finder, VeriSign said it would address specific
criticisms by adding foreign language support to Site Finder and
tweaking the way e-mail to nonexistent domains worked.

VeriSign's Matt Larson, who spoke at the meeting organized by the
Security and Stability Advisory Committee of the Internet Corporation
for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN), said a poll paid for by his
company showed 84 percent of U.S. citizens surveyed had
a "preference" in favor of Site Finder. ICANN is the California
nonprofit group that has an agreement with the U.S. government to
oversee some aspects of Internet addressing and successfully
pressured VeriSign to halt Site Finder on Oct. 3.

But Gomes and Larson, under intense questioning from ICANN committee
members, refused to release details about the methodology of the
survey such as the questions asked and the responses received. "The
actual feedback we got directly from doing the survey is proprietary
information," Larson said.

Committee Chairman Stephen Crocker, a veteran of many Internet
standards groups, suggested those details would be necessary to
evaluate the results. "It's not a matter of stacking the deck," he
said. "It's what are you measuring."

Crocker's questions, along with queries from Ram Mohan of Afilias, a
domain name registrar, prompted an angry reaction from VeriSign
representatives.

Gomes said: "I'm utterly clueless about how what we've been talking
about for the last few minutes has to do with security and stability"-
-the ICANN committee's mandate.

Larson suggested that "you guys don't think consumers are relevant"
and that committee members were unduly focused on the travails of
network operators affected by the Site Finder changes.

"We're going to have to stop this discussion and turn to a different
venue," Larson said.

The ICANN committee held an earlier meeting on Site Finder on Oct. 7.

Regards,

--
Jeffrey A. Williams
Spokesman for INEGroup LLA. - (Over 134k members/stakeholders strong!)
"Be precise in the use of words and expect precision from others" -
    Pierre Abelard
===============================================================
CEO/DIR. Internet Network Eng. SR. Eng. Network data security
Information Network Eng. Group. INEG. INC.
E-Mail jwkckid1@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
Contact Number: 214-244-4827 or 214-244-3801