-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: SHA1 On Tuesday 16 September 2003 10:16 pm, Steve Thomas wrote: > On Tue, Sep 16, 2003 at 08:31:55PM -0700, Matt Beland is rumored to have said: > > I stopped laughing, it occurred to me that hypocritical or no, that could > > mean trouble for ISC if VeriSign chose to push the issue. > > What kind of trouble? Certainly not legal trouble. There's nothing that > says that a publicly accepted standard has to be followed - Microsoft would > be in a world of legal trouble if there was. Verisign themselves are > breaking a a whole slew of standards with this move.
Remember the whole "check-names" fiasco? ISC has gotten themselves into hot water before - not legally, no, but from a PR standpoint. If Verisign makes enough noise about this, from a "these guys are violating standards" perspective, ISC could find itself with another PR disaster. Of course Verisign are breaking those same standards they're whining about - that's why I was laughing. But they can claim that they *do* have the administrative control to allow them to do this, that other gTLD operators have done this before (.museum, .cn, a few others), and so they aren't really doing anything bad - and to the non-technical public, it'll look like Verisign is in the right. On the other hand, Paul Vixie has been participating in the discussion over on NANOG and it sounds like ISC is aware of the potential pitfalls and they're working to dodge them. They are actively developing the patch, it may be released as early as tomorrow (USA time), and they have taken steps to avoid being descriminatory. Specifically, the "Verisign Fix" is not enabled by default, and does have to be enabled for each zone - so two lines in named.conf, one for .com, one for .net. > ISC can develop their software however they like. If a network admin > doesn't agree with what they're doing, they're welcome to use any competing > product. Neither Verisign nor anyone else has the authority to mandate how > an admin runs their network. They own the network and can determine what > traffic is or isn't allowed. Sure. Of course, Verisign has total administrative control over .com and .net, too. They own the .com/.net authoritative servers. They control the contents of the root files for those zones. They can do what they like. The problem is, the global community that has to *use* their stuff can complain about it - they can even pitch major fits. The same applies to the people working to create fixes for this problem - Verisign can create problems through careful use of their main weapon, the +4 Mace of Press Release. - -- Matt Beland [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.rearviewmirror.org -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: GnuPG v1.2.2-rc1-SuSE (GNU/Linux) iD8DBQE/Z/G2kgeEps3gMj4RAmI4AJ9i/fiLal3CMi7kmzP5Cq+fOE1xZwCfUwkt ejQ3VqUk7MUJ+dkr1mAZHuo= =LsFo -----END PGP SIGNATURE----- ------------------------------------------------------- This sf.net email is sponsored by:ThinkGeek Welcome to geek heaven. http://thinkgeek.com/sf _______________________________________________ Spamassassin-talk mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/spamassassin-talk
