VeriSign Granted a Patent Covering SiteFinder

An anonymous reader writes "Remember VeriSign's SiteFinder? Turns out that a couple of months back VeriSign was granted a patent on resolving unregistered domains. This came about thanks to its acquisition of eNic, operator of the .CC Domain. How long before Verizon, Earthlink, and OpenDNS are hit up for licensing fees?"

Obligatory Behind-the-times Question

[drinkypoo]

My ISP has recently joined the ranks of retards who return an incorrect result when a domain is not found. I've been looking around but it's unclear who is out there running DNS that I am welcome to use, that is worth using, and that is likely to be at the same IP for a long time. Whose servers should I use?

Many Reasons this is Appalling

[billstewart]

There are so many things wrong with this. The first one is that it doesn't actually work as indicated in Claim 1, because it's operating at the wrong levels of the protocol stacks. DNS maps between names and IP addresses, and is used for many different kinds of Layer 4, 5, and 7 applications, but URLs are a Layer 7 function typically supported by browsers, and the identification of what kind of service the client is interested in is not known at name resolution time, or even what Layer 4 transport protocol or Layer 7 application protocol, and in fact the methods used in the patent have the DNS operator's web server decide what kind of response web page to provide in response to a URL included in a HTTP request, even though the client's DNS request might not have been intended to be used for HTTP. When Verisign implemented their annoying breakage of DNS functionality, they supported HTTP on port 80, and had a stub email server that did a sloppy approach to rejecting connections, and AFAICT didn't provide other services, such as correct rejections on SSL's TCP Port 443 or SSH's TCP port 22. It's not clear that they even did the right thing at Layer 3 - if you were trying to "ping misspellllled-example.com", they not only should have answered the DNS request with a "No Such Domain" error message, but if you sent it a ping, it shouldn't respond (I forget if they responded to pings or not; many systems don't do that for self-defense.)

Another reason this patent shouldn't have been accepted is that wildcard domains were a standard capability, and having a web server try to provide useful information in a 404 page was probably a known capability, or at least obvious to someone skilled in the trade. Responding to a DNS request with the IP address of a web server that isn't the one the customer was looking for might not count as "obvious to someone skilled in the trade" because it's obviously wrong.

Re:Obligatory Behind-the-times Question

[Anonymous Coward]

Typically the ISP is just having their own DNS servers do this (as opposed to using a hidden DNS proxy). The solution is to run your own resolving cache. Then your ISP doesn't have anything to do with what addresses your DNS server returns (except for domains they control). bind can do this or you can use dnscache and probably a half a dozen or so other tools are freely available.

Re:Obligatory Behind-the-times Question

[drinkypoo]

Typically the ISP is just having their own DNS servers do this (as opposed to using a hidden DNS proxy). The solution is to run your own resolving cache.

I'm trying to avoid going to the root servers, which I understand is considered to be rude if you're just joe schmoe and don't have a bunch of users behind you.

Thus, even running my own cache (actually, I'm using dnsmasq for local resolution) I still need forwarders. I just don't want to use the ones from my ISP.

on a related net neutrality issue:

[drDugan]

http://www.truthout.org/docs_2006/050508R.shtml [truthout.org]

'''
The Federal Communications Commission has recently encountered mounting scrutiny in response to its broad deregulatory practices. Public frustration regarding the FCC has peaked at a time of fierce debate on net neutrality.

        In a memo obtained Tuesday by The Washington Post, 30 current and former commission employees complained about the leadership of FCC Chairman Kevin Martin.

        Staff members observed that "the FCC process appears broken and most of the blame appears to rest with Chairman Martin."

        The memo, written to chairman of the House Energy and Commerce Committee John Dingell and chairman of the House Energy Subcommittee on Oversight and Investigations Bart Stupak, increases pressure on the FCC chairman, who, in particular, has been accused of a rigidly anti-regulatory, pro-corporate approach. Many critics assert that his approach has contributed to a lack of oversight over network providers.
'''

What's a little deregulation between friends, right?

Re:Obligatory Behind-the-times Question

[rs79]

Do you mean root (".") or TLD (".com" et al) servers. Sorry to ask but a lot of people say "root" but mean "tld".

Anyway, primary the root zozne yourself. Run a copy of .com locally. Stop sucking on the tit of US government run DNS servers; we've been babied for 20 years and we really at this point should be doing this stuff for ourselves.

Somebody ought to look in the wayback machine for alternic.net. I have a vague memory of Kashpureff doing this well before 2001.
Talk abourt irony. (He went to jail for hacking the internic. Back then it was considered bad. Not sure about today)

Re:Oh the Humanity

[smittyoneeach]

After having been trivial, obvious, and awash with prior art by the gallery for decades previously.
None of the presidential candidates, AFAIK, has said peep #1 about patent reform. Hm.

Re:Obligatory Behind-the-times Question

[Anonymous Coward]

The root servers aren't very heavily loaded as their data has long TTLs. The .com servers do get a lot of traffic, but Verisign has to deal with that, so don't worry.

Re:This is a useful patent for a change.

[benthurston27]

Well i think it would be cool if someone webcrawled my apache server and people could find it without me having to be a whatever.com of course i'd have to have a static ip but thats ok.

I sincerely hope they sue Earthlink...

[SmoothTom]

I sincerely hope they sue Earthlink, because maybe then Earthlink will stop the stupid practice of NOT returning a failure when the domain is not found.

It is getting ever more difficult to find DNS that just works as it should, instead of coming up with a result for every request, even if it has to make one up. :o(

*mutter* *mutter* *mutter*

Tomas