Study Reveals How ISPs Responded to SiteFinder 172
penciling_in writes "During the 2+ weeks for which Site Finder was operational, a number of ISPs took steps to disable the service. A study just released reveals the details and analysis, including specific networks disabling Site Finder during its operational period. For example, the study reports China blocked the traffic at its backbone, and Taiwan's Chunghwa Telecom and Korea's DACOM also disabled the service. US ISPs have been slower to act, but US ISP Adelphia disabled the service September 20-22 before re-enabling it on September 23." That link is a summary; or cut straight to the study itself.
Intresting preup? story (Score:5, Informative)
Adelphia? (Score:2, Informative)
No, they did not, at least not nationwide. I was checking it literally everyday. It kept screwing with my DNS requests. Unless they mean those 4 hours I was offline on the 22nd, they did not disable sitefinder on my dns servers.
Umm (Score:3, Informative)
Re:It never "worked" for me... (Score:5, Informative)
No, everyone "uses" verisign. They control the database for the gTLDs .com and .net, so all nameservers everywhere on the internet listen to them. When a nameserver tries to resolve a name, it first goes to the root nameservers (A.ROOT-SERVERS.NET, B.ROOT-SERVERS.NET, etc. There's 13 of them. I believe verisign runs two of those, ISC (people that make BIND) run one, I'm not sure who else does). Verisign basically controls what those servers do. They added a wildcard entry for *.com - anything that's not specifically picked up by a registered domain will be connected to their sitefinder server.
We are an Educational Institution though, so that could be the reason.
Likely they just blocked it very quickly.
Re:So it comes down to this (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Not worth the trouble (Score:3, Informative)
I can give you one reason:
All your mail with mistyped domains has been "rejected" (probably read by a marketing bot) by verisign.
That's gotta be worth at _least_ blacklisting the IP, never mind messing with the DNS servers.
Adelphia (Score:2, Informative)
Verisign is helping itself, not users (Score:3, Informative)
Had Verisign wanted to help users, it could have done so in other ways, some of which would not have broken a working RFC standard or the servers of lots of people. In addition, as stated in previous threads, the searcher is not even as good as Microsoft's similar feature; thus Verisign's "help" is worse than that most users were already receiving. That seems to indicate that help for users was not a priority for SiteFinder - rather the opportunity for free advertising (and the lack of tangible worth of the trust they violated) led Verisign to conclude that this was a good idea.