VeriSign fends off critics at ICANN confab (News.com)

VeriSign fends off critics at ICANN confab (News.com)

[...] VeriSign's decision to redirect Web surfers who mistype domain names to its own advertising-based Web site

That's the VeriSign line. The rest of the world disagrees that this is what they did!

Did he consider the real situation too complicated to describe in one sentence? Perhaps we should find some simple ways to describe it. I tried to compose a few short descriptions but they were all flamebait :) (But from my perspective, not as much flamebait as the one in the article!)

[...] considering turning on Site Finder again but disabling the "wild card" service for e-mail deliveries to nonexistent domains

What does this mean? You can't turn off the wildcard for just one protocol; that's the whole problem. So this statement needs some interpretation. Possibilities:

1. They turn off the wildcard, but leave Site Finder as an accessible service on its normal address. Maybe they'll try to make deals with browser distributors. This would be a face-saving gesture. Removing the wildcard entry is what everyone wants; no-one has a problem with the existence of Site Finder. So this would be good news.
2. They put back the wildcard but stop running an SMTP server. This would be Bad, it would cause many MTAs to keep retrying deliveries.
3. They plan to do something evil involving wildcard MX records (I'm not sure what; maybe they figured something out) and then claim that this solves the problems.

In an unusual grassroots movement, some network administrators have adopted technical countermeasures against VeriSign.

Strange that he would call this unusual. I saw it as the normal and expected response. It's not as good as actually having a trustworthy source of information, but it's the usual "routing around damage" approach.

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