full-disclosure - Verisign abusing .COM/.NET monopoly, BIND releases new

lists.openwall.net		lists / announce owl-users owl-dev john-users john-dev passwdqc-users yescrypt popa3d-users / oss-security kernel-hardening musl sabotage tlsify passwords / crypt-dev xvendor / Bugtraq Full-Disclosure linux-kernel linux-netdev linux-ext4 linux-hardening linux-cve-announce PHC
Open Source and information security mailing list archives

Hash Suite for Android: free password hash cracker in your pocket

[<prev] [next>] [<thread-prev] [thread-next>] [day] [month] [year] [list]

From: jonathan at nuclearelephant.com (Jonathan A. Zdziarski)
Subject: Verisign abusing .COM/.NET monopoly, BIND
	releases new

There's a link to a great rant about this in an article I wrote up today
about Verisign's Anti-Competitive history at
http://www.nuclearelephant.com/papers/verisign.html.  A few key points
the author of the rant hits on is that Verisign implemented this
virtually overnight with no input whatsoever from the operations
community.  As a result, it broke a lot of things such as Anti-Spam
tools that reject mail from nonexistent domains, intercepts passwords
and other URL information misdirected to a nonexistent site or
unreachable sites, and sitefinder apparently has an open SMTP relay as
well.

In my own article, I had started to make mention about making both
practical and legal moves towards creating a non-profit organization to
manage a centralized top-level registry + a new set of root servers with
a _predefined set of rules_ all registry subscribers (domain registries)
must adhere to or risk being removed.  As I read more about some of the
whacked-on-drugs things Verisign has done recently, I'm beginning to
think we need to move on something like this a lot quicker than we have
been.  

The InterNIC wasn't perfect, but they certainly weren't commercialized
in the way Verisign is now.  The Internet now being a commercial
enterprise, root servers and TLDs should by no means be in the hands of
a for-profit corporation.