I agree with Zefram here, for at least a couple of reasons:
- there's a difference between doing this in infrastructure and
doing this in a client program
- there's a difference between doing this in a scenario where
there probably really IS a human in the loop (IE) and a
scenario where there's no reason to think that a human is
involved (trivially, an FTP running from cron on a Unix box)
- there's a difference between doing this in a component that
can be replaced (IE) and one that is very difficult to replace
in a meaningful way (DNS)
Not that I think IE's redirection is a GREAT example of the
Internet at its finest...
Spencer
----- Original Message -----
From: "Zefram" <zefram(_at_)fysh(_dot_)org>
To: "Dean Anderson" <dean(_at_)av8(_dot_)com>
Cc: "Keith Moore" <moore(_at_)cs(_dot_)utk(_dot_)edu>; "Yakov Shafranovich"
<research(_at_)solidmatrix(_dot_)com>; <ietf(_at_)ietf(_dot_)org>
Sent: Tuesday, September 16, 2003 8:18 AM
Subject: Re: [Fwd: [Asrg] Verisign: All Your Misspelling Are Belong To
Us]
Dean Anderson wrote:
Is it any worse than IE taking you to msn search when a domain
doesn't
resolve? Or worse than Mozilla taking you to Netscape, duplicating
a
Google search, and opening a sidebar (and a netscape search) you
didn't
want?
Yes, it is worse. Much worse. There is a fundamental difference
between
this defaulting happening in the DNS and happening in a client
program.
It is necessary that the wire protocols distinguish between
existence and
non-existence of resources in a standard manner (NXDOMAIN in this
case)
in order to give the client the choice of how to handle
non-existence.
If IE wishes to default to doing a web search under those
circumstances,
that is silly but harms no one else. What Verisign has done
pre-empts
that choice for everyone.
-zefram
--
Andrew Main (Zefram) <zefram(_at_)fysh(_dot_)org>
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