their mistake is in assuming that they can respond appropriately
for all ports - particularly when the association of applications
with known ports is only advisory, and many ports are open for
arbitrary use.
Agreed but this is overstating the issue since interoperability
demands we know which port is doing what and when.
only the app (not the entire network) needs to know which port to use,
and this doesn't require that every port be assigned to a specific app.
What we needed was time to
either stop this before it happened or to deal with the implications.
what we need is a way to punish people who abuse the Internet.
personally I think drawing and quartering would be appropriate...
in fact, a 550 response in SMTP is a different condition from
NXDOMAIN, and sometimes the difference is important - as the spam
filter folks have discovered.
Yes and this could be fixed with a new well-defined error code
NO Jim. VERISIGN DOES NOT HAVE THE RIGHT TO IMPOSE DISRUPTIVE CHANGE
ON THE INTERNET, not even with advance notice.
None of this makes it right but let's focus on the issue not Verisign.
Yes, let's focus on the issue. But let's not ignore who is doing it
either.
What's wrong for VeriSign is wrong for the other TLD operators also.
But Verisign causes much more harm by screwing COM and NET than the
operators of ccTLDs do.