Fuck Verisign!


UPDATE: ICANN order Verisign to remove SiteFinder

Verisign have been ordered to remove their catch-all so none of this page applies anymore (thought I'd keep it up anyway as I kind of like it.)
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What are verisign doing?

Verisign own the machines that computers on the Internet use to convert .com and .net domain names into IP addresses. They have now taken it upon themselves to create a "catch-all" record. This means that any .com or .net domain that has not been registered (such as www.benkennish.com) will now point straight to their web server rather than giving a "host not found" error.

Well, don't / didn't Microsoft used to do that?

If you use Microsoft Internet Explorer, you may have encountered its search page before (which is on by default and performs a search on MSN if you type any domain that doesn't resolve.) However, this can be disabled by you, the user, and the page you get shown isn't full of links designed for the purpose of making money. Verisign's "sitefinder" cannot be disabled without some quite technical measures on either your part or the part of your Internet Service Provider. It also contains other links ("Search Popular Categories:") which are basically there to help Verisign get more money into their pocket from your domain name typos.

So what? It's only if I mistype a web address, right?

Nope. The Internet relies on domain names for everything and there is certainly more to the Internet than the world wide web you know?!

If you send an email to somebody@domain-that-doesnt-exist.com, rather than it being rejected as you send it, it will be accepted and you will only realise that the email didn't get to who u meant it to go to when Verisign's server sends a reply e-mail back to you (which could take a long time depending on how busy it is at the time.) So if you make a typo in someones email address that's a .com or .net, you wont realise that they didn't get the email for much longer than before.

When you try to connect to a domain using FTP (commonly used to upload files to a web site) and you mistype a .com or .net domain, instead of getting a helpful "host not found" or "name doesn't resolve" message, you will get a confusing "Connection Refused" message.

So what can I do?

Just keep your web browser on this page! (just open up another copy of your browser and use that to browse the web whilst you keep this one minimised / in the background.) It will keep requesting pages from Verisign's "SiteFinder" again and again for as long as you keep your browser window open. This will slow their computers down and cause a lot of traffic on their network which should hopefully piss them off quite a bit. The more people that do this, the more pissed off Verisign will get and hopefully it will teach them a lesson for taking over all the unregistered .com and .net domains! So as Feeder once sang, "tell all your friends!" Oh and btw, you'll notice that sometimes it might not connect to them at all and will give an error message or a page with words like "The page cannot be displayed". This is good news because it means that their server is being hammered by Internet guardians like yourself. So keep up the good work! ;)

NB: Please do NOT keep clicking refresh on this page because that won't slow Verisign down any more but will certainly slow my web site down for everyone!

Aggghh! I can't stand the clicky noise!

Well I'm afraid that's not me that's doing that. It's Internet Explorer which is making the tick noise every time a page is requested. If you want to disable it, you can follow these steps. Unfortunately, it will disable it for all your web browsing but you can always enable it later and it's a small price to pay for being able to fuck over a greedy corporate company! :) ...

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Ben Kennish

Ben Kennish looking mighty fine! ;)

Read a slashdot article about this
Sign a petition to object to Verisign's attrocious behavior

(c) Ben Kennish 2008 - Source code license