19:31, Monday 3 Feb., 2003 Link

As long as we're talking about Network Solutions' claim that them paying compensation will herald the end of the internet, how about this: their parent company Verisign have broken the domain name system. What does this mean? Every domain with non-ASCII characters points to the same IP address, whether it's registered or not. At this IP address is a website that points you to a plugin specifically for Windows IE. So: this breaks knowing whether a domain exists or not so your application can give you an error message; anything on the internet on an international domain which isn't www will fail in bizarre ways (so if you make a typo, email clients will be trying to connect to the wrong machine, RSS aggregators will get 404s, ssh sessions will get connection refused -- instead of the appropriate, and consistent, "no address associated with hostname" error); you won't be able to trust DNS to give you an honest answer. There's more in this Slashdot thread. Messing with these deep levels of abstraction is really stupid. These are foundations that everything else uses, and it's pretty fundamental behaviour that's being altered, and in a non-trivial way. Unbelievable. Verisign, Network Solutions: they have to go.