On Mon, Jul 24, 2006 at 10:13:21PM +0800, James Davis wrote:
> 
> And finally, who in their right mind at auda, allowed this policy to be
> passed.. It's idiotic.

Agreed - it is concerning that auDA want to expand their mandate when
simple technical matters like this have passed them by.

Especially since:

<http://www.iab.org/documents/docs/2003-09-20-dns-wildcards.html> and
the fact that registering top-level domains should have been an obvious
interaction problem.

Anyway, you can see that not all the entities who have registered
ccTLD.com.au are evil - just a few of them are.

If I am not mistaken you should be able to neutralise this on the Unix
DNS side by specifiying the zones in question to be "delegation-only".

Another way to do this would be to setup the zones ccTLD.com.au and
GTLD.com.au yourself and always return NXDOMAIN.

> I welcome anyone's opinions, and to find out if anyone else has seen the
> above behaviour, and if there's anything we can do to petition Auda to
> actually consider third party applications before they do something like
> this.

That should be one of their primary considerations without requiring
petitioning or anything else. 

Anand

-- 
 `When any government, or any church for that matter, undertakes to say to
  its subjects, "This you may not read, this you must not see, this you are
  forbidden to know," the end result is tyranny and oppression no matter how
  holy the motives' -- Robert A Heinlein, "If this goes on --"