Sigh. I'm not sure anybody looks to ICANN for technical brilliance. Their 
'problems caused' summary for example - poor user experience. That's 
subjective, not a technical resolution, as are a few of the others.

Regardless. The issue in the paper, is wildcarding in the root, which is what 
Verisign did.

My very first post said this was bad. Very bad. 

Unless you know something I don't Telstra aren't wildcarding in the root. They 
are returning defined HTTP against failed lookups. I think you're confusing 
what the issue is and what it isn't.

A better analogy might be for example how a browser handles a fail. IE 
displaying Bing search results or Chrome displaying Google content. 

I'm sorry but I'm still not seeing this as anything other than a very minor 
inconcenience to a very small subset of users (who have the ability to turn it 
off anyway).


> On 20/11/2009, at 12:39 PM, Brett Fenton wrote:
> > Perhaps you can tell me why any DNS provider would out of hand see this
> > as something that is bad for an end user?
> 
> Because DNS is not the web.
> 
> > a) They are only doing it on failed lookups (different story if they were
> > pushing content on valid lookups, and I think they understand this as
> > well)
> 
> In which lies a multitude of sins.  See slides 13 - 18 of
>  http://sel.icann.org/meetings/seoul2009/presentation-ssac-26oct09-en.pdf
> 
> In case you don't know (and this is not meant to be patronising) the
>  authors of that view, the SSAC, are _the_ committee that safeguards the
>  security of DNS and have the power to do so.
> 
> > b) If you want to see a 404, you can opt out of the system
> 
> If only DNS were just about HTTP.
> 
> kind regards
> Jay
>