Photos from yesterday's ICANN meeting on VeriSign's Site Finder

[Declan McCullagh <declan () well com>]

The photos:
http://www.mccullagh.org/theme/icann-verisign-meeting-oct03.html

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http://news.com.com/2100-1038_3-5088128.html

VeriSign fends off critics at ICANN confab
Last modified: October 7, 2003, 5:23 PM PDT
By Declan McCullagh

WASHINGTON--David Schairer, vice president of broadband provider XO 
Communications, is frustrated by VeriSign's decision to redirect Web 
surfers who mistype domain names to its own advertising-based Web site.

At an unprecedented public meeting Tuesday to discuss VeriSign's "Site 
Finder" redirection, Schairer described in detail how the changes had 
increased XO's network traffic, confused his customers' e-mail utilities, 
and disabled a test that previously snared about one-fifth of the spam 
directed at XO's network.

The Site Finder server also chokes on large e-mail messages that are 
addressed to nonexistent domain names and does not work with software 
created for people with handicaps, Schairer said. He predicted that the 
work required to fix similar problems in thousands of software programs is 
smaller in scope but "similar in kind" to the massive Year 2000 bug 
effort--amounting to a kind of "tax on the Internet."

Schairer's examples and those offered by other participants at the 
meeting--organized by the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and 
Numbers (ICANN)--combined to put VeriSign on the defensive on Tuesday. The 
company, which enjoys a government-granted monopoly on the master .com and 
.net database, said last week it would "temporarily suspend" its 
redirection service.

[...]
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