September 25, 2003
Monopolies suck

The recent introduction of VeriSigns obnoxious SiteFinder service is , fortunately being fought from all angles. If ICANN let's VeriSign do this without taking away the com/net monopoly, we will need a new ICANN. VeriSign is not only hijacking the domain industry, but also the search industry and DNS itself. Meanwhile VeriSign is busy putting a 'we put customers first' spin on this abomination. Keep the lawsuits coming.

While we're waiting for this, we have to investigate the technical means for fightiing this service. Complete filtering of all traffic from the SiteFinder address is the most appealing option. This could be a very popular browser plugin.

BUT of course the ultimate solution is to 'fix' the DNS lookup itself - simply treating the SiteFinder ip-address as a black hole. Bind is currently being patched to do exactly that.

UPDATE
Here's a partial quick fix for the problem: Route the traffic to sitefinder via a nonexistent address. It is not efficient - it takes a while to fail - but it will give you the satisfaction of not generating traffic for SiteFinder...
If you're on a Windows NT/2000/XP machine here's how: Open a command prompt and use the following command

route -p ADD 64.94.110.11 MASK 255.255.255.255 10.100.10.0

What this does is force traffic to the SiteFinder address to route via the nonexistent 10.100.10.0 address. This assumes that you're actually on the same network as 10.100.10.0 (eg your address is 10.100.10.xxx and your subnet mask 255.255.255.0 or similar). The -p makes this route persistent so it remains after reboot.

Do let me know if you know of a good reason not to do this (i.e. harm to others of some kind. The local damage I can deal with)

Posted by Claus at September 25, 2003 03:56 PM | TrackBack (0)