Hi Brett,

On Fri, Nov 20, 2009 at 1:38 AM, Brett Fenton
<brett.fenton&#167;netregistry.com.au> wrote:
> 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.
>

Actually it was talking about: "redirection / synthesis for all TLDs
(gTLDs & ccTLDs)

The reasons they listed are:

 - architectural violation
 - impact on Internet protocols
 - single point of failure
 - reserved and blocked domains appearing 'live'
 - privacy concerns
 - lack of choice for Internet users
 - poor user experience
 - impact on IDN TLDs

The first three are (frankly, minor) technical reasons.

One technical reason not listed is that if you happen to be browsing
via a mobile phone, you'll get more data back that an NXDOMAIN. I
wonder if Telstra charge you for that extra, valuable, data.

A more interesting reason, though, is 'privacy'.

> Unless you know something I don't Telstra aren't wildcarding in the root. They
> are returning defined HTTP against failed lookups.

You mean they are synthesising records for non-existant domains, just
like what the paper mentions?

I don't understand how you could read the same paper that I did and
completely misrepresent it.

Was that intentional?

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

Yes - I expect MY browser to know more about me.

And potentially give me a better result when the underlying protocols
indicate a problem.

But in this case, the job that I've assigned my browser to do is being
subverted.

Both the browsers you mention take the issue of user privacy so
seriously they do not actually use the URL that returned a NXDOMAIN
when looking up their recommendation service.

They take a hash of it, and then find other URLs near the same hash
bucket to display suggested URLS (actually there is more to it, but
I'll assume you are technical enough to dig up the details).

>
> 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).

Kind of like your mechanic deciding for you that you really only need
3 cylinders in your car. It'll inconvenience a small subset of users
who can re-install the extra cylinder if absolutely necessary, right?

Cheers,
Anand