Verisign is now on crack for the .com and .net zones, they've fractured reverse lookups for .com and .net

[Nico Kadel-Garcia]

Quoted from a security newsgroup:

	As of today (2003-09-15) Verisign has hijacked/squatted on ALL unused 
..com and .net domain names. These unused domains will now resolve to a 
Verisign IP which runs http and smtp. The host will accept incoming mail.

	Implications:
	1. Instant departure from clearly established, expected DNS behavior
	2. Verisign demonstrates total ownership of .COM and .NET root hierarchy
	3. Unilateral action to insert corporate advertising into heart of Internet
	4. Junk filtering that checks existence of domains is now broken
	5. Nameservers around the world will now cache all sorts of useless junk
	6. Mail to invalid domains (typos, bounces) will go to Verisign
	7. Admins will have a harder time determining site configuration errors
	8. Invalid URLs can now pollute search engines and automated systems

	You might want to complain to ICANN [ http://www.icann.org/ ] The 
largest influence will probably come from ISPs, who I'm sure _will_
suffer weird, unforseen problems from this action.

	-- Jem Berkes http://www.sysdesign.ca/

Also, check out this article.

	http://www.iab.org/Documents/icann-vgrs-response.html

Basically, Verisign modified the .com and .net servers to resolve all 
non-existent domains  to one of their web servers, routing *all* 
attempts to use non-existent domains for web access to their server to 
advertise their domain services.

ICANN is *NOT* happy about this. I suspect that it's time to revisit 
Verisign's ownership of the .com and .net rootservers, because this sort 
of behavior is completely unacceptable.