On Sat, Oct 3, 2009 at 4:55 PM, Jorge Amodio <[log in to unmask]> wrote: >>> Are you talking about a SiteFinder like system? >> >> Conceptually, SiteFinder is a great initiative. One that open up >> increased mobile innovation and considering also that it is founded on >> Freedom of Information legislation. Unfortunately, many countries e.g. >> Kenya do not have FOI legislations therefore governments and >> institutions with the colour of the law and corporate entities of >> great public interest never disclose important information to the >> public.(We have been lobbying for FOI since 2000 and has been the >> global Freedom of Information week) > > I believe you are getting confused with something else here. You are right I did not know about it. Because of telcos earlier mention I assumed it was about http://www.sitefinder.ofcom.org.uk/ Now I know meant http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Site_Finder > SiteFinder was a wrong thing to do and it ended in a big lawsuit > between ICANN, DoC, Verisgn, etc. > > Now is one of the reasons why on the DAG there is explicit mention > to restrict the use of wildcards on resource records at the apex of > a TLD. > > The scheme use to work adding an entry on the zone for a given > domain name that had a wildcard (*) pointing to the IP address of > a website of this company, then when your browser asked the DNS > to resolve a name, if the name didn't exist instead of getting back > the notification that the name does not exist you will be directed > to this site (which was SiteFinder) and then there you have a > bunch of stuff to choose from, 99% for which the company > operating that TLD and that website was also making money. > > My mention of ISPs tampering with the DNS is similar to what > SiteFinder did. For example if from here I try to get to the URL > "http://icann.noexiste" my ISP (Time Warner/RoadRunner) > intercepts the DNS response are redirects me to: > http://ww23.rr.com/index.php?origURL=http://icann.noexiste/ > and as you will see, the links on the top are "sponsored", which > means people pay to be there and the ISP now has another > source of revenue. > > Since this is being done tampering the DNS traffic but not using > a particular zone of the DNS and the ISPs have no contractual > obligations with ICANN there is nothing that can be done. > Very interesting indeed!