Re: [sitefinder-tech-discuss] Pseudo code please

[Kee Hinckley <nazgul@somewhere.com>]

At 6:40 PM -0400 10/23/03, Andrew Newton wrote:
> > The real issue and reason that .com and .net are different from .museum
> > is that .museum is a "sponsored" domain with a clear owner and a clear
> > constituency that agreed that wildcards were an acceptable and good idea
> > for that TLD.  It serves a very different purpose than .com and .net.
> > I suspect that if you were to approach the community about wildcarding
> > .org or .edu, you'd get similar responses.  Frankly, the only reason I
> > can think of that noone has objected to this in .us is that we just
> > didn't notice the change because not very many people actually use
> > the .us domain in URLs that they type.
>
> I believe this to be a political opinion.  Unless your network 
> cannot receive mail from machines with these TLD's and unless your 
> machines are incapable of making HTTP requests to domains in the 
> these TLD's, their wildcards have the same effects as the one in 
> com/net.  The DNS protocol doesn't behave differently for 
> "sponsored" domains.

There is more here than a political opinion.  It's a matter of scale. 
My personal domain bounced 1.5 million messages last year using the 
standard "bad domain" test that an A wildcard breaks.  That was 17% 
of the total bounces.  Those were messages sent to non-existent 
addresses.  I can go run the stats and see how many of those messages 
were sent from other than .com and .net, but I can tell you right now 
that it's a very small percentage.

The historic domains are used for spam... and everything else, far 
more than any other domain.  So changes to them need to be far more 
conservative.  After all, NetBios doesn't run around defaulting to 
".name" as an ending, nor do browsers automatically append ".museum" 
if you forget to add a domain to name.
--
Kee Hinckley
http://www.messagefire.com/         Next Generation Spam Defense
http://commons.somewhere.com/buzz/  Writings on Technology and Society

I'm not sure which upsets me more: that people are so unwilling to accept
responsibility for their own actions, or that they are so eager to regulate
everyone else's.

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