I agree with Zefram here, for at least a couple of reasons: - there's a difference between doing this in infrastructure and doing this in a client program - there's a difference between doing this in a scenario where there probably really IS a human in the loop (IE) and a scenario where there's no reason to think that a human is involved (trivially, an FTP running from cron on a Unix box) - there's a difference between doing this in a component that can be replaced (IE) and one that is very difficult to replace in a meaningful way (DNS) Not that I think IE's redirection is a GREAT example of the Internet at its finest... Spencer ----- Original Message ----- From: "Zefram" <zefram@fysh.org> To: "Dean Anderson" <dean@av8.com> Cc: "Keith Moore" <moore@cs.utk.edu>; "Yakov Shafranovich" <research@solidmatrix.com>; <ietf@ietf.org> Sent: Tuesday, September 16, 2003 8:18 AM Subject: Re: [Fwd: [Asrg] Verisign: All Your Misspelling Are Belong To Us] > Dean Anderson wrote: > >Is it any worse than IE taking you to msn search when a domain doesn't > >resolve? Or worse than Mozilla taking you to Netscape, duplicating a > >Google search, and opening a sidebar (and a netscape search) you didn't > >want? > > Yes, it is worse. Much worse. There is a fundamental difference between > this defaulting happening in the DNS and happening in a client program. > It is necessary that the wire protocols distinguish between existence and > non-existence of resources in a standard manner (NXDOMAIN in this case) > in order to give the client the choice of how to handle non-existence. > If IE wishes to default to doing a web search under those circumstances, > that is silly but harms no one else. What Verisign has done pre-empts > that choice for everyone. > > -zefram > -- > Andrew Main (Zefram) <zefram@fysh.org> > > _______________________________________________ > This message was passed through ietf_censored@carmen.ipv6.cselt.it, which is a sublist of ietf@ietf.org. Not all messages are passed. Decisions on what to pass are made solely by Raffaele D'Albenzio.