Thanks, VeriSign, For Breaking The Internet

(Mis)Uses of Technology

from the good-move dept

More fallout from VeriSign’s decision to typosquat the entire internet. Salon is pointing out more of the reasons why this is a problem, suggesting that they’ve basically “broken the internet” in a way that is causing all sorts of problems. One result of this (which a few others have been mentioning) is that it’s wreaking havoc on a number of anti-spam filters. Those filters used to check to see if the domain an email was coming from was valid. If it wasn’t, into the spam bin it went. With the new change, all domains are suddenly valid. The outcry is getting louder, and now some are hoping that this will backfire and will finally cause VeriSign to lose their government granted control of the internet. What surprises me is that this story came out weeks ago and everyone seemed to ignore it until VeriSign actually moved forward with the plans. Anyway, people keep telling me this has gone into effect, but I haven’t seen it. If I type in fake domain names, I still get the standard error messages. Has it changed for everyone else, while I’m still trapped in some sort of internet time warp? Update: Here’s another report suggesting that this could lead to a huge vulnerability should VeriSign get hacked. People are worried that a malicious virus could be installed on the machines of anyone who makes a typo.