Yay For Laptops In Bed -Wednesday, September 24, 2003 -2:14 am-
This is the first time I've ever used a computer in bed. It's kind of surprising that it's taken 23 years to happen. Although, I do use the computer from the couch all the time and I do sleep there occasionally. I bought Final Fantasy X today. It was finally released on the Greatest Hits label and therefore dropped to $19.99. Yay. Also yay is the continued awesomeness of my new phono cartridge. I like having the record player in the house, and I think I might actually now own more records than CDs, which is quite an achievement since I've only been buying records for three months.
I think I actually did well on my electronics test today, I actually had all the equations I needed this time. No guesswork is always a good thing.
Alright, time for something important. This is pretty dense, but please read through it as it affects you in a serious way. A few days ago (September 15th, 2003) a company in charge of running an important aspect of the Internet changed something that fundamentally broke the way major portions of the net function. This change appears to be motivated solely by the desire to make more money. The internet relies on something called the Domain Name Service (DNS). DNS changes the address you type in into a machine-readable number. For example, you're reading this on williaty.dyndns.com. However, your computer has no idea who, what, or where williaty.dyndns.com is. So it makes a DNS Request. Basically, it asks its neighbor "Hey, have you ever heard of this williaty.dyndns.com guy?" The neighbor can say "Sure he's at this number." or, "No, I've never heard of him, but I'll ask my neighbor on the other side." and so on, until a server finally knows the answer. The server who finally knows who williaty.dyndns.com is will say "Yeah, I know him! You can reach him at 65.31.10.28!" Your computer actually asks for http://65.31.10.28/ to reach me. Try it. Type http://65.31.10.28/ into the address bar of your browser and hit return. See, got my site anyway, didn't ya? Unless I've moved to a different IP Address by the time you read this. If by some chance, nobody knows the person you're looking for, the question is passed to the Top Level Domain (TLD) Server (a.k.a. The Root Server) The TLD Server knows everybody. Right now, the TLD Servers for .com and .net are owned by a company named VeriSign.
Let's recap: You type in williaty.dyndns.com, which is a Domain Name. Your computer makes a Domain Name Service (DNS) Lookup request and finds out that my IP Address is http://65.31.10.28/. And you get to see my site in all it's glory. Which is exactly how it's supposed to work. But we have to add one more thing. Wildcards.
A Wildcard is pretty much exactly what it sounds like. It's something that can take the place of something else. In terms of the DNS, a wildcard is a bit of a Domain Name that can be changed without changing the IP Address that you get from a DNS Lookup query. It is represented by the "*" character. Wildcards are a good thing, they have lots of legitimate uses. For instance, my Domain Name is Wildcarded. My Domain Name is really *.williaty.dyndns.org The wild card can be anything, or even nothing. The reason I use a wildcard is so that people who type www.williaty.dyndns.org by mistake still come to my site. But you can put anything on the front. Try foo.williaty.dyndns.org, ilovecookes.williaty.dyndns.org, or even 123456.williaty.dyndns.org. They all point to me. This is how wildcards are supposed to be used.
On September 15th, 2003, VeriSign decided to change the way the net works, without asking anyone. They added two little lines to the very end of their massive TLD Servers. They added *.com and *.net With these two little additions, they completely broke the way errors are handled by DNS. Let's say you were trying to come to williaty.dyndns.com, but you goofed and typed qillliaty.dyndns.org Prior to September 15th, you would have seen a message saying, basically, "Yeah, um, that person doesn't exist, try again". Which, as things go, is actually pretty useful. You know you made a mistake and you get a chance to fix it. This is because qwilliaty.dyndns.org doesn't exist, therefore, none of the DNS Servers know who it is. Now, with the entire .com and .net TLD Servers being wildcarded EVERY POSSIBLE DOMAIN EXISTS So that typo actually takes you to a web page that VeriSign owns. A page on which they list helpful suggestions that companies paid VeriSign lots of money to put there. And you'll never know exactly what went wrong. If you try it, you'll find out that anything you type into the address bar and end with .com will take you to a web page. This is wrong. This breaks a lot of things.
One of the most important things this breaks is email. Yeah, email has to use DNS too, only it uses a lot more of it than the web does. Email uses DNS to figure out how to get from place to place and uses DNS to eliminate some kinds of SPAM. With the wildcarding of .com and .net, mistyped email addresses no longer "bounce" back and let you know something went wrong. That all important email asking for an extension on your term paper just disappeared into the ether because you made a typo. Also, many email servers use DNS Lookups to try and decide if a message is SPAM. If a mail server gets an email and it finds out that the domain it claims to be from doesn't exist, it deletes it as SPAM. This too, is broken by the wildcards. Since September 15th, a lot more SPAM is getting through.
Obviously, this is pissing a lot of people off. It should piss you off. VeriSign has been asked to stop this by all the governing bodies of the net, the very people who gave VeriSign its job. VeriSign has told them to fuck off. Why? Because VeriSign is making a lot of money off of this. So do something about it. Call your ISP (the people you get your internet from) and tell them you don't like what VeriSign is doing to your internet. Call you Senator and Representatives and tell them you think it looks bad that VeriSign is ignoring what the government is asking it to do. Basically, just call anyone higher on the totem poll than you and say "Fuck off VeriSign"
If you want to know more, read this, this, or this. Also, talk to me about it if you want to know more.