John and all, Weather this action by NSOL was due to malice or incompetence, it remains not excusable. Surely NSOL has test platforms for testing DNS configuration changes. Either way however, NSOL has seemingly corrected the problem, but leaves the user community at all levels at some increased level of doubt as to the creditability of NSOL's management practices. And this in no way addresses the Tasting still being practiced by NSOL, now does it? Frankly, NSOL should pay a price for these sorts of disruptions, and as ICANN is responsible for the oversight of its Registries, it should take immediate and appropriate action accordingly. Instead what is happening is something much different from ICANN which by all appearances is turning a blind eye and as such abrogating it's contracted responsibilities. Looks like RegistryFly all over again... All this seems greatly like the incompetent overseeing the incompetent. Hell of a mess IMO! -----Original Message-----

From: John Levine <johnl@iecc.com> Sent: Apr 10, 2008 5:45 PM To: Danny Younger <dannyyounger@yahoo.com> Cc: At-Large Worldwide <alac@atlarge-lists.icann.org> Subject: Re: [At-Large] Network Solutions not hijacking unassigned sub domains

...

Are you taking the position that it's OK for registrars to populate users' unassigned subdomains with their own ads?

I don't see any evidence that NSI intended to do that. It looks to me like it was a configuration error.

This particular domain is hosted on NSI's DNS and web servers. It has a wildcard DNS entry for *.gotgame.com. There's over a thousand other domains on the same DNS servers so I spot checked a few of them, and didn't see any wildcard entries, so I assume that gotgame added that wildcard themselves.

When you set up a web server that handles a lot of different domains, one of the things you configure is what to do when someone points a domain at other than one of the configured ones. I can easily imagine that someone at NSI figured that would only happen if an ex-customer left their DNS pointing at NSI, so it's not NSI's problem and it never occurred to them that an actual customer would do something as dumb as to set up a DNS wildcard and not adjust the web config to match.

If you check random blah.gotgame.com domains now, you see a generic page not found error. So although I am not a big fan of NSI, we do have to remember never to attribute to malice things that can be attributed to incompetence.

Regards, John Levine, johnl@iecc.com, Primary Perpetrator of "The Internet for Dummies", Information Superhighwayman wanna-be, http://www.johnlevine.com, ex-Mayor "More Wiener schnitzel, please", said Tom, revealingly.

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