Tag: Missing the Point

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Since our apartment complex was taken over by new ownership and management last year, they’ve embarked on a months-long project to “rehab” the complex. In some cases, this meant long-overdue repairs like replacing all the plumbing and water heaters, or rebuilding the balconies with less termite-laden wood. In some cases, this meant cosmetic changes like prettying up the main entrance with a trellis and new steps (still in progress).

There’ve been problems along the way. The plumbing work forced us to move everything out of our storage space for several months, and they’ve delayed things with little explanation and started up again with no notice. They tried out new color schemes in our section back in August, and still haven’t gotten around to a final paint job. They told us to move everything off our balcony just before Thanksgiving, but didn’t actually remove it until January (by which time many of our neighbors had moved things back).

Sometimes the changes themselves have been ridiculous or annoying. They’ve decided to fence off the lawn in our courtyard so that it can be attached to an expanded pool-and-picnic area. I don’t think it occurred to anyone that people liked having a lawn that wasn’t behind a locked gate.

But the most bizarre change has to be the garage doors they’re adding to the carports. They’ve widened and squared-off the posts so that they can put in standard-sized garage doors, despite the fact that this (a) makes it very hard to park in the middle spaces (I’ve already scraped the bumper once, and this is with a Sentra. I’d hate to think about parking here with an SUV or pickup. A Hummer? Forget it!) and (b) accomplishes absolutely nothing. The section is shared by five cars, and two of the doors are double-width, meaning that four of those cars have to share a door with a neighbor:

Image of open garage doors, lightened to showing more clearly that there's no separation behind them.

But what’s really annoying: There are locks on these doors – even the shared ones:

Close-up of a standard garage door lock.

Yes, your neighbor can lock your car in or out of its space by locking his own garage door. Yes, you need to buy your own lock in order to prevent someone else from making your car immobile. No, having the garage door there in the first place does nothing to protect your car – from anything.

What the heck were these people thinking?

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SiteFinder was a “service” Verisign offered for a few weeks in 2003 in which DNS lookups to any non-existant domain in .com or .net responded with a pointer to an ad page. Techies revolted because it broke a lot of stuff. Verisign attempted to paint opponents of Site Finder as a minority of anti-innovation “technology purists” who still resent the presence of commerce on the Internet. A shorter version of my response ran on CNet’s News.com as a letter to the editor.

Mark McLaughlin’s opinion piece, “Innovation and the Internet,” simply proves that Verisign has completely missed the point. The reason so many people objected to SiteFinder is not the service it provided, nor a rejection of innovation, but that it caused a significant number of non-web applications to fail. Verisign, a company that should know better, had forgotten that the Internet is more than just the web.

There are many applications besides the web which make use of the DNS system, and many of them take actions that depend on whether a domain exists or not. Some of the more obvious cases occur in spam blocking. For instance, mail servers often check to see whether a the sender’s domain exists before accepting email. The DNS wildcard that powered SiteFinder broke this: suddenly, all domains would appear to be valid. A spammer could claim to be sadkjfhdsaf@asdfsadfjsdf.com, and the message would be accepted.

Another issue is DNS-propagated blacklists: at least one (ORBS, if I remember correctly) had folded and allowed its domain name to expire, but many software packages still included it in their default configurations. Since people often install software without updating, they were seeing slightly slower results at first, but the SiteFinder wildcard suddenly caused all queries to return positive, and a number of servers began rejecting all mail. (Something similar happened with Osirusoft a month earlier, but that was intentional on the part of Osirusoft’s former administrator.)

Other people are concerned about the fact that misdirected email, instead of being routed to secondary servers (in the case of a bad configuration) or bounced back by the originating ISP, is being routed through Verisign. Here, it’s a matter of trust: if you trust Verisign to do the right thing and bounce it without looking at it, then you probably have no objection. But many people saw the arbitrary creation of the wildcard in the first place as a breach of trust, casting doubt on their trustworthiness in other areas.

There are ways to resolve the issue of mistyped websites that do not break other applications. Microsoft embedded this functionality in Internet Explorer some time ago. I believe AOL has done the same in their software. While there were probably some objections, in neither case did it cause other applications to stop working.

It’s not about being technology “purists,” stifling innovation, or keeping commercialism off the Internet. It’s about recognizing the fact that the Internet is a collaborative effort, not the private domain of any one company. If Verisign had submitted its idea for review, and given others a chance to point out its flaws and to make adjustments to their own software, this could all have been avoided. As it is, it is clear that Verisign neither thought through all the consequences nor is willing to recognize that there even are consequences. And that – not a desire to “hold the Internet back” – is the reason for the backlash.

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Two years ago, the company I work for moved to a new office. We used to do most of our domain name registrations through Network Solutions, mainly out of habit from when they were the only registrar, and accounts were of two types:

  1. Contacts. This involved a person or role and contact information.
  2. Domain names. This involved the person or company who registered the domain name, and links to three contacts (admin, technical, and billing).

So I had a contact account for any registrations we did on our clients’ behalf. We moved – again, this was two years ago – and I updated the address.

Network Solutions has restructured their entire account system into something immensely complicated. Somehow this single contact account has been split into three separate accounts, none of which had the password I started with, and all of which had the old address.

Yes, all three redundant accounts showed the address and phone number that I deleted two years ago.

We used to have people lose their domain names (or at least get them put on hold) because they never gave NS their new address when they moved, and they wouldn’t get the renewal notice. I guess these days it doesn’t really matter. Even if you do update your address, they’ll revert it anyway.

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(If you couldn’t tell from the title, this is gonna be a rant.)

When I was in college, I was involved with a creative writing club / literary discussion group called the Literary Guild at UCI. I built a website to post club information and collect our writing projects, and we set up a listserv for online discussion and collaboration.

After a while we started getting complaints from people about how they never received their books, or they were sick of getting junk mail from us, etc. and it became pretty clear they were complaining about the Literary Guild Book Club, which at the time didn’t have a website.

Now think: You’ve signed up with a company that lets you order books from a catalog. The website you find is all about college students and weekly meetings on campus. No mention of catalogs, or ordering books, or even customer service (oops, I mean “customer care”). Don’t you think you might wonder if maybe, just maybe this wasn’t the same group of people?

So we put up a note on the home page stating “We are NOT affiliated with the book club!” Over time it became bold, and then red, and when we noticed the “other” Literary Guild had set up a home page we added a link, and occasionally people would still send us their complaints.

Fast forward to today. Continue reading →

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Given that most of us think we are above-average drivers, you’d think people wouldn’t expect other drivers to be telepathic.

Turn signals prevent other drivers from hitting you! (Or at least reduce the chances of it.)

I am amazed time and time again as I see people driving shiny new Mercedes, Lexuses (Lexi?), and BMWs dodging in and out of traffic without signalling, trusting those below-average other drivers to have above-average reflexes and precognitive abilities.