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Suppose while typing the URL for this blog, you missed the “o” key and typed “blgware” instead of “blogware”. Until today, you’d get an error message because the domain “blgware.com” doesn’t exist.

That changed today. Here, try visiting accordionguy.blgware.com. You no longer get an error message, but a search engine page.

The page you get is Site Finder, a search page owned by Verisign. Verisign is the 800-pound gorilla of the internet, a for-profit company that by virtue of buying Network Solutions, who were originally in charge of domain name assignment, are in charge of all domain names that end with “.com” or “.net”. Every registrar pays Verisign a fee for every .com and .net domain name they register.

(Full disclosure: my employer is Tucows, Inc. and it is, among other things, a domain name registrar.)

Now they’re using their monopoly power over internet’s infrastructure to generate profit. One of the companies providing the search engine technology for Site Finder is Overture, which is a “paid placement” search engine: advertisers bid for placement in their search engine and pay each time their search result is clicked. According to this article, Verisign stands to make about US$100 million per year off Site Finder.

This is probably going to break a lot of software. While error messages aren’t necessarily pretty, a lot of software that accesses the ‘net uses the “there’s no domain by that name” error as its cue that a given domain name does not exist. Electronic Frontier Foundation Chairman Brad Templeton says:

E-mail delivery will be interfered with. Scores of other applications will also break. In some cases, there will be security problems, where users running applications that should have given them an error now connect them to a distant Internet site.

Worse still is the fact that Verisign, probably anticipating the outcry, didn’t give anyone much warning that they were going to pull this stunt. This, as Salon’s Andrew Leonard observes, is not the way things are normally done:

Once upon a time, when engineers were considering making major changes to the way the Internet worked, they asked other engineers whether what they were proposing was a good idea. They even came up with a nifty way to solicit feedback, the “Request for Comments” system. If you had a good idea, you would write it up, post an RFC to the Net, and then enjoy the fun as the proposal was constructively ripped to shreds.

This was a good thing. For example, if implementing your proposal would have ended up breaking parts of the Net, your colleagues would get the chance to tell you, instead of discovering all the wreckage after the fact.

There is a fix in the works. The ISC (Internet Software Consortium) is going to distribute a patch to BIND (Berkeley Internet Name Domain, software used to convert domain names into numerical internet addresses) that blocks Site Finder. To paraphrase a classic line about the internet, it will see Site Finder as damage and route around it.

Want to find out a little more about what all this techno hoo-hah means? Check these out…

Layperson-friendly

• Today’s User friendly comic sums it up in three panels.
• Salon has an article called Thanks, VeriSign, for breaking the Internet
• Wired.com article: ISC to cut off Site Finder

Techier

• Verisign condemned for domain-system changes
• Adam Langley has all kinds of Verisign countermeasures on his site, ImperialViolet
• Paul Vixie in response to Site Finder controversy
• Domain Names Gone Wild!
• Boss Ross has been in this domain name business for years and is commenting regularly on the whole thing on his blog.

I just wanted to say “hello” and “thank you” to the YULBlog folks (YUL is the airport code for Montreal’s Mirabel Airport) for holding a gathering for me and Paul during our visit.

If any of you come to Accordion City, I’ll arrange for a gathering of the GTABloggers to greet you!

(More stuff about our Montreal trip tomorrow.)

We may not have flying cars yet (although Montreal cabbies are pretty good at faking it), but I’ve recently seen gadgets that nobody would’ve recognized a mere five years ago…

Segway

The CIBC (for non-Canadians: it’s a bank) is promoting their new VISA card by sending out representatives to hand out flyers while scooting about on advertising-laden Segways. I suppose having them on Segways is a little more attention-getting that merely sending them out on foot…

Unfortunately, the advertising hides her very nice pleather pants. The CIBC should take note of this, as I, like many red-blooded straight men, have been programmed to accept the orders of women in leather pants without question.

WiFi

With even grade school students owning cell phones these days, public phone use has gone down considerably. At the same time, with the rise of mobile computing and wireless internet, more and more people are WiFi users. Bell Canada’s taken the smart approach and provided free WiFi access at many VIA rail stations across Canada, placing their WiFi access points in rugged, HAL 9000-esque containers in spaces where a pay phone would normally go.

…will be made this weekend. I’ll be spending a total of ten hours on a train (first class, even!) so I figure I should be able to crank out some blog entries I’ve been meaning to finish.

Priority number one will be given to WORST DATE EVER PART 5: “Hot English Girls and Horse Tranquilizers” and a little after-the-fact story with me and Crabs that I’ll call “Dude, I loved the way your head exploded!”

(A certain member of the clergy keeps asking for Worst Date Ever, part 5 and I figure I should make him happy. I’m going to need a guy on the inside to vouch for me when it’s time to do those afterlife bookings, and I don’t think my “BUT JESUS, I CAN EXPLAIN!” t-shirt is going to cut it.)

Someone recently emailed me (in fact, I still have to email this person back — soon, I promise!), saying “You’ve experienced quite a few bizarre events.  I’m glad you can look back and laugh.” Thank you! My trick to handling life’s strange vicissitudes? Preparedness. As shown by Torg in today’s Sluggy Freelance comic:

I’m leaving for a weekend in Montreal tonight, and I’m taking my housemate Paul there as his birthday present (His birthday’s on the 13th). It’s part of Paul’s indoctrination as a soon-to-be “New Canadian”. I’ll take him to rue Prince-Arthur, St-Denis, the mountain, the old city, “Club Super Sexe” (at least to take his picture beside that beautiful sign) and teach him remedial French.

Thanks to a VIA Rail voucher sent to me by Dave “Dave’s Picks” Polaschek — thanks very much, Dave! — and Boris’ loaning me of his apartment (he’s off to NYC for the weekend) — thanks, Boris! — we can go to Montreal in cheap but comfortable style.

We’ll be there from tonight around 11:30 p.m. to Sunday around 6:00 p.m. If you’re in Montreal and want to share in some drinking and general accordion mayhem, I’ll have my cell phone (416 WIT N HIP — hey, that’s the number they gave me) and I should have email access.

Greg Knauss’ The Devil’s Dictionary (which I’ve mentioned before) has some wonderfully nasty definitions of things computer- and Web-ish. He updates it every now and again, and he’s added some new entries since last I checked. My favourites:

GNU License, noun

An impairment of vision, causing the victim’s perception to be limited to black and white.

usability, adjective

The quality of being easy, usually championed by the difficult.

(One nitpick: “usability” is a noun; “usable” is an adjective.)

extreme programming, noun

A method of software development that combines all the charm of backseat driving with all the efficiency of a marital squabble.

The downside of living in large cultural centre like Accordion City is that there is a distressingly large number of overexposed, under-brained Gen X enfants terribles who get paid terribly large salaries to write terribly bad pronouncements on popular culture. Canada’s National newspaper, the Globe and Mail, is located a short walk south of my house and houses two such twerps. I’ve already introduced you to Leah McLaren, who like outer space is beautiful yet vacous. Her male counterpart is Russell Smith, a well-dressed, well-coiffed, well-read cultural Pharisee who badly needs a good solid punch to the mouth.

His most recent column bears the title Blogs: Hanging Dirty Laundry On-line. Allow me to use one of my stock phrases: I’ve seen better paper after wiping my ass.

Like his co-worker McLaren, he immediately gets up my nose with these lines from the opening paragraph:

The blog phenomenon is perhaps the strangest side of the Internet. It’s stranger even than all the porn. Thousands of unremarkable people are posting their diaries on-line.

“Oh dear,” one can imagine him saying, “the proles are writing about their unremarkable little lives.”

Such acts, it would seem, are best left to professionals. Say, one Russell Smith, whose books about disaffected young twenty-somethings whose stories are derived from his more-remarkable-than-yours-life. Take, for instance, this plot summary of How Insensitive, a book that became a favourite in CanLit circles:

Adrift in Toronto’s gossipy, grant-driven cultural scene, a coterie of overeducated, underemployed young people stab at vaguely artistic projects and scramble after the opportunities that seem tantalizingly within reach — if you know the right people. Searching for work, sex and big-city life is Ted Owen, who quickly finds himself swept into the complicated lives of the young and the jaded, people who thrive in a strange world of hip fashion and surreal night-clubs.

Wow, Russ, that Ted Owen character reminds me of someone. Wish I could put my finger on whom…

Here’s the first bit from a summary of his second novel, Noise:

Noise, much like Smith’s first novel How Insensitive, deals with young, Torontonian ladder-climbers.

This time the story revolves around James, a restaurant critic. We follow James as he tries to understand his relationships with those around him, and watch his struggles as he tries to make a name for himself.

Yo, Russ! Are you familiar with a term that gets bandied about in fandom called a “Mary Sue”?

(At writing schools all over North America, the credo seems to be “Write What You Know.” Surely they should teach a corollary: “Expand your knowledge. Please.“)

The difference between Russell Smith and most bloggers boils down to these things:

• He is paid to go on about his life, which once you remove the College Street West/CanLit crowd trappings, is about as unremarkable as everyone else’s.
• He has been published in dead tree form.
• He has nice suits.
• He must suffer from a little vertigo, what with the universe revolving around him.

Here’s the deal. If you see Russ in some bar, go buy a drink. Then walk up to him and throw it in his face. I’ll reimburse you and take you out for drinks. Sound cool?