<font size="3">VeriSign's redirection will resume</font>
The domain administrator's controversial Site Finder service will be switched back on, though with one or two months' notice

VeriSign will give between 30 and 60 days' notice before resuming a controversial and temporarily suspended feature that redirected many .com and .net domains, company representatives said on Wednesday.

Speaking before an unusual gathering of technical experts in Washington, D.C., VeriSign said its own re-evaluation of its Site Finder redirection service found "no identified security or stability problems." When it was active, Site Finder added a "wild card" for .com and .net domains that snared queries to nonexistent Internet sites and forwarded them to VeriSign's own servers.

That confused some anti-spam filters and other network utilities, a side effect that VeriSign downplayed on Wednesday by arguing that Site Finder's benefits to end users -- a search screen instead of an error message -- outweighed the costs to network administrators. "One of the segments of the community that has not been looked at in this whole issue, in my opinion, is the user community," VeriSign vice president Chuck Gomes said. "They're very relevant."

In a presentation, VeriSign said that 35 companies were confidentially briefed about Site Finder before its debut and they reported "no issues" or problems before its launch on Sept. 15. Its own expert group -- including the chief technology officers of Brightmail and Morgan Stanley -- reviewed Site Finder and decided that most issues were "minor or inconvenient," VeriSign said. Before resuming Site Finder, VeriSign said it would address specific criticisms by adding foreign language support to Site Finder and tweaking the way email to nonexistent domains worked.

Full Story: news.zdnet.co.uk