Re: [dnsext] enough is enough

[Jim Reid <[e-mail]>]

On 21 Dec 2014, at 09:44, bert hubert <[e-mail]> wrote:

> This would then come with a website with further explanations, and perhaps
> even a registry of faults that has been decided we're not going to fix.

Bert, your prototype email is all very well. Of course it would be nice if there was some botnet (say) which went looking for these broken DNS servers and sent an email from the aa=0 police like the one you suggested.

However this is howling at the moon. For decades the DNS industry has been unable to get people to fix their lame delegations or get them to stop using BIND8 or to use software which does EDNS or... So an attempt along these lines to fix the aa=0 problem will be yet another Epic Fail. If DNS lameness can't be cured, contacting registrants -- assuming that was possible and it isn't -- to get software replaced surely won't succeed either.

Everyone here should already know by now that contacting registrants en masse will never produce the desired outcome. We should also know why that approach is guaranteed to fail every time. Now who was it that said “The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again, but expecting different results”?

The only sensible approach to take here is to notify the vendors of the broken software and hope they do the Right Thing. If they don't, or their customers can't/won't upgrade, the rest of us just have to suck it up. 'Twas ever thus. At least the DNS developer community is small and fairly easy to reach.

BTW, your Subject: header is appropriate. There's been more than enough discussion of this deeply flawed approach to fixing the aa=0 problem.