If you use Internet Explorer you may have installed VeriSign's i-Nav plugin to resolve internationalized domain names you will have discovered this week that VeriSign's recent SiteFinder abomination is not unique but rather typical of their behaviour.
Hidden somewhere in a EULA, and in their i-Nav FAQ is the fact that the I-Nav plugin is "...automatically updated without you having to worry about it".
What is less clear from the FAQ is that in VeriSign's world that also means that they believe the company has the right to install/enable additional plugins. This week VeriSign added the i-Nav plugin to MS Outlook without asking me if I wanted that enabled (the timing is due to the fact that the migration from RACE to Punycode has begun last weekend). So the i-Nav plugin is actually a trojan on your system and VeriSign believes it has the right to modify your applications as the company sees fit. Truly annoying.
[UPDATE]
I am unsure to what extent they just enabled the plugin and to what extent they actually installed. The net effect is the same
[UPDATE II]
Learn more about the hidden connection between whitbeer (aka weissbier) and i-Nav in the comments
Well i have always choosen not to install their F**king lame product.
Flipping The Bird a verisign!
Wowowow, Bow.
I trust you guys to create the OS extension that obsoletes i-Nav. (The five other global users of NetBSD agree)
Posted by: m on December 18, 2003 12:16 PMThat's right - We need Widechar enabled hostlookup BUILT into the OS instead of a ton of hacks.
Bo was working on that and there's a lively discussion on the issue at http://cr.yp.to somewhere in an archived thread on the qmail mailinglist
Sure and Bernstein is right. I started patching lynx to do idn, but realised that it was all wrong. We need to make the different libraries idn enabled and then the different programs can adapt to the libraries.
The simpel solution would be to take the gnu idn tools, and merge them in the source of libc.
But for netbsd thats a no go, since it will make it hard for people who create embedded system, because of the restrictions of gnu.
So im still working on my own idn tools for freebsd and netbsd, patches will be available as soon as i think they'r stable enough - at least for testing.
This somehow ressembles the adoption of weissbeer from bottled to draughted. This, however goes the opposite direction. From drafted to bottle...party.
Posted by: m on December 18, 2003 12:35 PMActually, despite their suckishness VeriSign's Xcode IDN toolkit is open source and freely redistributable under a BSD style license. So you can just use that.
So thumbs up to VeriSign for that!
Posted by: Dee on December 18, 2003 12:37 PMNot that i will endorse verisign's welcome in the source tree of any *BSD.
But i agree:
Thumbs up to VeriSign for the BSD license!
But their plugin still sucks.
"The Absolute Minimum Every Software Developer Absolutely, Positively Must Know About Unicode and Character Sets (No Excuses!)"
http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/Unicode.html
Posted by: Bo on December 18, 2003 3:22 PM