NEW: Go Daddy joins the fun with this lawsuit.
NEW: The United States District Court for the Middle District of Florida has finally scanned and made the appropriate docket entries for this case. It has been assigned Case #03-CV-1352 and here is the docket and the complaint in PDF format as filed with the Court. As of September 23, there is new material (including two new documents) at the docket. Additionally, the case has been assigned to Judge G. Kendall Sharp, although his website on the Florida Middle District website is less than informative.
ZDNet UK reports that Popular Enterprises, the parent company of netster.com has sued Verisign over their recent despicable hijacking of all unclaimed domain names.
The story claims a $100 million suit was filed in a court that can only be the U.S. District Court for the Middle District of Florida in Orlando. However, PACER indicates no suit as of today. It may be delayed. I'll put up anything I can get as soon as I can get it.
In the interim, here's a sampling of the litigation VeriSign has been involved with in the Federal courts. Note that these pages are mirrored from PACER and you need an account to access the hyperlinks. You will note that there are a round 100 entries so far, soon to swell to 101 if this lawsuit mentioned in the title URL ever materializes.
Here's the lawsuit! Thanks to this Slashdot thread.
Posted by muldrake at September 19, 2003 06:22 AM | TrackBackthis script appeared on the canberra linux users group list:
#!/usr/bin/perl -w
# (C) Kim Holburn 2003
# released under GNU Public License
# http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/gpl.html
# script to generate pseudo-random strings
# and download robots.txt files from random websites.
use strict;
use LWP::Simple;
@ARGV and die "Just run it man, it's not configurable.\n";
my @chars=(
"a","b","c","d","e","f","g","h","i","j","k","l","m","n",
"o","p","q","r","s","t","u","v","w","x","y","z","-",
"0","1","2","3","4","5","6","7","8","9",
);
while (1) {
my $url = 'http://www.';
for ( 1..int(rand(17)+3) )
{ $url .= $chars[int(rand($#chars))]; }
$url .= ".com/robots.txt\t";
print "\nTrying $url";
get($url) and print "OK";
sleep 1;
}
...prompted by this email....
I'm wondering if now might be a good time
to scan and map out ALL domains in .com.
Up to 50 letters long.
Pick a random string, resolve and lightly scan it,
not enough to send byte counts crazy,
or annoy an ISP or any real recipient.
Sleep lightly, pick another, scan again.
We could call it the
"Search for Intra Terrestrial Acceptance of Responsibility".
and the aim would be to map names to services available.
Would such an worthy endeavour even engender legal liability?
It would have to be a shared effort
but even if it was quite widespread,
the only people who would be inconvenienced
would be people with disproportionate representation
in string-space....
--
Michael James michael.james@xxxxx.xxx.xx
System Administrator voice: 02 6246 5040
CSIRO Bioinformatics Facility fax: 02 6246 5166