It's axiomatic that if you tell a big enough lie often enough, people will eventually believe it. This works especially well in technology reporting, because you're guaranteed that the vast majority of not only the audience, but the journalists won't understand enough of the subject to recognise it's a lie in the first place.
Verisign's big lie, their party line, is that before they instituted the SiteFinder service the web was a mess of incomprehensible error messages: that SiteFinder saved millions of casual users from the terrible fate of not knowing where they were going. As Mark McLaughlin, a Verisign VP declares from his generously-provided C|Net soapbox:
More than 20 million times a day, Internet users receive an error message when they mistype a domain name (such as typing in orangd.com when they meant orange.com). That error page can lead to a dead end, with no options on how to get to where you tried to go.
This is, of course, bullshit. It was true a few years ago, but these days pretty much every web browser (except, interestingly, Safari) defaults to redirecting you to a search-page if you mistype a domain. It's a feature I turn off as soon as I can—I understand and prefer the error—but it has been available, and the default for years. SiteFinder just hijacked this functionality for themselves.
Verisign's Sitefinder adds nothing to the Internet. The problem was solved long ago where it should have been: in the web browser. The pre-existing solution allows user preference and competition (for example, the Google Toolbar redirects IE's default MSN search to Google), and has no effect on non-WWW protocols. Verisign's "solution" is monopolistic, and prone to breaking the Internet in unexpected ways.
I'd like to say that Verisign's mouthpieces should be called on their lie, but I doubt it will happen outside small technical circles such as weblogs and Slashdot. It's an interesting take on journalistic impartiality. To be "impartial", the accepted wisdom is that a journalist should present both sides of a debate without partisan comment. But what happens if one side is spouting crap? In the tech world, a purely factual correction would just confuse the matter more for a non-technical audience. The only effective response is an emotive one: "this is bullshit".
Maybe that's why I like The Register. Sure, they're the gossip-magazine of the tech world and I regularly wildly disagree with them; but they wear their biases on their sleeves and don't hesistate to be critical of nonsense like this.
This is one of those times where I feel that I'm expected to go sit in a corner with my finger up my nose, because I am so retarded as to need vast amounts of hand-holding in order to navigate various parts of the internet, without being asked if I want that hand-holding.
Of course I know it's nothing to do with me, it's them being greedy and monopolistic, but for him to say that it's for MY benefit is not only bullshit, it's utterly retarded. I'd like to smack him one, with a rancid flounder on a hot July afternoon.
I wonder when "the Internet" collapsed and got replaced by "the Web"?
The DNS service supports ALL Internet activity, not just Web browsing. As a particularly bothersome example, while they had their SiteFinder service up, VeriSign was collecting all of the e-mails that were sent to erroneous domain names. They probably have a very nice collection of "From" addresses now.
As you say, the proper place to fix this is in the client for the particular protcol -- in this case, the Web browser. And certainly NOT in the DNS system.
And now for the conspiracy theorists out there: who would be in a better position than VeriSign to dynamically concoct certificates for mistyped domain names being accessed via https? Personally, I don't think VeriSign is smart enough to have thought of that. Yet.