Is Muddleworks scanning your DNS too?

[Simon Waters]

Neil W Rickert wrote:
> 
> Danny Mayer <mayer at gis.net> writes:
> >At 01:39 PM 11/27/02, David Miller wrote:
> 
> >>This is exactly what we're doing.  The purpose is a reverse dns
> >>accelerator for high end web sites who want to resolve log files in
> >>real-time, or resolve log files that are simply too large to handle
> >>now.  An additional use is customization of the web site in real-time
> >>based on the resolved hostname.
> 
> >This seems to be based on a number of erroneous assumptions:
> >1) No DDNS so the PTR names are not changing
> >2) Different users won't use the same IP addresses
> 
> More importantly,
> 
>   They are collecting your data.
>   The cost of collection is partly paid for by you.
>   They are then selling your data for their own profit, without your
>   permission.

They haven't really revealed enough to say what they are doing.
Sounds to me they will be selling stale DNS data, but even stale
DNS data can be in different and less objectional forms.

For example a file listing broken delegation from the
in-addr.arpa zone could be used to speed DNS reverse resolution,
the resolution would be incomplete (not include recent
corrections to in-addr.arpa), but it would be faster, and I
can't believe anyone would have objections to such a scheme.

Whether the performance gain is worth it will be interesting, my
guess is a big shared caching server in such environments would
quickly build negative cache, and could quite quickly cache
everyone using a particular large hosting site reverse DNS.

For logging purposes it seems largely irrelevant as popular
webservers will do reverse lookup after the request has been
served.

It sounds like a hard sell to me but maybe they have some smart
ideas, especially since IP address to country mappings are
already around to help customize web sites, and these will
probably be more accurate in that case that DNS reverse look up
gives a generic TLD, or nothing useful.