Neowin.net

Final Fantasy X hit our shores December 2001 and has since then sold over 1.8 million copies (5.9 million worldwide). Then, in early September 2003, Final Fantasy X graduated to become on of the PlayStation 2 “Greatest Hits” games that retail for $19.99 US. At a price just under $20, everyone could afford to pick it up. Reasons for moving to a mass market price point? Either to jump start sales, or to gear everyone up for a sequel.

Even though Final Fantasy X is the tenth ‘title’ game in the series, you couldn’t really call any of the Final Fantasy follow-ups true sequels. By the American Heritage dictionary’s definition, a sequel is “a literary, dramatic, or cinematic work whose narrative continues that of a preexisting work.” While many of the Final Fantasy games share certain elements (such as Chocobos and a guy named Cid), the worlds, characters, narratives, even play mechanics were all independent of one another.

News source: Firingsquad Gamers

VeriSign's Site Finder, launched on Monday, has drawn heated criticism for hijacking mistyped Web addresses. Instead of getting an error message, Web surfers who mistype ".com" and ".net" Web addresses are redirected to the Site Finder service, which then offers a list of likely alternatives, some of which are paid-placement links. Critics complain the new service gives VeriSign too much control over online traffic and allows it to profit from an essential monopoly over ".com" and ".net" names. VeriSign is charged by the U.S. government with running the ".com" and ".net" domains, and directs much of the traffic on the Internet.

However, the ISC is about to undercut the Site Finder service with a patch to its BIND software.

BIND runs on about 80 percent of the Internet's domain name servers -- the machines that translate human-readable Web addresses like www.wired.com into machine-readable Internet addresses used by the Internet's vast network of computers."

The patch will be released by the end of Tuesday, said Paul Vixie, ISC's president.

"The phone has been ringing off the hook with deeply unhappy customers," he said. "We don't have a political ax to grind. Whether VeriSign should or should not have done this is not for us to decide. But we have to respond to our customers who are demanding it."

Vixie said that ISC's customers -- typically ISPs and large enterprises -- needed a fix because VeriSign's Site Finder broke their spam filters.

Vixie said a lot of spam spoofs the "from" domain, and that many ISP-level spam filters check whether incoming e-mail is from a valid domain or not. Instead of generating errors, the spam filter checks are instead being rerouted to the Site Finder service, and therefore appear to originate from a legitimate domain.

Vixie said the ISC's customers aren't too concerned with advertising. "They don't want to help spammers. It's the lack of a viable spam-detection mechanism they're worried about. They are concerned about spam, not advertising," Vixie said.

VeriSign did not respond requests for comment.