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ICANN has very little direct control over what a nation can do with their own TLD.

ICANN controls a root DNS server, which is authoritative for the "." zone - one level higher than a ccTLD. This means they get to say what DNS servers are authoritative for .cm, and could send traffic to different servers if they really wanted to. Or at least they could redirect queries that came to their particular root server. If the other root servers followed suit they could do whatever they want with any ccTLD.

You seem to be implying that all Al Gore did was go to Congress sometime in the 90's and say, "Hey guys, this Internet thing is really cool!". As other posters have pointed out, some of the core innovators in what we now call the Internet credit Gore for his work at making the Internet what it is. I trust them more than I trust you.

Let's get specific, though. According to Did Al Gore Invent the Internet?

The inventor of the Mosaic Browser, Marc Andreesen, credits Gore with making his work possible. He received a federal grant through Gore's High Performance Computing Act.

Some nice things that that bill did, besides sponsor Andreesen? It set up a national computing plan, it linked research centers and universities across the country, and it funded a lot of other important research.

Did Al Gore invent the internet? No. He did sponsor the bills that provided funding and vision for some key components of it, though.

BTW, to say you were there to see the Internet created, and then say you've been on the Internet since 1990 is idiotic. The net's been around a lot longer than that. The ARPANET, which is what evolved into the Internet, has been around since 1969. Email came along in 1972. TCP/IP a year later, and things just grew from there. Let me quote from A Brief History of the Internet

Thus, by 1985, Internet was already well established as a technology supporting a broad community of researchers and developers, and was beginning to be used by other communities for daily computer communications.

Oh, and he refers to inventing the Internet as inventing the world-wide-web which is not the Internet.

Leonard Kleinrock (US): Was the first person to write about packet switching.

J.C.R. Licklider (US): Had the first idea of what would become the Internet (He called it the Galactic Network)

Larry G. Roberts (US): Created the first long-distance network in 1965 (Called ARPANET)

Bob Kahn and Vint Cerf (US): Created the Transmission Control Protocol (TCP) which we all know the Internet uses as it's primary protocol.

Between what all these guys did plus the work of U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), U.S. National Science Foundation (NSF), and National Aeronautics and Space Administration. (NASA) The Internet was created.

You can read about it at the two following links.

http://www.boutell.com/newfaq/history/inventednet. html
http://www.isoc.org/internet/history/cerf.shtml

So, the Internet was in fact created in the US. The World Wide Web was invented at CERN by Tim Berners-Lee.

802.11 legacy

The original version of the standard IEEE 802.11 released in 1997 specifies...

Auctions and unlicensed wireless bands

In February 1995, an Apple petition to open up more spectrum was approved. The public now has 10 Mhz for license-free use. Apple does not own it. Everyone must use equipment designed for the band. Some of the bands are what the FCC privately calls "garbage bands"; the official term is ISM band, for industrial, scientific, and medical applications. These can cause interference to wireless radios, especially in an office environment. A microwave oven operates in the 2.4 GHz band, so radio equipment to handle this interference generally costs more than radio technology for use in a clear band.

One way around that would be to set up a mobile server with several wireless base stations and mount it on whatever reliable vehicle makes regular runs through the area. The post bus, library's bookmobile, health care workers, or others who make regular rounds could carry the server. Major uploads and downloads could be facilitated this way. There was a very successful project called OAUNET in Africa which sent such a bus around and used UUCP. Something like that could be used to supplement the mesh network.

Who cares what Gates says? He was wrong about the WWW, the Internet, and many other major trends, too. His utterances should be restricted to the political or business section of newspapers not waste space in information technology publications.

"The Internet treats censorship as a malfunction and routes around it." ~ John Perry Barlow

Actually, that quote is from John Gilmore. In his piece Censorship 2000, John Perry Barlow himself attributes it to Gilmore speaking at the Second Computers Freedom and Privacy Conference.

Ok, this kind of stuff kills me. We are talking about TLD DNS servers being controlled by their respective countries, we are not discussing ROOT servers....(Two verry different entities!) I understand the confusion because verry few people in the grand scheme of things even know how DNS works...But I assure you the ROOT servers are much more than TLD servers, in fact ROOT servers are upstream of the TLD servers. So before we get our panties in a bunch lets understand what the hell we are talking about

Just as a little tidbit of what I am trying to tell you....

The root name servers do not store all the information in the DNS. Storing all the information in one place would be totally infeasible today. This is exactly why the DNS was developed as a distributed database. So if you register thatnewdomain.org the root zone file will not change and the root name servers will not give different answers. The ORG zone file will be changed.

(The above is pulled from this link http://www.isoc.org/briefings/019/)

While people are puttering around with patches and kludges and crap they are not taking advantage of what their machines could be doing with the IPv6 address space and with end to end connectivity.

Stop thinking that the internet is about anthrocentric communication.

Its not and never was.

See http://www.isoc.org/internet/history/brief.shtml for a clue.

Also Larry Wall, author of Perl, was originally funded by the U.S. National Security Administration (NSA) as part of the "Blacker" project ; AND
DARPA grants largely funded the development of UNIX 4.1 BSD (Berkeley Software Distribution) as well as the later development of the TCP/IP networking protocols.

Why not join in and support the effort?

Yes, he has passed away but he could have been given the award posthumously.

"What, you want Cuba running the Internet?" No, I don't.

Then what is your solution? The UN routinely appoints despot regimes to chair the human rights subcommittee. ITU is under the UN ... you don't see the problems with that? Such as depot regimes making it difficult to use cheap alternatives to the gov't telecom monopolies?

The article discusses the standards the Internet uses. Currently these standards are issued by IETF under the auspices of the Internet Society. IETF is an truly international organization where the people with ideas and time have the influence in terms of authoring or editing standards, chair working groups, and directing actitivies, all achieved by a credo of "rough consensus, running code". It is a system that prizes technical excellent above politics. The same system that told the USA to piss off when the gov't attempted to cripple encryption over the the network in order to "protect us." Under your vision this would be replaced with each national government voting on standards; the same people who gave us OSI standards that were stillborn. The nerds would lose control to Castro, Mugabe, and the Ayatollah, not to mention the regulators of democratic regimes. Get ready for a new internet protocol with gov't backdoors in the standards.

Next week IETF meets in Vancouver. I expect it will be one of the last IETF meetings I'll attend, thanks to visionaries like you.

The Internet is global, and no one nation should have a chokehold over a global system.

This is just simply not true. Some slashdotters here wish that was the case, but repeating it enough times doesn't make it fact. The core foundations of the Internet were invented in the US and is still being used today.

Here's one short history.

It's politically correct and nice to say "oh the whole world and everyone helped to invent it" but it's just PC bullshit. The lion's share of the credit goes to the US.

...improve on the Internet?

And on another note, the US should not necessarily control the internet. It is used by many people around the world. Its not even like the US invented it, either...

Huh? You can't be serious. The US did invent the internet, and has always owned and controlled the root servers. ICANN was created to take direct government control out of the equation, but it is still overseen by the US government (I'm not sure which branch, but I think it's the commerce department).

I, frankly, think the EU and UN are acting like a couple of spoiled children. "wah wah wah, we want the internet! wah wah!" Sheesh. We designed it, we built it, we control it. End of story. If they want to use it, great, and they should be thankful to us, like they should be thankful to us for a great many things, for opening it up to everybody around the world. There was no requirement for us to do so, just like there is no requirement for us to turn over root server control now. If we choose to, that's our business. If we don't, that's our business too.

I'd like to see what happens if the UN passes a resolution "requiring" us to turn over server control. Let's see them enforce that. It'll be just another example of how far beyond the UN's original mandate that organization has gone, and how useless and impotent it has become as a result.

This is the U.N.'s attempt to take control of something that it did not create, for the sole reason of administrating it into the ground. Consider the reasons for this move: - The U.S. is allowing a '.xxx' root domain. This is seen as an endorsement of porn. (That way all the smut is in one place, and can be easily blocked by corporate firewalls) - The U.S. is not doing anything official about SPAM. This is seen as an endorsement of SPAM. (So we are instead allowing jobs to be made to combat this filth) - We can't do anything about the U.S. administration of the internet! (see rant below) Consider the only things that can possibly happen as a result of the U.N. administration of the internet: - Mandates raising privacy concerns (While the european contries are our friends, most of them are far less concerned with the rights of thier consituents) - The mandated blocking of certain words, phrases, individuals, geographical areas, and nations. (See "The Great http://yro.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=05/05/05/16 20225&tid=153&tid=95&tid=219Firewall http://yro.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=05/07/12/03 47200&tid=153&tid=95&tid=17of http://yro.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=05/04/15/18 51244&tid=153&tid=95&tid=219China") - A tightening of acceptable behavior on the Internet through legislation. But it will likely fail as people will find ways to circumvent the blocks put in thier way (just see the http://www.riaa.com/RIAA http://yro.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=05/04/30/19 13227&tid=123&tid=141&tid=103&tid=95&tid=17efforts ). The U.N. has no right to "take" administration of the internet from the U.S., since it http://www.isoc.org/internet/history/brief.shtmlst arted out largely funded by the U.S> military. It would be akin to the U.N. trying to take away the http://www.autobahn-online.de/geschichte_e.htmlaut obahn. However,I do invite the countries that are so concerned about the administration of the internet, to instead set up thier own Root Servers, thier own Certification Authorities, thier own Great Firewalls, mandate thier own people use thier country's DNS, and do whatever they care to do. In the meain time, if they want to use the U.S. infrastructure, I suggest they don't complain if we administer ourselves what we alone have paid for.

I guess no one on the entire Mozilla Calendar team or the user community, for that matter, has thought of that right? :)

Not trying to give you a hard time, but what you're asking for would be very, very, difficult. You would essentially have to reverse engineer Microsoft's MAPI over RPC protocol. Many have tried, none have succeeded. Or, if you only support newer versions of Exchange with OWA turned on, use Microsoft's WebDAV based calendar schema built on Exchange WebAccess, like Evolution does.

Mozilla is doing the best they could I think, they're basing their app on a protocol on the IETF standards track http://ietfreport.isoc.org/idref/draft-dusseault-c aldav/ If an organization wants to get rid of Exchange entirely, they then can give their Outlook users a MAPI plugin that supports CalDAV. We're an opensource plugin at OpenConnector.org.

No. Exchange uses calendaring uses RPC/MAPI or WebDAV.

If not... Can they pull of "Exchange-like" behavior with calenders and meetings on a pop server?

No. They use CalDAV for calendar sharing.

One could argue - and many have - that the current Internet does not give you enough of either. Security in the Internet context applies also to the security of the user from eavesdropping or interruption.

Also - please distinguish between government funded projects and research - GENI is research, pure and simple. Right now, there's no blueprint for what the results of this will look like, no deployment plan for rolling out a new, improved Internet. Rather, there's a plan to create a testbed to enable network research to be drastically more innovative and effective than it has been. Like all research, there will be successful projects under this umbrella, and unsuccessful ones. But if you never take the risk, you never have the chance to make amazing discoveries. Say what you want about government inefficiency, it's funding like that provided by the NSF, NIH, and (formerly) DARPA, and their corresponding agencies in other countries over the centuries that has made possible some of the greatest advances in the history of humanity.

Note that this jargon file entry refers to internet users as "old-timers" a mere two years later in 1993:
http://www.catb.org/~esr/jargon/html/S/September-t hat-never-ended.html

And Sonny, next time save it for the script kiddies. Some of us were "old-timers" before you ever heard of computers. Most especially you can stick your public graffiti (Wiki, Everything I&II, etc.) where the sun don't shine when it comes to citing it as an authorative source; anybody can write it. Granted, you can change the definition of what a "web page" is to include the latest technology, your choice of proprietary system, etc, and claim to have been "first". By the same logic, SCO owns Linux, everybody who's ever created a .gif file owes Unisys a settlement, and Microsoft invented the GUI. But a web page is JUST files on a server. A web site is JUST a server with files that's accessible to other computers via some kind of wire. It gets tricky, here, because the old acoustic modems weren't "wires" as such, at one point, they were rubber cups you set the old-fashioned kind of phone reciever in. And don't get me started on RFC 1149 (proposed in 1990)!

And if ignorance were light bulbs, you'd be General Electric.

Presuming you have enough language skill to know that "create" is not equal to "develop, nurture, and improve", which country did create it?

No one country did. That's exactly the point. For a start, the Internet is almost by definition a network of networks, many of which are not in the US. Moreover, there is no clear "creation date"; different aspects of what we know today as "the Internet" appeared at very different times in history.

What became today's Internet was mostly driven by academic research. While I'll certainly concede that much of the initial research during the '60s and early '70s happened in the US, it's still clear that from a very early stage, the research effort was international. For example, ISoc's brief history of the Internet mentions researchers in the UK working in parallel with the US research as early as 1967, until the groups discovered each other and started collaborating.

The infrastructure is obviously international, and for the most part quite capable of surviving without any one country. Networks that now form major parts of the Internet have existed in other countries for over 20 years. (The same history notes the existence of the JANET in the UK in 1984, while another mentions satellite links to Hawaii and the UK as early as 1975 and the creation of EUnet, connecting the Netherlands, Denmark, Sweden, and UK, in 1982.)

The software side, in particular the established communications protocols for things like e-mail, WWW, Usenet or FTP communication, has come from diverse sources. What was effectively the first TCP/IP standard was presented to an international working group at Sussex University in the UK in 1973.

Bodies like the IETF and W3C have geographically diverse memberships. While the US has by far the largest single category of W3C membership today, it still represents less than 40% of the total, which isn't much more than Europe, for example. There are a total of 28 countries with member organisations.

For any one country, including the US, to claim that this whole picture developed because of it, or wouldn't have happened in a similar way without it, is simply a delusion of grandeur. It might not have happened as fast, or in exactly the same way, but it would still have happened, probably working off the research done in Europe.

I find it deeply ironic that one of the other replies to my GP post was an AC who claimed I was trolling, and challenged me to provide information about other countries that contributed to the Internet's creation, while another accuses me of rewriting history. Fortunately, while a lot of mostly US-based Internet history pages choose to ignore the contributions from outside and focus on the US academic network during the early stages, the kind of information above (all of which is written by the people and organisations at the heart of the Internet) is freely available, even to those in the US.

The recent development and widespread deployment of the World Wide Web has brought with it a new community, as many of the people working on the WWW have not thought of themselves as primarily network researchers and developers. A new coordination organization was formed, the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C). Initially led from MIT's Laboratory for Computer Science by Tim Berners-Lee (the inventor of the WWW) and Al Vezza, W3C has taken on the responsibility for evolving the various protocols and standards associated with the Web.

The recent development and widespread deployment of the World Wide Web has brought with it a new community, as many of the people working on the WWW have not thought of themselves as primarily network researchers and developers. A new coordination organization was formed, the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C). Initially led from MIT's Laboratory for Computer Science by Tim Berners-Lee (the inventor of the WWW) and Al Vezza, W3C has taken on the responsibility for evolving the various protocols and standards associated with the Web.

you think ICANN controls the root?

Think again - but take a look at http://www.isoc.org/briefings/019/ first

It would be nice if the people writing the stories understood what a root server was. Might make for a more informed public, you know?

This is why IPv6 is a much better network (layer 3) protocol for VoIP as it supports mobility natively, allowing TCP and UDP sessions to be maintained when roamning from one network to the next.

In fact, the Internet Society point out that IPv6 is necessary for mobile and wireless internet.

ISOC Official Page
IETF Official Page
IESG Official Page
IRTF Official Page
IAB Official Page
RFC Editor Official Page
ICANN Official Page
IANA Official Page
W3C Official Page
W3C encyclopedia article
ICANN encyclopedia article
IANA encyclopedia article

• ISOC Official Page
• IETF Official Page
• IESG Official Page
• IRTF Official Page
• IAB Official Page
• RFC Editor Official Page
• ICANN Official Page
• IANA Official Page
• W3C Official Page
• W3C encyclopedia article
• ICANN encyclopedia article
• IANA encyclopedia article

ISOC Official Web Page

IETF Official Web Page

IESG Official Web Page

IRTF Official Web Page

IAB Official Web Page

RFC Editor Official Web Page

ICANN Official Web Page

IANA Official Web Page

W3C Official Web Page

W3C encyclopedia article

ICANN encyclopedia article and IANA encyclopedia article

ISOC Official Page IETF Official Page IESG Official Page IRTF Official Page IAB Official Page RFC Editor Official Page ICANN Official Page IANA Official Page W3C Official Page W3C encyclopedia article ICANN encyclopedia article IANA encyclopedia article

Well, Kerberos is nice and everything but as long as the different PKINITimplementations dont get along with eachother, *cough*win2000*cough, we can still do simple social engineering to recover passwords...
Heimdal has a pretty good support by now but the docs are scarce at best, and getting it ( the PKINIT part ) to interoperate is Mayor Payne

Some of you might have thought it somewhat weird to read the stance of Internet Society of China (ISC). I know I did. Well, it turns out that Internet Society of China isn't a chapter of Internet Society (ISOC), as the name might lead you to believe. Lynn St.Amour, President, CEO of ISOC writes in a letter to the editor of The Economist, in reply to a similarly confusing article:

Your September 5 [2002] story "Stop Your Searching" on censorship of the Internet in China referenced an organization backed by the Chinese government that calls itself the Internet Society of China. I would like to make it absolutely clear that this group is in no way affiliated with the Internet Society (ISOC), a global not-for-profit membership organization founded in 1991 to provide leadership in Internet related standards, education, and policy development. ISOC has offices in Reston, Virginia, and Geneva, Switzerland, with chapters throughout the world.

Complete letter

Some of you might have thought it somewhat weird to read the stance of Internet Society of China (ISC). I know I did. Well, it turns out that Internet Society of China isn't a chapter of Internet Society (ISOC), as the name might lead you to believe. Lynn St.Amour, President, CEO of ISOC writes in a letter to the editor of The Economist, in reply to a similarly confusing article:

Your September 5 [2002] story "Stop Your Searching" on censorship of the Internet in China referenced an organization backed by the Chinese government that calls itself the Internet Society of China. I would like to make it absolutely clear that this group is in no way affiliated with the Internet Society (ISOC), a global not-for-profit membership organization founded in 1991 to provide leadership in Internet related standards, education, and policy development. ISOC has offices in Reston, Virginia, and Geneva, Switzerland, with chapters throughout the world.

Complete letter

This is history.

From ISOC.

This is history.

From ISOC.

OK, four people used Gopher (give or take an order of magnitude or three). How many people use WWW?

Can you say inertia? I knew you could.


I guess you've never heard of a smily or netiquette.

You might also find that studying Internet history as well as growing up can diminish your cluelessness.

Out of curiosity, why?

I don't recall the details, but an attack was found a few years ago that allows the key to be recovered if the attacker can get the first few bytes of the keystream. Doing it requires the first few bytes of many related keystreams, and getting the keystream from the ciphertext requires that the attacker have the plaintext. With WEP, RC4 is rekeyed for every packet, and the first few bytes of each packet are highly predictable, so an eavesdropper can fairly easily gather enough data to mount the attack.

Got any links so I can read up on the why and wherefore?

Google turns up plenty. Here is the original paper, which has all of the dirty details. Here is a paper that describes how to use it to attack WEP. And, of course, if you'd like to read code that implements the attack, look at Airsnort.

The internet for the first 10 years...

If change didn't happen (good and bad) we wouldn't be able to say in our old age: "back in the day,..."

I RTFG (RTF Google) and the third article down (watch out, its a pdf) says bounds checking is usually turned off 'in the name of efficiency'. How hard is it for any programmer to run his source through a prog that checks for stupid stuff like this? My favorite part of this kid's paper has to be this:

An alternate approach is to test programs. A tool called Fuzz was used to test standard UNIX utilities by giving them input consisting of large, random streams of characters[17]. 25-33% of the programs crashed or hung.

The Internet Society also mentions Al Gore in their history timeline. You have to give credit to Al Gore for taking the initiative from a political stand point. The creation of the Internet was a huge project that needed the cooperation of Universities, Businesses and Government. Projects of that scale always need a Politician to champion the cause to get funding and grants. Did Al Gore use an unfortunate choice of words? Yes.

I assume you've read the RFC detailing standards for IP over Avian Carriers with Quality of Service

In fact, they did very much push to get this topic on the agenda, and even sent a mail last week asking all memebers to fill in a survey on this matter.

From the newsletter of ISOC:

[...] during preparations for the World Summit for Information Society (WSIS), the top-level, United Nations-sponsored conference to be held in December, several government delegations have suggested replacing ICANN with an inter-governmental body. (Details at www.wsis.org.

In fact, they did very much push to get this topic on the agenda, and even sent a mail last week asking all memebers to fill in a survey on this matter.

From the newsletter of ISOC:

[...] during preparations for the World Summit for Information Society (WSIS), the top-level, United Nations-sponsored conference to be held in December, several government delegations have suggested replacing ICANN with an inter-governmental body. (Details at www.wsis.org.

In fact, they did very much push to get this topic on the agenda, and even sent a mail last week asking all memebers to fill in a survey on this matter.

From the newsletter of ISOC:

[...] during preparations for the World Summit for Information Society (WSIS), the top-level, United Nations-sponsored conference to be held in December, several government delegations have suggested replacing ICANN with an inter-governmental body. (Details at www.wsis.org.

Yes... this is a very good idea... so why aren't you the president of an ISP? Get your butt in gear my friend because the NET needs you to lead the way!

As for the "commercial" reason in belgium cited in another reply... the reason for statics not being viable is that they cost more...

Well, that is a concocted abuse of the system.

How would you like it if every time you picked up your cell phone the telco injected a new telephone number? This would allow you to make outgoing calls. If you want to receive calls? Well - get a more expensive account.

That is about the state of affairs with regard to DHCP and the net. IF you want to run a server... you get to pay more even though servers provide the content of the net and thus provide a service to the industry.

Its just one of those aberations that we get in the peering verses client arrangements in the telecommunications industry.

You can read more about these issues here: paper from Telstra on the peering vs client problem at ISCO.org

Ok... back on the topic... Kudo's for Telia!

Perhaps Sitefinder was an attempt at maximizing shareholder value for the sale.

Sitefinder was an abuse of the registry side of the business. Since the registry business is operated under contract to the Commerce Department and ICANN, and Verisign has violated that contract by not operating the registry in compliance with applicable contract requirements (such as releasing expired domains after the grace period) and technical standards (DNS responses for non-existent domains), the Commerce Department and ICANN should cancel the contract and award a new contract to a non-profit corporation. Preferrably one that has demonstrated an ability to provide responsible stewardship of public infrastructure, such as the Internet Society.

The expiration dates for the .com and .net registry contracts are 10-NOV-2007 and 30-JUN-2005; if the contracts aren't cancelled by then, I hope ICANN and the Commerce Dept. at least have the good sense not to renew them, and instead evaluate and choose new registry operators.

but Apple pushed AirPort out and marketed it as a reason why you'd want to buy Apple. They didn't invent it, they weren't first to have it, but they did manage to make it more popular than it would otherwise have been.

They my not have invented it alone, but then, what company besides Microsoft invents a standard by themselves? I'd say working to secure the spectrum with the FCC back in 1995 gives them some bragging rights.

As for "they weren't first to have it", who mass produced built in Wi-Fi before Apple's iBook? Seriously, I'd like to know. And if you say Dell, "Junior, remind me when we get home to slap your momma right in the mouf..." ;-)

Al Gore did more for the internet than any other politician. Just look at the Internet Societies page. You will notice that from a political stand point he did take the initiative to create the internet. With out his help the internet as we know it would have been delayed. Also, he never said he "Invented the Internet". Al Gore said that he took the initiative to create the internet. Meaning that he championed the technology.

This little item was a government sponsered initiative. I really don't see a problem with it. It was actually pretty innovative for its time.

The Hobbes' Internet Timeline and the ISOC list of Internet Histories give much better coverage.