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To the mods who gave this a '-1, Flamebait', please be aware of the quote about Emacs "Emacs is a nice operating system. The only thing it lacks is a good editor."[1] If you don't know history, you're condemned to reinvent Unix (poorly) [2].

[1: http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Emacs]
[2: http://www.postel.org/pipermail/internet-history/2001-November/000068.html]

But can we fairly characterize the early 'net as having a lack of fixed leaders? Usenet may have been chaotic, but to those who followed the RFCs, we had certain leaders. Jon Postel and Vint Cerf leap to mind as ones who led by example of patience, intelligence and reason. They may not have been "Self-Appointed Benevolent Dictators for Life," but they did provide leadership of a sort that effectively mitigated some of the anarchy we have seen with the Debian lot. (Disclaimer: I love Debian, have provided some modest feedback to the maintainers of their documentation over the years, and am currently an Ubuntu user and evangelist.)

Radia Perlman presentation PDF:
http://www.postel.org/rbridge/infocom04-talk.pdf

I dunno if this is the best thing to post, but it does discuss some of the problems with bridges and a proposed solution. Note, at the time it was called "Rbridges" but was since renamed Trill.

ietf.org has a lot of presentations on Trill/Rbridges...

The best documentation on TCP/IP is the RFCs themselves, especially anything written or edited by Jon Postel.

Why wade through someone else's interpretation when the specifications themselves are so good and freely available?

Creating .Asia without creating .Europe , .Africa , .NAmerica , .SAmerica , .Australia (and .Antarctica ) is insanity, and shows that ICANN is a gang of hacks. They can't even pull off geopolitical favoritism and apologies without underscoring their orientation along those lines. Preferential treatment of a subgroup is just as bigoted as opposition, just as "racism" means bias with respect to race, regardless of whether positive/negative. But then, what to expect from a gang which compensates for letting the US override consensus for .xxx by throwing a few parties?

I miss Jon Postel.

[ ] Unix
[ ] Mainframe
[ ] Windows

beard #2

[ ] Unix
[ ] Mainframe
[ ] Windows

beard #3

[ ] Unix
[ ] Mainframe
[ ] Windows

Jon Postel said it best: "Be liberal in what you accept, and conservative in what you send." A web browser that crashes due to invalid HTML fails this test. Execution must stop at once... yes, but the program should handle the error. A program that crashes is the Operating System handling a program with bug. See RFC 1122 for more details about the Requirements for Internet Hosts. Section 1.2.2 about the Robustness Principle explains better than I can why you're wrong.

Jon Postel passed away October 16, 1998, so I doubt there's much that the ??AA can do now. Incidentally, here is the initial RFC for FTP, which gives credit to J. Postel.

So it started with technological innovation, and saw rapid development through the cooperation of governments and universities. It was refined and improved thanks to the effort of a bunch of awfully dedicated academics to the point where it could merge with mainstream technologies (talking PPP over analog phone modems). The new worldwide resource gave us the ability to communicate like never before.

Things were going so well, until the marketers came on board and started flooding people with ads and junk whatever way they could find. Spam was funny at first; now it's a serious waste of bandwidth and resources, with business people resorting to purely criminal activities in order to flood their advertising and harm benevolent volunteer organizations. Thanks to dirty business the Internet has become a battle ground. Spyware and even viruses are directly linked to immoral advertising/spam.

Now, I don't hate marketing people (I run a businses, and am a student in Management) but it's safe to say that immoral marketers are f*cking up the Internet.

It's too bad that the godfather of internet is no longer with us. RFC was such a better system for internet governance.

It didn't appear in BSD until 4.2, but it appeared as early as 1962 on Dartmouth BASIC (GE 635).

In short, this goes back to at least 1967. I'm sure there is no way our esteemed patent office could possibly have found prior art back that far, let alone what happened last week. Someone should alert them to the existence of google.

Yes, but ... that change came about when the Feds were stepping out of the public funding of the Internet, handing it over to Network Solutions as the only private entity (previously under government contract) capable of handling DNS services. Network Solutions had to have a way to make ends meet without the government dollars, which meant that they had to charge for registration services. There was also a day where registering the .us domain was free, courtesy of Jon Postel and the ISI. Those days are gone.

you may be interested in seeing what some people (who know a little about networking), think about this P2P project... follow the thread e2e mailing list

Formed in October 1998, the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) is a non-profit, private-sector corporation formed by a broad coalition of the Internet's business, technical, academic, and user communities. ICANN has been recognized by the U.S. and other governments as the global consensus entity to coordinate the technical management of the Internet's domain name system, the allocation of IP address space, the assignment of protocol parameters, and the management of the root server system.

As a technical coordinating body, ICANN's mandate is not to "run the Internet." Rather, it is to oversee the management of only those specific technical managerial and policy development tasks that require central coordination: the assignment of the Internet's unique name and number identifiers.

...we recommend that an intensive, international study be started at once, with a mandate to propose detailed and meaningful paths for the Internet's development, operations, and management. The goal of this study would be to help guide the formation of purpose-built representative organisations and policies that would be beneficial both to established Internet stakeholders and to the wide variety of organizations and individuals who are effectively disenfranchised in the current Internet policy environment.

That sounds to me an exact description of the International Working Party on the White Paper, the consultation process which led to the setting up of ICANN (and, which, incidentally, I took part in in Geneva).

What worries me is that if we do the whole thing again in the same way,

• There's a very high probability that we'll come up with something more or less exactly like ICANN;
• If we go round this cycle often enough, Governments (plural) are going to get pissed off, and the functions will either be put into the hands of the ITU or a new, intergovermental (or UN) body will be set up to take over.

It's a shame Jon Postel went and died on us; we moaned enough about him during his lifetime, but he died this job far better than ICANN have. Short of finding another individual as unmoved by commercial pressures, and as essentially fair minded as Jon was, we are stuck with a bunch of extremely wealthy conflicting vested interests, and a lot of hungry looking lawyers. The horizon to windward looks stormy.

TCP/IP adds a 16-bit checksum to the packets. This will generally detect an error burst of 15 bits or less, if the data is uniformly distributed then this will accept a corrupt segment with probability 1 / (2^16-1). [Snader p70]. This was designed to catch bugs in routers etc. (which may write the wrong data when forwarding packets) rather than catch all data corruption on the wire.

Depending on how much noise goes undetected at your physical layers, you should expect a TCP session to pass thru incorrect data about 1 in 10^9 to 10^12 bytes passed (thats the metric I use) - and if this is unacceptable then your application layer should check and/or correct data itself, bearing in mind the end-to-end argument for system design.

T

And since ICANN falls under the UN, which was created by Treaty with the US and other nations, ICANN's wishes override the Constitution by our own Constitutional definition.

Bzzzt!

Sorry, but you are incorrect. The ICANN has nothing to do with the United Nations. From the About ICANN page:

The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) is the non-profit corporation that was formed to assume responsibility for the IP address space allocation, protocol parameter assignment, domain name system management, and root server system management functions previously performed under U.S. Government contract by IANA and other entities.

ICANN derives its authority purely from a contract with the United States government. Essentially, ICANN was created to replace IANA (John Postel r.i.p.) and ARIN.

The scary thing about ICANN is that they so quickly became beholden to Network Solutions and the other vested big-money interests, instead of paying attention to what's good for the Internet as a whole.

Recent revelations about secret deals to allow Network Solutions to hang onto the .COM databases essentially indefinitely should have woken up the US Congress to the degree to which ICANN has already been corrupted, but so far, there is no sign that anyone in Congress has noticed, nor do they appear to care.

Well spotted. The reason Jon Postel's name is absent is due to him being deceased. http://www.postel.org/remembrances/ Regards, Steven