Slashdot Mirror

"Congress's reaction is predictable and hilarious, but to be fair, they are only talking about banning P2P use on government computers."

*and* government contractors. So no more show tunes in Marina del Rey at the ICANN office.

http://rs79.vrx.net/opinions/internet/domains/eyestar/icann/inside/

http://rs79.vrx.net/.oops/yixe/

Here's where I found my face on an ad on slashdot in late may. Using liknesses for commercial purposes requires a model release and this is actionable. Anybody feel like doing a class action?

" ICANN needs to figure out an enforcement policy. Perhaps it should order the root servers to stop accepting new registrations from registrars not following the rules" "

Nomenclatural nit: root servers contain lists of tld servers, the servers that serve up com/net/org/de/uk etc.

You mean "tld servers" not "root servers".

But, the real way they do this is send a letter to the registrar telling them to knock it off. If they don't they can pull their accreditation and the registrar is no longer a registrar.

There is a contracts enforcement officer at ICANN. You can see him in the video on the botto mof this page: http://rs79.vrx.net/opinions/internet/domains/eyestar/icann/inside/

I address the troll issue here: http://rs79.vrx.net/opinions/internet/domains/shills/

Paul Twomey for 8 years collected nearly a million dollars a year from ICANN and in ten years they've never made any new tlds to speak of. They do not have an elected board like they were supposed to and there is no viting membership in the legal sense, in ICANN - another guiding principle that was supposed to have been done but never was and still isn't. Let's be clear that ICANN was to create new TLDS, not to debate whether they should be created, the governments mandate was to do this as its primary function. It was also to study the trademark problem but lets not loose sight of the fact there are laws that protect trademark holders.

I met Paul Twomey at the beginning of his tenure. He's a professional politician and in my opinion his job has been to see there are no new tlds and no voting membership and a continuence of self perpetuating board.

The rest of that nicely written rant I agree with.

Descriptive sentence about how this image is a .jpg of Slashdot 'sucking.'

That's actually just an effect of using the efficient JPEG compression.

It looks fine for me using PNG.

Try it for yourself

" Slashdot 2.0 sucks "

http://rs79.vrx.net/.oops/slashdot/sloopsagain.jpg

Looks like somebody left out a close table data cell. Sometime after midnight reply started behaving very oddly.

Given there's articles about opera this week is it really too much to expect that changes are tested in opera?

http://rs79.vrx.net/.oops/slashdot/oops7.jpg

" But at least you can say it's rendered properly. "

Oh really?

http://rs79.vrx.net/.oops/slashdot/slashoops.jpg http://rs79.vrx.net/.oops/slashdot/sldot.jpg ---- Opera 9

The last slashdot "upgrade" in the CSS was never checked against opera. Please don't do that again.

" Exactly. Slashdot 2.0 is horribly broken on Opera, and has been for months. Sometimes they fix something and it temporarily works what I assume is supposed to be correct, but generally something is wrong. "

This is what that looks like in Opera 10:

http://rs79.vrx.net/.oops/slashdot/slashoops.jpg

You heard it first here kids, this is the week that will go down in history as the inflection point from which newspapers never recovered. This is the third thing in a few days along these lines, but the last nail in the coffin. *poof*

http://rs79.vrx.net/works/photoblog/2009/Feb/22/tvnews.jpg

Linux also has a PR problem.

Huh? What r u talking about?

You get your first RAID controller from a trusted friend. "Here" he says "try this" and hands you a Mylex board. It has a 64 bit bus and 3 SCSI LVD connectors. Oooh. That looks fast. So you start ebaying drives, cables, adapters, more controllers, the inevitable megawatt power supply and you mess around with raid 1, raid 0 raid 1+0 and raid 5. Suddenly every system falls prey to RAIDMANIA; eventually for yourself you build a system with 3 controllers, with 3 busses each and a drive on each one of 9 busses. With a controller for swap, one for data and one for the system will Windows now be fast? Yeah, sorta. Those drives sure are quiet - from a click-click busy noise perspective, NOT from a "sounds liks a jet airplane when running" perspective. Heat is an issue, too.

http://rs79.vrx.net/works/photoblog/2005/Sep/15/DSCF0007s.jpg

But oh my are the failure modes spectacular.

I just use a laptop now and make several sets of backup DVDs or just copy to spare drives. I love RAID to death. But it's really only marginally worth the effort in the real world. But if you need fast, OMG.

" What did you have in a tower that drew 700 watts?"

This one: http://rs79.vrx.net/works/photoblog/2005/Sep/15/DSCF0007s.jpg

SCSI raid using old (but fast) hot overconsumptive drives, 9 of them on 3 controllers, one scsi bus per drive. It was the machine I could plug any of my (40+) scsi drives into and just go. And it was fast.

I simply put everything I have into DVD instead. Turns out I didn't need all those drives *at once*.

"I think this article by Dan Bernstein is a pretty good read regarding this subject - http://cr.yp.to/djbdns/ipv6mess.html"

Bernstein is quite right as always, but you don't care and unlike Bush, don't need to panic. There's lots of milage left in the protocol and those that think we're running out of addresses just aren't looking at the packet headers. They're in meetings instead.

http://rs79.vrx.net/interests/computers/net/v6failure/

This is a non-issue.

"You misspelled kibo. "

Misepelling things is how usenet grows.

Alt didn't come till well after 1970.

It was net.* and mod.*, later, the comp/sci/rec etc hierarchies.

Alt happened around this time when some anal retentive twits pissed off Brian Reid and Jon Gilmore.

See Hardy:The History of the Net
Master's Thesis
School of Communications
Grand Valley State University
Allendale, MI 49401

I should have theougt the pudgy pot smoking basement dwelling freedom (and in everything) loving crowd of slashdot would have recognized the proprietary capture of a cool and friendly slogan by a lawyer when they saw. But maybe not.

My purpose in the original incantation of same ( http://groups.google.com/group/news.groups/msg/b54 314f075182eeb ) was to guarentee the freedom and protection from proprietary interests of said meme in a pre-prenguin gpl'less world.

And what happens? You schmucks play right into his hands and incant the demon himself by chanting his name over and over again. Arize from the depts of legal hell oh Mike Godwin. Take these souls that have pleged their dark hearts to you.

I know Mike Godwin. I like Mike Godwin. Mike is a friend of mine. But he's still a dirty thief.

Oh, the horror.

Richard Sexton
Froup this, bitch.
http://rs79.vrx.net/works/usenet/

"Because I plan to retire to somewhere as rural as possible. Gods, the stink and the noise of you people...

Have fun, urbanites, when your little towns blossom into fire, either suitcase nukes or via the inevitable breakdown of the social order when the average IQ reaches that of a ferret. Or they'll become vast concrete sepulchres after a good, old fashioned plague sweeps through them.

I'll be fishin'."

I was born in a small town in Wales, moved to Canada when I was six and grew up in suburbia. After Waterloo I lived in LA, New York and Toronto. 12 years ago I moved to the middle of nowhere, Ontario (Pop. 150) and have never looked back. Do it. Get rabbits. Buy local fresh eggs. Enjoy your neighbors for a change.

My barn on a foggy morning.

"If he gave two shit about OTHER PEOPLE he'd spend more time making the tools [not just djdns but his crypto code] actually easy to work with.

I mean it's a DNS server. I don't understand the big guffaw about it. Respond to requests on port TCP:53 ... not exactly hard."

Having used both extensively I'd say while BIND4 is a little bit easer to set up, TINYDNS (the authoritative DNS server in the DJBDNS suite) is easier than BIND8 or 9 to set up and (MUCH) easier to work with in a production environment.

The first time I set it up it took me about 2 days. These days I can get one up in 5 minutes.

I wrote up this to make it a little easier, please let me know of any suggestions for improvements:

http://dumpbind.vrx.net.

DJB's zero security problems compared to the hundreds if not thousands for BIND is a fairly compelling argument in my mind.

"You got temporary storage gains, but your discs would quickly fail. Not a good deal in the meantime."

Did you actually try it?

Anybody that was used to day in day out 8" floppy operations knew a bit about what brands of media worked and what didn't. This data was applicable to 5" floppies and then 3".

My first box of low density 3" floppies cost me $50 US.

If you used cheap floppies and punchd them you'd get a certain failure rate roughly equivalent to the failure rate of unpunched floppies on low density drives. Crap is crap no matter how many holes you punch in it.

I've used hundreds of punched disks. After a year of 18 hours a day they'd start to get errors, punched or unpunched. Use good media. Duh.

<rant>
It appears only 2 people besides me RTFA and slashdot is beginning to make usenet look as credible as a peer reviewed scientific journal by comparison.

RTFA or don't bother posting. You may well be a clueless fucktard but posting here without reading no longer keeps this fact hidden. Spam waste less of my time than you nimrods.

And spare me the friggin dupe alerts. If that's all you have to say then STFU.
</rant>

"Who cares? They're all starting to smell the same."

Duh. That's because it's different names for the same people.

If you google It seeks Overall Control you get ISOC.

And only ISOC. I'm sure that's just coincidence.

But, that's the way it's always been.

I really had to laugh at the story about the ITU taking over control of the DNS namespace and IP allocations. Say it doesn't happen. The I* people are in charge. Say it does happen. They all move over there and they are still in charge. That's just what they do.

"Who cares? They're all starting to smell the same."

Duh. That's because it's different names for the same people.

If you google It seeks Overall Control you get ISOC.

And only ISOC. I'm sure that's just coincidence.

But, that's the way it's always been.

I really had to laugh at the story about the ITU taking over control of the DNS namespace and IP allocations. Say it doesn't happen. The I* people are in charge. Say it does happen. They all move over there and they are still in charge. That's just what they do.

"Who cares? They're all starting to smell the same."

Duh. That's because it's different names for the same people.

If you google It seeks Overall Control you get ISOC.

And only ISOC. I'm sure that's just coincidence.

But, that's the way it's always been.

I really had to laugh at the story about the ITU taking over control of the DNS namespace and IP allocations. Say it doesn't happen. The I* people are in charge. Say it does happen. They all move over there and they are still in charge. That's just what they do.

"It seems most people love to bitch piss and moan about ICANN/IANA, but they can't pick up a damned phone or write an email"

If you'd actually tried this you know how non-productive this idea is. I wasted 10 years of my life doing exactly this, only to watch a bloated and corrupt ICANN emerge in spite of everything hundreds of people did and now watch all our predictions about their future potential wrongdoings come true. I do not feel good about this.

When the US government was handing over IANA to "the new corporation" (ICANN), open-rsc (ORSC) was invited to "advise" them in the early days. What this amounted to was every time ICANN had a truly horrific idea and we pointed out what a bad idea this was ICANN simply took our adive by using it against us and found ways to work around our criticism by adding enough spin to makie it appear it wasn't a problem and of course they were prepared now to hear this criticism and had stock nonsensical answers for their PR machine.

The list of reasons why ICANN is an utter and abject failure is miles long. Put as succinctly as I can, ICANN is supposed to measure consensus and enact policy based on it. Anybody who as at or saw the Marina del Rey 2000 selection of the 7 new tlds knows how far from reality this actually is.

The video of this is still, I believe, available at the Berkman center. Worth a look...

As for conspiracy, I can give you names of people who have first hand evidence of it. Names you will recognize. It runs in the tens (hundreds) of millions of dollars and is he reason there are so few, and so lame, new tlds.

ICANN was born "behind the scenes" and has always operated that way. It gets more distane from reality every day. At some point it will implode.

Keep in mind ICANN, a $50M+ (and climbing) organization replaces what Jon Postel used to do as a part time "task" for about 30K a year. Except Jon could not be bought. Pity he died right before ICANN was formed. For the record, I first called him in 1994.

"It seems most people love to bitch piss and moan about ICANN/IANA, but they can't pick up a damned phone or write an email"

If you'd actually tried this you know how non-productive this idea is. I wasted 10 years of my life doing exactly this, only to watch a bloated and corrupt ICANN emerge in spite of everything hundreds of people did and now watch all our predictions about their future potential wrongdoings come true. I do not feel good about this.

When the US government was handing over IANA to "the new corporation" (ICANN), open-rsc (ORSC) was invited to "advise" them in the early days. What this amounted to was every time ICANN had a truly horrific idea and we pointed out what a bad idea this was ICANN simply took our adive by using it against us and found ways to work around our criticism by adding enough spin to makie it appear it wasn't a problem and of course they were prepared now to hear this criticism and had stock nonsensical answers for their PR machine.

The list of reasons why ICANN is an utter and abject failure is miles long. Put as succinctly as I can, ICANN is supposed to measure consensus and enact policy based on it. Anybody who as at or saw the Marina del Rey 2000 selection of the 7 new tlds knows how far from reality this actually is.

The video of this is still, I believe, available at the Berkman center. Worth a look...

As for conspiracy, I can give you names of people who have first hand evidence of it. Names you will recognize. It runs in the tens (hundreds) of millions of dollars and is he reason there are so few, and so lame, new tlds.

ICANN was born "behind the scenes" and has always operated that way. It gets more distane from reality every day. At some point it will implode.

Keep in mind ICANN, a $50M+ (and climbing) organization replaces what Jon Postel used to do as a part time "task" for about 30K a year. Except Jon could not be bought. Pity he died right before ICANN was formed. For the record, I first called him in 1994.

"It seems most people love to bitch piss and moan about ICANN/IANA, but they can't pick up a damned phone or write an email"

If you'd actually tried this you know how non-productive this idea is. I wasted 10 years of my life doing exactly this, only to watch a bloated and corrupt ICANN emerge in spite of everything hundreds of people did and now watch all our predictions about their future potential wrongdoings come true. I do not feel good about this.

When the US government was handing over IANA to "the new corporation" (ICANN), open-rsc (ORSC) was invited to "advise" them in the early days. What this amounted to was every time ICANN had a truly horrific idea and we pointed out what a bad idea this was ICANN simply took our adive by using it against us and found ways to work around our criticism by adding enough spin to makie it appear it wasn't a problem and of course they were prepared now to hear this criticism and had stock nonsensical answers for their PR machine.

The list of reasons why ICANN is an utter and abject failure is miles long. Put as succinctly as I can, ICANN is supposed to measure consensus and enact policy based on it. Anybody who as at or saw the Marina del Rey 2000 selection of the 7 new tlds knows how far from reality this actually is.

The video of this is still, I believe, available at the Berkman center. Worth a look...

As for conspiracy, I can give you names of people who have first hand evidence of it. Names you will recognize. It runs in the tens (hundreds) of millions of dollars and is he reason there are so few, and so lame, new tlds.

ICANN was born "behind the scenes" and has always operated that way. It gets more distane from reality every day. At some point it will implode.

Keep in mind ICANN, a $50M+ (and climbing) organization replaces what Jon Postel used to do as a part time "task" for about 30K a year. Except Jon could not be bought. Pity he died right before ICANN was formed. For the record, I first called him in 1994.

"Spam is not FREA SPEACH. Spam is THEFT. Theft of computer ressources, theft of bandwidth, theft of storage, THEFT OF PEOPLE'S TIME."

So is slashdot. No matter...

But here's my conundrum. I'd like every spammer to die a slow painful death. But, at the end of the day, I get mail like "Hi, I'm a clueless fuckwit and I'm on one of your mailing lists (or read your webpage, whatever) and I'd like you to spend an hour helping me". I can just delete it. I can say "no" or I can choose to help them (rolls eyes, oh boy, again)

If I get a piece of spam I delete it.

Now what's the difference? Both are unsolicited. Both use my computing resources, both cost me per-byte bandwidth charges.

The only difference as I see it is we all agree (hopefully) spam is "bad" and helping people is good, but that doesn't mesh well with the law.

Ban, say, commercial unsolicted speech and then some guy who might say "Hey, I saw you're looking for a racaltitrant pleby on your webpage, I have an old one in my garage, I don't use it and you can have it for the price of postage, cheers" might fave the same penalty as your average c|@lis haflwit spammer.

What we want is a "email that pisses me off is bad" law and that's a real slippery slope.

I'm not sure the law is going to be any use here at all. Some people like/use spam. Bah.

Now, if there was some way I could say "if you want to send me unsolicited commercial email about killifish or pre-1940's Lemania chronographs that's ok. The rest of you can die" I'd have a good case, I think, for going after the penis pill hawkers, and I'd get what *I want*. Whois seems a likely place to put this.

(I'm serious about the killifish and watch parts btw, I need 4 Lemania 15TL column wheels and SJO "Loe")

I think it's alright, as long as they take the right path. But maybe they're afraid of this.

I think it's alright, as long as they take the right path. But maybe they're afraid of this.

"And people wonder why HST blew his brains out."

But before he did...

http://ctr.vrx.net/hst/

{Guy in audience} What would you like people to remember you by ?

{HST} I don't have to worry about it.

USENET (In the form of the Unix User Network was born in 1979.

That was tried with extremely mixed results by the International Telecommunications Union, an IGO (intergoverernmental oragnization) that pre-existed the UN. As far as a body for purely technical standardization, it had some success.

However, the Soviet Union saw it as a way to legitimize its and its client states' control over information (under an early version of anti-globalization) throughout the 70s. Instead of promoting local content, it propped up government control of telecommunications networks and helped insure that telephone growth in the Third World would not take off until the rise of the cell phone. (Canadian view here).

You can just imagine what influence China would have on the process if it were applied to the Internet.

You're slipping Keith, Randy Bush usualy refers to me as a "dangerous psychopath", Paul Vixie refers to me as a "misguided lunatic" and never mind the fact that Vixies boss who funded the $2M of DEC's money for development of BIND is behind all that I do in this arena, as a follow on act to his creating of the back-then wildly unpopular alt newsgroups (which Vixie prediced would be the death of usenet.

Who exactly are you referring to as "paranoid lunatics" Keith?

The obvious technical argument to your first paragraph is to self-primary the root and do away with any reliance on the legacy root servers or NSI's operation of them.

Non-legacy tlds aside, anybody that uses the legacy root servers is not going to get as fast or reliable nameservice than if they do it for themselves.

This would be the first step to wean yourselves away from the tit of the US Government controlled DNS. If you used ORSC dns that would be nice, but you don't have to, you can use the legacy root.

ftp://internic.net/domain/root.zone.gz still works if your favorite flavour is vanilla.

ftp://rz.vrx.net/db.root also works if you like other flavours.

Cordially,
Richard Sexton

I've been experimenting with alternative roots over the past couple of months.

The OpenNIC root zone file seems pretty stable, and resolves ICANN domains along with opennic's own .geek, .oss, .parody, .indy, .null, and .opennic . AlterNIC and Pacific Root alternate roots seem to be long gone - I haven't been able to find any current information on these alternate roots, and I have yet to come across a root zone file that allows resolution of any of their names (anybody know?).

I tried the ORSC root zone file, which is FAR more extensive, but it seems to be out of date - I couldn't even resolve some ICANN domains with it!

It seems that the YouCANN and ORSC web sites are possibly horribly out of date - can anyone verify that these projects are even active?

Now for a little editorial criticism: I don't see any indication in the article that ICANN is considering "incorporating" alternative TLDs as much as it's considering bulldozing over them, like it has for .biz . The submitter's take that ICANN roots may soon start resolving these independent root operators is either woefully mistaken or badly misleading.

Already done!

This one.

dig NS .

In the bad old days you and you alone were in control of name resolution. For those of you without receding and/or grey hairlines who may not know or remember this, you had a file called hosts.txt that contained all the mappings of names to IPs. That, obviously, didn't scale and DNS was developed and was widely deployed by about 86 or so.

The one big gotcha with DNS is it takes control out of your hands. That is, you may have your own DNS server locally, but you traditionally refer to other servers that serve up the root zone that tells your DNS server where all the TLD servers are. Somewhere along the line the decision was made to use other machines, not your own, for this.

This is wrong for many reasons:

1. It's slower than if you have your own local copy of the root zone
   
2. it's a point of failure you can live without - a DDOS on the legacy roots shouldn't take you down
3. it provides a political point of capture - he who controls the root controls all the DNS namespace, and it's currently under the aegis of the trademark lobby under the guise of an incompetant and gutless wonder we jokingly refer to as "ICANN".

But there are ways around this. The easiest if is you static route the 13 root server IPs to your own nameserver. Then you can run an unmodified copt of the legacy root zone on your own nameserver and the US government root servers can be backhoed or DDOS'd and you wouldn't even notice. ISP's are starting to figure this out, especiallly ones with expensive longhaul connections.

Or, you can modify your nameserver to declare youtself primary for the root zone (which you've dutifully downloaded) and edit out the declarations for "." in the legacy root zone.

Or you can use the ORSC root zone. If it's good enough for two ICANN board members, it's good enough for you.

Whatever you do, for God's sake dump bind and use DJBDNS. It really is so much better it's just not funny.

In the bad old days you and you alone were in control of name resolution. For those of you without receding and/or grey hairlines who may not know or remember this, you had a file called hosts.txt that contained all the mappings of names to IPs. That, obviously, didn't scale and DNS was developed and was widely deployed by about 86 or so.

The one big gotcha with DNS is it takes control out of your hands. That is, you may have your own DNS server locally, but you traditionally refer to other servers that serve up the root zone that tells your DNS server where all the TLD servers are. Somewhere along the line the decision was made to use other machines, not your own, for this.

This is wrong for many reasons:

1. It's slower than if you have your own local copy of the root zone
   
2. it's a point of failure you can live without - a DDOS on the legacy roots shouldn't take you down
3. it provides a political point of capture - he who controls the root controls all the DNS namespace, and it's currently under the aegis of the trademark lobby under the guise of an incompetant and gutless wonder we jokingly refer to as "ICANN".

But there are ways around this. The easiest if is you static route the 13 root server IPs to your own nameserver. Then you can run an unmodified copt of the legacy root zone on your own nameserver and the US government root servers can be backhoed or DDOS'd and you wouldn't even notice. ISP's are starting to figure this out, especiallly ones with expensive longhaul connections.

Or, you can modify your nameserver to declare youtself primary for the root zone (which you've dutifully downloaded) and edit out the declarations for "." in the legacy root zone.

Or you can use the ORSC root zone. If it's good enough for two ICANN board members, it's good enough for you.

Whatever you do, for God's sake dump bind and use DJBDNS. It really is so much better it's just not funny.

is the creation of alt.sex

Remember usenet? It was 'the big thing' before the web. Check out a great history site here

See http://dns.vrx.net/tech/rootzone/db.root

I think there are a few things amiss with the pfir plan and I'd like to suggest and comment on some alternatives and have a few comments about our continues use of 20th century DNS.

Look back at the creation of ICANN and it's not difficult to see why it has failed. The timeline goes something like this: when the Wired article came out in 1994 where Joshua Quittner reported he registered mcdonalds.com and McDonalds didn't want it he ended up selling it to Burger King. At the time InterNIC registrations were taking about 3 days. This shot up to 11 weeks in a matter of days. The NSF, who funded NSI to run the InterNIC, did not feel it's role, which is to foster academic and scientific advancement, included subsidizing deodorant.com and the like, so, it asked the FNCAC to do something. What they did was instruct the NSF to tell NSI to begin charging for domains. This caught the Internet community rather off guard and discussion ensued on a "newdom" mailing list (whose archives can be found here). Several forces came into play. First was the rift between the group that felt they too could run a TLD and the group that though this should be run from a great big central registry. The latter became the IAHC/CORE thing while the former became the first alternative root. The US Government shut down the IAHC and began it's own proceedings: the white paper was produced. Other governments, most notably in the form of Paul Twoomey from Australia
and Chris Wilkinson from the EU balked at the plan and the revised plan, the green paper took out the language about creating 5 new TLDs immediately (thereby throwing each conflicted group at least one bone). At the time Mikki Barry and Kathy Kleinman suggested in Becky Burr's office that a set of global meetings take place, not to decide answers to tough problems, but to determine just where there was consensus on the various issues. This became the IFWP forum and 3 meetings were held in Reston Va., Geneva, and Singapore. There was to be a followup meeting to merge these consensus points into a framework for the new corporation that was to replace IANA. While this was happening, NSI and IANA were negotiating, and Ira Magaziner, Clinton's senior science advisor and Roger Cochetti, a VP of IBM were running around selecting a new board. The IFWP wrap up meeting never happened, it was scuttled by Mike Roberts (suspicion is high he had been told be would be president) and the vast amount of time and energy, money, hopes and aspirations that was IFWP went down the toilet - which is a real shame as it was a significant body of work. Three proposals went in to the US government to form the new corporation. The IANA/NSI proposal drafted by Joe Sims and NSI, the Boston Working Group proposal (which is where the wrap-up meeting was to have been) which was a sane version of the NSI/ICANN proposal, and the ORSC proposal which was the BWG plan with greater fiscal responsibility and an existing corporate shell. Citing popular public support for the IANA/NSI plan it was selected - but if you read the public comments on the NTIA site carefully you'll see far less support than implied and much of it was tentative, frankly. A board materialized out if thin air, selected because they didn't know anything about DNS. So what went wrong? Was the original ICANN plan flawed or were the people just the wrong choices? I suggest that if Karl Aurbach and 9 people like him has been the original board we would not now be even talking about DNS; the board appointed from in high did not represent the Internet community whatsoever and instead represented telco, government and trademark special interests. It is believed the concessions made so that foreign government supported the "green paper" was that they got to pick certain members of the board. The first big clue there was trouble was when the board missed it's deadline to define a process for their replacement and simply extended their jobs; they should have been gone over two years ago now.

So what have we learned from this? In my opinion, no group that says "we're in charge" really is; respect is earned, not asserted and I think this was the great failing of both IAHC and ICANN. So while I generally like Weinstein, Newman and Farber, I do distrust the IAB to some extent based on previous debacles like the Boston Tea party where they were thrown out for claiming OSI and not TCP/IP was the way to go. The ISOC is another non-starter, it's wanted to get it's hands on the DNS for over a decade and has been a great supporter of the authoritarian regimes of both IAHC and ICANN. The key, I believe, is not some group claiming they should be in charge or that they have all the answers - nobody does - but the good old fashioned and time proven method of Internet collaborative cooperation. And this means actually doing it, not paying lip service to it like ICANN did. Oh and cut out the 5 star hotels and first class Concorde flights.

Is this about Internet governance? No. Absolutely not. In it's most basic form this is nothing more than an institutionalized debate between Dave Crocker and Karl Denninger in 1986 taken to it's logical conclusion. But it's nothing to do with governance of the Internet. Face it, if all you do is read and write email and/or usenet news, and play on ISC or muck about on the web, you may never have heard of ICANN and it certainly has zero effect on you. This is just about new top level domains, period; the IP addresses have virtually all been handed over to the regional registries and the port allocations are handles by somebody than CAN add one to a number and write it down on a piece of paper.

But didn't ICANN break up NSI ? Nope. That was Ira Magaziners plan executed through the Department of Commerce. You don't really think NSI gave in because ICANN though it was a good idea do you? What has ICANN really done in 4 years? They've knuckled under to WIPO and given us the horribly flawed UDRP and 7 really stupid TLDs that despite $2.$M worth of scrutiny still had huge problems to the point of being dragged into court over it.

What alternative roots exist? Quite a few actually, and while on the face of it you might think this would be a problem, but face it, if you can pick up your mail and get to Yahoo! then they work, and any of them will let you do that. The differences in them are what new TLDs they publish in their root zones. I need to disclaim right away that I coordinate, with Brian Reid's help, the ORSC root, and it's generally believed to have the greatest penetration and is certainly the longest continuously operating one. The barrier to entry it low: show us working TLD servers and we'll list you. Other notable ones are the TINC root which is operated by some old time Usenet people such as Peter da Silva which has a policy of one tld per entity, which I don't like think can be made to work (the now defunct eDNS tried this and it was found to be too easily worked around), PacROOT which in my opinion swings too far the other way with their NameSlinger client - I don't think I know the proper number of TLDS any entity should operate but I do know it's not in the hundreds if not thousands; this raises anti-trust issues, and OpenNIC which is pretty good but only has a small number of new TLDs. There is also NameSpace which believes they should run all tlds. This grates against the notion of the root as a collection of independantly run TLDs in my opinion. But, it doesn't matter to me which one people use as long as they use one of them. Vote with your nameservers - it is in nobody's interest to break anything and using any of these roots will let you see all current DNS names and a whole universe of new ones although how many depends on which one you pick.

Why do we still use root servers? Now this is where it gets interesting. What if the US Government suddenly shut off the legacy root servers? 90% of the net would feel some sort of perturbation immediately especially since at least one TLD (.SE) is name-served directly from the root (not TLD!) servers as are many in-addr.arpa delegations. As the TTLs to TLD servers expired, users of the legacy root would not be able to resolve any DNS names. But, people that use other root servers would be immune to the demise of the legacy roots (modulo one of Swedens 7 .SE nameservers of course) but an even better tactic in my opinion is to primary the root zone for yourself. Then, any or all root servers could be shut off and you wouldn't notice a thing. This would leave you with one remaining problem and that is where could you get the root zone from. Your upstream might be a good place or as DJB has suggested, a cryptographically signed root zone could be posted to usenet periodically. This has the inherent advantage of being out of band of TCP/IP; that is, even a UUCP connection could inject the zone into the news stream. That's one answer to "how do you bootstrap DNS without DNS".

Do I think ORSC should be the next ICANN as the ICANNWATCH poll suggests? No and hell no! Nobody should be in charge, and given that the net and the DNS itself is edge controlled - that is, whoever has the root password to a nameserver determines what dns names exist and what don't - any model that asserts a central authority is doomed to fail. There is need for coordination, but not authority.

Vote with your nameserver; vote early and vote often.

Richard Sexton
March 19, 2002

I think there are a few things amiss with the pfir plan and I'd like to suggest and comment on some alternatives and have a few comments about our continues use of 20th century DNS.

Look back at the creation of ICANN and it's not difficult to see why it has failed. The timeline goes something like this: when the Wired article came out in 1994 where Joshua Quittner reported he registered mcdonalds.com and McDonalds didn't want it he ended up selling it to Burger King. At the time InterNIC registrations were taking about 3 days. This shot up to 11 weeks in a matter of days. The NSF, who funded NSI to run the InterNIC, did not feel it's role, which is to foster academic and scientific advancement, included subsidizing deodorant.com and the like, so, it asked the FNCAC to do something. What they did was instruct the NSF to tell NSI to begin charging for domains. This caught the Internet community rather off guard and discussion ensued on a "newdom" mailing list (whose archives can be found here). Several forces came into play. First was the rift between the group that felt they too could run a TLD and the group that though this should be run from a great big central registry. The latter became the IAHC/CORE thing while the former became the first alternative root. The US Government shut down the IAHC and began it's own proceedings: the white paper was produced. Other governments, most notably in the form of Paul Twoomey from Australia
and Chris Wilkinson from the EU balked at the plan and the revised plan, the green paper took out the language about creating 5 new TLDs immediately (thereby throwing each conflicted group at least one bone). At the time Mikki Barry and Kathy Kleinman suggested in Becky Burr's office that a set of global meetings take place, not to decide answers to tough problems, but to determine just where there was consensus on the various issues. This became the IFWP forum and 3 meetings were held in Reston Va., Geneva, and Singapore. There was to be a followup meeting to merge these consensus points into a framework for the new corporation that was to replace IANA. While this was happening, NSI and IANA were negotiating, and Ira Magaziner, Clinton's senior science advisor and Roger Cochetti, a VP of IBM were running around selecting a new board. The IFWP wrap up meeting never happened, it was scuttled by Mike Roberts (suspicion is high he had been told be would be president) and the vast amount of time and energy, money, hopes and aspirations that was IFWP went down the toilet - which is a real shame as it was a significant body of work. Three proposals went in to the US government to form the new corporation. The IANA/NSI proposal drafted by Joe Sims and NSI, the Boston Working Group proposal (which is where the wrap-up meeting was to have been) which was a sane version of the NSI/ICANN proposal, and the ORSC proposal which was the BWG plan with greater fiscal responsibility and an existing corporate shell. Citing popular public support for the IANA/NSI plan it was selected - but if you read the public comments on the NTIA site carefully you'll see far less support than implied and much of it was tentative, frankly. A board materialized out if thin air, selected because they didn't know anything about DNS. So what went wrong? Was the original ICANN plan flawed or were the people just the wrong choices? I suggest that if Karl Aurbach and 9 people like him has been the original board we would not now be even talking about DNS; the board appointed from in high did not represent the Internet community whatsoever and instead represented telco, government and trademark special interests. It is believed the concessions made so that foreign government supported the "green paper" was that they got to pick certain members of the board. The first big clue there was trouble was when the board missed it's deadline to define a process for their replacement and simply extended their jobs; they should have been gone over two years ago now.

So what have we learned from this? In my opinion, no group that says "we're in charge" really is; respect is earned, not asserted and I think this was the great failing of both IAHC and ICANN. So while I generally like Weinstein, Newman and Farber, I do distrust the IAB to some extent based on previous debacles like the Boston Tea party where they were thrown out for claiming OSI and not TCP/IP was the way to go. The ISOC is another non-starter, it's wanted to get it's hands on the DNS for over a decade and has been a great supporter of the authoritarian regimes of both IAHC and ICANN. The key, I believe, is not some group claiming they should be in charge or that they have all the answers - nobody does - but the good old fashioned and time proven method of Internet collaborative cooperation. And this means actually doing it, not paying lip service to it like ICANN did. Oh and cut out the 5 star hotels and first class Concorde flights.

Is this about Internet governance? No. Absolutely not. In it's most basic form this is nothing more than an institutionalized debate between Dave Crocker and Karl Denninger in 1986 taken to it's logical conclusion. But it's nothing to do with governance of the Internet. Face it, if all you do is read and write email and/or usenet news, and play on ISC or muck about on the web, you may never have heard of ICANN and it certainly has zero effect on you. This is just about new top level domains, period; the IP addresses have virtually all been handed over to the regional registries and the port allocations are handles by somebody than CAN add one to a number and write it down on a piece of paper.

But didn't ICANN break up NSI ? Nope. That was Ira Magaziners plan executed through the Department of Commerce. You don't really think NSI gave in because ICANN though it was a good idea do you? What has ICANN really done in 4 years? They've knuckled under to WIPO and given us the horribly flawed UDRP and 7 really stupid TLDs that despite $2.$M worth of scrutiny still had huge problems to the point of being dragged into court over it.

What alternative roots exist? Quite a few actually, and while on the face of it you might think this would be a problem, but face it, if you can pick up your mail and get to Yahoo! then they work, and any of them will let you do that. The differences in them are what new TLDs they publish in their root zones. I need to disclaim right away that I coordinate, with Brian Reid's help, the ORSC root, and it's generally believed to have the greatest penetration and is certainly the longest continuously operating one. The barrier to entry it low: show us working TLD servers and we'll list you. Other notable ones are the TINC root which is operated by some old time Usenet people such as Peter da Silva which has a policy of one tld per entity, which I don't like think can be made to work (the now defunct eDNS tried this and it was found to be too easily worked around), PacROOT which in my opinion swings too far the other way with their NameSlinger client - I don't think I know the proper number of TLDS any entity should operate but I do know it's not in the hundreds if not thousands; this raises anti-trust issues, and OpenNIC which is pretty good but only has a small number of new TLDs. There is also NameSpace which believes they should run all tlds. This grates against the notion of the root as a collection of independantly run TLDs in my opinion. But, it doesn't matter to me which one people use as long as they use one of them. Vote with your nameservers - it is in nobody's interest to break anything and using any of these roots will let you see all current DNS names and a whole universe of new ones although how many depends on which one you pick.

Why do we still use root servers? Now this is where it gets interesting. What if the US Government suddenly shut off the legacy root servers? 90% of the net would feel some sort of perturbation immediately especially since at least one TLD (.SE) is name-served directly from the root (not TLD!) servers as are many in-addr.arpa delegations. As the TTLs to TLD servers expired, users of the legacy root would not be able to resolve any DNS names. But, people that use other root servers would be immune to the demise of the legacy roots (modulo one of Swedens 7 .SE nameservers of course) but an even better tactic in my opinion is to primary the root zone for yourself. Then, any or all root servers could be shut off and you wouldn't notice a thing. This would leave you with one remaining problem and that is where could you get the root zone from. Your upstream might be a good place or as DJB has suggested, a cryptographically signed root zone could be posted to usenet periodically. This has the inherent advantage of being out of band of TCP/IP; that is, even a UUCP connection could inject the zone into the news stream. That's one answer to "how do you bootstrap DNS without DNS".

Do I think ORSC should be the next ICANN as the ICANNWATCH poll suggests? No and hell no! Nobody should be in charge, and given that the net and the DNS itself is edge controlled - that is, whoever has the root password to a nameserver determines what dns names exist and what don't - any model that asserts a central authority is doomed to fail. There is need for coordination, but not authority.

Vote with your nameserver; vote early and vote often.

Richard Sexton
March 19, 2002

History of USENET

Archive for the History of Usenet Mailing List

Usenet Readers and Clients

History of Usenet - Development, people involved

(Yeah sure, anyone could look these up but isn't it easier to just point and click? There is more to USENET history than Google. Also, if you think I'm a karma whore, that's fine. I've got karma to burn.)

BIFF was the invention of Joe Talmadge in 1988, soon taken over by Richard Sexton and then imitated by many. Here are some links to the history:

http://www.tuxedo.org/~esr/jargon/html/entry/B1FF. html

http://www.vrx.net/richard/biff.html

The ICANN document this article refers to in turn refers to RFC 2826, published by the Internet Architecture Board. It seems to me that that is about as close as you're going to get to an official statement from the IETF on this. So it looks to me like it's Simon Higgs (perhaps supported by famed namespace-abuser Richard Sexton) vs the sane world.

If Microsoft was so ignorant of the Internet, then why was it a node on Usenet in 1981?

(See the map - here)

Simon

Many of the early Net philosophers gathered around the now-corporatized Wired magazine