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Kahn Overhauling the Internet
Whanana sent us an article about information objects as visualized by Robert Kahn.
The article is written from a fairly childish place (it explains DNS for crying out loud, and the bulk of it is a history lesson obviously designed for a mainstream paper) but Kahn's Digital Object Identifier concept is interesting. If anyone has links to RFCs and the like, please post them in the comments.
Try http://www.handle.net/. Stumbled across it some time ago with some Python doco, IIRC. I had no idea it had acquired any kind of acceptance.
This may be a dumb question, but is this "Handle" approach compatible with URIs?
;)
It sounds like a good idea to abstract the identifier for a document (or whatever) from its location, but will this mean an incompatibility with current Web names? Are we going to have two different standards of access to information resources, or can they peacefully coexist?
Personally, I love the Franklin quote:
'We must all hang together, or assuredly we shall all hang separately.'
Just as long as you're well-hung.
First of all, what's scary about the DoD putting its library on-line?
Second of all, only people who create nothing think that the creative work of others should be free. If copyright holders want to be able to track their work and make sure that their work is only available to people who have acquired a licence, I don't see a problem. In fact, it will be a HUGE help to individual authors/musicians/artists/whatevers, since they can take care of managing distribution all by themselves without needing a big company to handle it. Of course, promotion is still an issue, but that's another debate...
If you want to be a thief, you'll hate this. If you want to actually use the net to find stuff and be reimbursed for the things you create, you'll love it.
-jon
Remember Amalek.
The idea of objects being passed around by handles is the original concept for the Internet as espoused by Dr. Alan Kay. This is how he originally envisioned Object-Oriented information models. Now the Internet is being re-invented to change it from the simple collection of connection paths to a real highway where real self-contained objects can be passed around. This may be better, maybe not. I guess it depends on how it's implemented. If each object has to be accompanied by a slew of "helpers" to allow the recieving node to interpret it, this could get ugly. But if a single, open, method is used, this could be beautiful. Imagine a fully portable object going from platform to platform totally transparent to the user!
.NET and I just hope the geniuses who are behind this idea don't get mown down by Microsoft's marketing muscle.
Of course, it'll have to compete with
Steven
-- I have marked myself unwilling to moderate-- I don't have other accounts to artificially inflate the karma of
A central database would not necissarily have the same problems as our current DNS system if OIDs were not human readable. Unfortunatly, three would still be two serious problems:
(1) Who would do the human readable -> OID translation.
(2) Using a centralized database to find things would make censorship really easy. I've seen a lot of people here asking "who would own the centralized database." This question is totally irrelevent as any government would strongly regulate the database owners. the real question is "what country would be able to pass laws about it?" i.e. who's version of censorship are we going to force on the world.
First, there maybe be a solution to (1), but it's not totally clear how to implement it. Specifically, you need a "philosophical" cross between search engines and alternative DNS servers. I do not see how to d this, but it seems like you want to have the "athoritative" qualities of DNS, but allow eople to switch as easily as going to a diffrent search engine.
Second, the only real solution to (2) is to eliminate the centralized database. Actually, you really should just junk all this guys ideas an use freenet. Now, information on freennet is not perminant, but there are soltions to that too. Specifically, get people to permenently rehost thngs they think are importent.
Anyway, issue (1) is central to freenet too, so there is really no point in even considering this guys proposals. Freenet is beats these proposals in every way.
The Christian religion has been and still is the principal enemy of moral progress in the world. -- Bertrand Russell
Had no idea that some people hated it so much (see first reply to "What about Xanadu"). Is it really that crappy? Damn, and I thought that it would rock and it would change a bunch of stuff or something.
our written thoughts are gifts to our future selves
I think it would be grat to be able to access the closest copy of an article (or music, or the drawings of a historical organ, or the latest Linux kernel) without worrying whose computer it is on, and if they have moved it to a different location.
As far as I can see, this scheme does nothing towards solving the (admittedly real) problems of intellectual property. If I can fire up a nslookup or its relative, and translate the ID to anb URL and then to an IP address and a filename, then at most it can obscure the path to direct access. And we all know how badly "security by obscurity" has performed...
This brings up the whole philosophical discussion of what is information, and how it can be or should be owned or controlled. Not all information wants to be free - at least my credit card number wants not.
No matter how the legal and philosophical discussions go, this scheme may provide a valuable tool for identifying information, and that I see that as something positive. But will it take off? Only time will show.
In Murphy We Turst
-
Organizing and accessing my data by object/content over my own network would be pretty cool. However, in the "wild" of the Internet, I don't necessarily need some central organizer knowing the "what" of what I am accessing. I guess I must be a privacy paranoid.
Mambo dogface in the banana patch
I'm guessing that real radicals like to eat and have shelter. If they are going to give away what they produce for the Greater Good, they have to live off of the money/goods/etc. from other people, and they can get it either by force or the good graces of other people. The second option is wonderful in theory, but the first is more common in practice.
The sole reason why the Open Source movement exists is students and professors who have been living off of parents and/or government grants.
Granted, there are companies which are trying to make money from Open Source projects, but they are trying to profit from obscurity; their products are so hard to use, that people are willing to pay for support. I don't see that happening with books or music any time soon, and when people start putting easy-to-use interfaces on these Open Source products, these companies are sunk.
I've written code in my spare time which I've given away, but if I (or my company) was unable to make money from the code I write for them, I wouldn't be writing code, and I probably wouldn't have the spare time to write code that I give away. As much as I love to code, I love to take care of my family even more.
-jon
Remember Amalek.
If there is already a DNS root in place, why not visualize setting up a central object database at the specific site? I.E. cod.slashdot.org/whatever.object.you.want. that way, each individual site would administer it's own object database. this would eliminate the need for standardizing the server systems and would take the power away from a central authority(that could possibly screw it up...)
Kaaahhhhhhnnnn!!!!!!!!!
Where does the censorship come in? It sounds to me like the owner of the domain (in the example give, MSNBC) would be responsible for maintaining the object ID table. DNS would resolve the domain name to an IP address, then the handle would be resolved by the object ID table that resides on that domain's server. Different than how it works today, but I don't see any new censorship opportunities.
Can you please explain where the possibility for censorship lies? I think I'm missing something here.
-
Of course most real radicals enjoy eating and having shelter. Putting patentable ideas into the public domain, or GPL'ing them, doesn't prevent the creator from making money by being first to sell products based on them or by creating better products based on those ideas than others can make.
Many Open Source developers are students and professors, it is true. But there are others: Linus Torvalds has a day job and still finds time to direct kernel development, the KDE team is largely made up of people who work for TrollTech, and there are many many sysadmins who Open Source tools they have created to help themselves in their jobs. Furthermore, we can assume that there are *some* developers who have made themselves independently wealthy through their own hard work and can therefore afford to code for free. If I am lucky enough to find myself in such a position, that is what I hope to do.
You are mistaken when you imply that those who don't believe in the ownership of ideas are themselves incapable of making a valuable creative contribution. If you believe in "Intellectual Property", that's your business, but it doesn't give you the right to denigrate the work of those who believe differently than you. There is not *yet* a law that states that all intellectual activity must be undertaken in service of the profit motive.
If you mod me down, I will become more powerful than you can possibly imagine.
This could be implemented in the current DNS system.
DNS has a record called "hinfo" for Hardware Information, however due to security concerns, not many people use them now. The record is just a text string that can be almost anything to discribe the machine including hardware information, physical location, etc.
We could use this record for the IHS information without any changes to the current DNS system.
Comments?
Check me on this... how would you determine who gets to be the Object Id Root owner? Highest bidder? First bid over a certain amount of cash? What? Personally, I have no idea how ICANN got to where they are, but would it be that likely to go the same way, however that may have been?
Or even worse... ICANN somehow gets to be the Root owner for this too....
Kierthos
Mr. Hu is not a ninja.
Strong data typing is for those with weak minds.
Strong data typing is for those with weak minds.
Speaking of which, anyone heard any news on that darned Xanadu's progress?
our written thoughts are gifts to our future selves
http://www.rfc-editor.org
You do the hard work and we shall relax and shall "slash you up" on slash.
There's always sufficient, but not always at the right place nor for the right folks.
Yup. Of course, if UUCP were still the dominant medium, companies would be scurrying to register things like "snarf!foovax!kremvax!kgbvax!joshua!ucbvax" as trademarks.
That's "Mr. Soulless Automaton" to you, Bub.
I have gigantic mixed feelings on DOIs, handle systems, and other metadata schemes. I come at this as an anarchist, a librarian, and as a person who has actually purchased a DOI prefix for my employer. I've even been to the DOI workshop that was held several months back at CNRI in Reston, VA.
First, the postive side of DOIs. As most of you know, there is alot of information on the Internet and it isn't organized logically or in a way that a library would organize it. Librarians have been trying to instil some order on the Internet for years, mostly via various metadata schemes. A metadata-based system, like the DOI file handle system, would get us away from identifying content based on location (URLs) and get back to identifying content based on classification (i.e. like Dewey or LC call numbers in your local library). So, if you've installed the proper DOI plugin into your browser and you click on a DOI-enabled link, you'll be given a choice of where you want to get the item. The article by Professor X on nanotechnology is identified by a number, not a URL. Youc an choose to get it from a variety of sources, some of which will give you free access, say if you are a student at a particular university.
In other words, DOIs would greatly help people find information on the Internet.
Now for the flip side. If you read the MSNBC article carefully, you notice a few scary things mentioned, like "[it] is using it to build the Defense Virtual Library" and "another problem is with copyrights and other protections of intellectual property." If you care about the free flow of information on the Internet, which tech like Napster has enabled, DOI and handle schemes should throw up lots of red flags. The music industry is salivating over the DOI project. They are involved in it, the extent to which is unknown to the public. I suspect that the DOI system will be sold as a cool way to find Internet content and that its use to police the Internet for intellectual property owners will be downplayed. If Microsoft and the AAP are involved, you can bet that they don't have the interests of Internet freedom in mind. They simply want to protect the profits they make from the intellectual work of other people.
This is another example of why technology is never neutral. There are always socio-political ramifications from every new tech. Is this new system, which allows you to find content easier, worth the tradeoff in how it makes intellectual property fascism easier?
Forget censorship. This would lead to a bold new world of broken links. It's bad enough to have to update hyperlinks on pages on your own server. Imagine trying to get someone like Network Solutions to update their database every time you move a file.
That's "Mr. Soulless Automaton" to you, Bub.
Did anybody notice that to be able to assign handle's you had to have a "naming authority" as in:
.biz domains. I mean, so if I as a person want to use this new scheme, I've not only got to apply for an ICANN controlled domain name, I've now got to apply and pay for a "naming authority". What's to keep them from pricing this naming authority out of reach from the common person? I think this is a looming large threat to independent posting of material on the internet. Or am I being paranoid (again, heh)?
Under the handle system, my last column might have an identifier like: "10.12345/nov0700-zaret". "10.12345" is MSNBC's naming authority, and "nov0700-zaret" is the name of the object. MSNBC would then keep a record in its handle registry that told the computer what server the object is on, what file it's stored in, as well as the copyright information and anything else it may want in that record.
Scary stuff given the recently introduced $2000 price of the
EMUSE.NET
"We're sorry, but the website you're trying to reach has been disconnected."
--
The shareholder is always right.
Can you please explain where the possibility for censorship lies? I think I'm missing something here.
The point of this exercise seems to be making navigation revolve around the 'what' of the information instead of the 'where'. So, if I want to go looking for yahoo.com/nazi_auctions, I no longer simply ask the DNS server for the IP yahoo.com and then ask the server for nazi_auctions. I ask a distributed DOI database for the whole thing, if I understood it correctly. Conceptually, this would mean that intermediaries will know 'what' I'm looking for and not just 'where' I'm looking for. That's what I mean.
--
Some people have a way with words, and some people, um, thingy.
jim
Of course, an OID system still doesn't solve the problem it purports to address. So you have a registry and an object handle in that registry - what happens when the object is removed, or moved to a different place?
If you change service providers, will you still be using your old OIDs? I doubt it ... use of the registries is hardly going to be free. So you're back to the 404 problem ... only this time you have to remember what looks like a phone number with a name on the end, instead of a nice simple URL.
Oh, and while we're at it ... let's throw DNS into a new crisis by negating the value of everyone's domain names ... whoops!
i-name =twylite [http://public.xdi.org/=twylite], see idcommons.net
From hell's heart I ping at thee.
Any sufficiently advanced civilization is indistinguishable from Gods.
It seems to me this sort of discussion has been handled many times with the same results. Object descriptions and addresses ought to remain separate. DOI looks like a big directory structure for the net; your objects be they computers, printers, or individual files are given handles which are are then in turn given directory registrations. Am I following so far? It seems like this is just restructuring overhead without making it particularly more efficient or effective. TCP/IP packets can be run through a stack which pretty quickly gives the receiver information about the packet but leaves the content alone. This is very simple and amorphous which is why it caught on (you can even use different routing/addressing schemes as long as it follows the header-has-little-to-do-with-the-packet concept). Directory structures on the other hand need alot of overhead due to the fact something somewhere has to know exactly where something is. Lets say all of the DNS servers around today had to hold references for every file available on the internet. That is amazing overhead just to access a text file on a server someplace. Overhead that is distributed over the WHOLE network (the entire internet) as you've only got so many directory servers you can possibly access. TCP/IP combined with transfers that overhead to the computers that are actually talking rather than the entire network. Its easy to upgrade the speed of your hardware to handle an increased demand or whatnot which is generating the extra overhead but is truely hard to squeeze more umph out of a network that is forced to access a limited number of nodes to do absolutely everything.
I'm a loner Dottie, a Rebel.
Thats what the dudes who came up with EJB wanted to do. Objects pass around the net and the person accessing said object only becomes aware if there is some response lag. Lets say instead of just a reference to a static web page you accessed a web page object. You could then pass that object onto someone else. But you could also substitute the object's contents with your own content that someone will access. Even with a powerful encryption and validation system in place you could still spoof the contents of an object. You could also make the contents of an object interactive so you could make a BO-type spoofed object that totally fucks someone over if it is ever accessed. The host-based internet sidesteps some of the security problems of an all peer internet by centralizing files and objects. Besides, I don't want to share my comparitively paltry dialup bandwidth with some other dude because I have a web page object on my system he wants to see.
I'm a loner Dottie, a Rebel.
> More content-id, rights management, copy
/. and the discussion on on-line legistation at k5
0 0/11/22/17051/683
> control stuff. Very interesting but users
> will reject it. Sorry!
You presume that you will have a choice. Bad mistake.
I refer you to the volume of deCSS discussion @
http://www.kuro5hin.org/?op=displaystory;sid=20
May I also remind you that there is nothing stopping either nationalisation or "registration" of ISPs and POPs.
Afterall, a modem might be considered a burglary tool.
-- Butlerian Jihad NOW!
Is he going to use the Genesis device?
More content-id, rights management, copy control stuff. Very interesting but users will reject it. Sorry!
sulli
RTFJ.
This is what happend because the computer users of the world walked away from UUCP. :-/
-----------------
------------
RFC's can be found at http://www.cotse.com/references.htm
making this stuff obligatory for everybody that wants to use the Internet? That should make tech-support really interesting...Hi, I just put this shiny new AOL CD in my shiny new Compaq Presario, and now it makes me answer all sorts of funny questions. I didn't do anything wrong. This wrong is broken! I want to talk to your supervisor!!!
People replying to my sig annoy me. That's why I change it all the time.
...sorry, that's one beeeeeleon dollars (i'm the boss, need the info)
Why don't we just use the current DNS system to resolve to the hostname, and each host has its own database of object id's? This seems most reasonable to me. Each site can (if it chooses to) migrate to using OID's at its own leisure. Then, we could use this along with the current protocols and filesystems, without having to create a whole new internet. It sounds like this is a good solution for administering a single domain, but not for the entire internet. Can you imagine the size of the database necessary to store id & location of every page on the net? Geez...
It may look like I'm doing nothing, but I'm actively waiting for my problems to go away.
--Scott Adams
Freenet stores files under a unique name in a distributed filesystem (i.e. freenet). All you need to retrieve a file is it's name. It appears to me that this is Kahn's idea taken to the extreme. Freenet takes care of storing and retrieving objects with a unique identifier. The system could easily be extended with databases coupling relevant keywords to the identifier. Also it is safe, freenet is explicitly designed to hide the location of the files. Even the owner can't touch it after it has been put into freenet.
Jilles
A system serial number with bits reversed, and packed against the top of the 64 bit word.
An object creation counter for that system serial number -- under localized control/increment.
I had to continually fight off people who wanted to subdivide the 64 bits into fields, the way IP was. The primary discipline I wanted people to follow was to keep routing information out of the object identifier so that object locations could be changed dynamically. It was amazing how many times I had to explain this to people who should have known better.
Unfortunately, I didn't explain it to the right people at DARPA, although I did have a couple of meetings with David P. Reed about it when he was still at MIT's LCS.
I touch on some of this history in a couple of documents, one written recently and one written at the time.
Until I read the article about Kahn, I didn't realize that DARPA chose the IP nonsense at almost exactly the time that the AT&T/Knight-Ridder project that was funding me made a bad choice of vendors that resulted in my resignation from that particular high-profile effort and try to strike out on my own turning 8MHz PC's into multiuser network servers (which I actually succeeded in doing after a lot of blood letting, but that's another story).
Seastead this.
(it explains DNS for crying out loud, and the bulk of it is a history lesson obviously designed for a mainstream paper)
---------- You are not the contents of your sig.:-p
It sounded pretty interesting, but I guess I missed something because they started saying it would help people protect copyrights. At first I thought, they must be talking about publishers which want an easy way to identify the copyright holder of a given object (article, song, whatever) so they can electronically pay for their royalties, etc. For example, when colleges want to create course packets for a class by photocopying various articles, etc. they send faxes to various publishers asking for prices for permission to copy, and then sending in payments. (I was once working on a database to help this process, never bothered to finish it though.) But it's not like the photocopier machines require authorization to copy, the people selling coursepacks manually get permission.
So the question is, is this object thing they are talking about a way to make it easier for these type of people (and other who wish to maintain copyright compliance because they happen to be operating publicly and will get sued if they don't, perhaps an online radio station for example), is is this supposed to be part of a trusted client (the perpetual motion machine of the information age) scheme like the failed Divx DVD players?
Agreed...
This is similar to akamai's setup. Akamai (for those who don't know) is a cache that a lot of bigger sites use (Yahoo, etc). The way it basically works is as follows:
ISPs are part of Akamai's network. They maintain a certain amount of cache for the websites involved and, in turn, provide fast content to thier users (dial-up, etc) and others
Something similar to this would work. Multiple distributed, _independant_ machines would be responsible for maintaining some segment of the the library. They would provide this content to their users (and everybody else) and everybody should be happy.
The objects would be fast for the local users, the objects would be permanenent (because it's distributed).
Of course it would need to be more complicated than this... but the idea is there
-andy
http://theopenlab.org/piper
--
This sort of thing has cropped up before. And it has always been due to human error.
--
This sort of thing has cropped up before. And it has always been due to human error.
HAL9000
Since I've been involved in this discussion for some time I thought I'd recycle some of my old comments :-)
Date: Thu, 20 May 1999 16:46:26 -0400 (EDT)
From: "Arthur P. Smith"
To: discuss-doi@doi.org
Subject: Re: [Discuss-DOI] DOI: Current Status and Outlook
On Wed, 19 May 1999, Norman Paskin wrote:
> A paper which provides a summary of the current thinking on DOI has
> just been published in D- Lib magazine at
> http://www.dlib.org/dlib/may99/05paskin.html
This does answer a lot of questions we had, mostly in what seems
to be the right direction. The relationship with INDECS on metadata
issues looks like a particularly good resolution ("functional granularity"
is essentially what I was looking for in one of my earlier
questions). It looks like a specific metadata "Genre" needs to be
worked out in detail for journal articles (re reference linking) - and
it's not clear who has responsibility for this (the IDF or someone else?)
but at least at the level specified in this article it looks workable.
But to some extent the paper shows the DOI is a solution in search
of a "killer application" (mentioned several times in the article).
There's a chicken-and-egg problem here: the potential applications seem
to require widespread adoption before they become useful.
As one of the final bullets says: "Internet solutions are unlikely to
succeed unless they are globally applicable and show convincing power
over alternatives" - does the DOI as described show convincing power
over the alternatives?
It's sometimes hard to know what counts as an alternative, but the
following systems (some listed in the article) could be
alternatives for at least some of the things the DOI does:
1. the handle system itself
2. uniform resource names
3. IETF's DNS-based Naming Authority Pointer
4. Persistent URL's (PURL's)
5. rule-based reference linking (link managers, Urania, S-Link-S)
6. a global LDAP/directory service
Alternatives 1-4 provide a variety of routes for creating a unique
digital identifier for something - we really don't NEED the DOI just
to have digital identifiers, though DOI does provide a handy rallying
point for those of us providing intellectual property in digital form.
Alternative 2 is the highest level of digital identifier, but perhaps
that is all we really need? There is room for many "naming authorities" -
perhaps even each publisher could be their own naming authority. That
would depend on widespread adoption of (3) which may or may not happen,
and resolution of general registration processes too.
As the article mentions, general implementation of URN's is quite
limited even after almost a decade of work. Is there a reason why
nobody has found it particularly useful yet?
Alternative 1 is, to some extent, a non-issue (a DOI is, after all,
just a handle) and is also, to some extent, the same issue. Any
publisher could, with or without DOI, register as a handle naming
authority and create handles for its digital objects. Is some of
the DOI work duplicating what has already been done (or should have
been done) for the handle system itself? As the handle system web
pages mention (http://www.handle.net/) it is at least receiving some
use as a digital identifier of intellectual property by NCSTRL,
the Library of Congress, DTIC, NLM, etc. Does the DOI provide
convincing power over using the handle system directly?
Alternative 4 (PURL's) is critiqued at length in the article,
particularly on the issue of resolution (section 3). Perhaps I
don't understand properly, but I don't quite agree with some of
the arguments against PURLs. Any digital identifier can be used to
offer great flexibility in resolution - a local proxy can redirect to a local
cache or resource, for example, for ANY of the unique identifiers
under question. Once resolved, the "document" resolved to can
itself contain multiple alternative resolutions. And a handle is only
going to have multiple resolutions if the publisher puts it there
(who else has the authority to insert the data?). So I think the
single vs. multiple redirection issue is a red herring. I do agree it's
nice to have a more direct protocol (though from looking at the details
of the way handles are supposed to resolve there is a lot of
back-and-forth there too). As far as being a URN or not, there's
no reason why PURLs couldn't be treated as legitimate digital identifiers,
even if they are simply URL's at the moment. On "scalability" - the
current handle implementation doesn't seem particularly scalable
either. Only 4 million handles per server? Only 4 global servers
(with 4 backups that seem to point to the very same machines on
different ports)? And those servers seem to all be in the D.C. area...
Not that I think PURLs are wonderful, but does the DOI provide
convincing power over using PURLs, as far as identification and
resolution goes?
Which is presumably why we've been told DOI's have to do
more than just identification and resolution. Hence metadata, to
provide standard information to allow "look-up", multiple-resolution,
and digital commerce applications. This actually makes a lot of
sense. And the other id/resolution alternatives do not
seem to meet the INDECS criteria as well as the DOI can.
But what does this have to do with reference linking, the
first "killer application" mentioned? The look-ups required there
are almost certainly going to be more easily performed with
specialized databases (A&I services) or direct rule-based
linking (alternative 5) and in fact this is already
being done, generally without the use of DOI's. The DOI does not seem to
make the linking process easier, so there's no "convincing power"
here it would seem.
I added alternative 6 (global directory service) as a wild-card -
this seems to be a major focus of "network operating system" vendors -
Novell's NDS, Oracle's OID, Microsoft's Active Directory - these seem
to be systems intended to hold information on hundreds of
millions of "objects" available on a network - an example being the
personal information of a subscriber to an internet service provider.
But another potential application of these is to identify and provide
data on objects available on the net - intellectual property or other
things available for commerce. Is this something the DOI could
fit into, or is it something that could sweep URN's, handles, DOI and
all the rest away? I really don't know, but it seems like
something to watch closely over the next year or so.
Energy: time to change the picture.
*puts pinky to his mouth* we will store these "objects" in our "active directory" *laughs maniacly*
duh, this isn't that revolutionary, and it wouldn't require anything special. just have a database and a primary redirect/include page, and you can change your data around all you want. still doesn't fix the problem that if something is DELETED, (not simply moved) that people aren't gonna find it, all you would do is either keep a list of the 'resourceid' that have been used and tell the user that it was deleted, or have a standard way of generating them, and if its not found in the reference database, tell them its deleted (even tho the id in this case might not have ever been used, it would just fit the criteria for generation)
Kahn is a smart man, but this is a classic go-nowhere idea. Too many people are invested in a host-centric model. This is DOA.
"(The) architecture can not write the law, but it provides a technical design that matches the legal structure that is expected to emerge," the Library of Congress says on its Web site.
Heh.
I forget what 8 was for.
An alternative to the current (mis)use of the DNS would be great, but I don't think one could easily drop the current system and introduce a new one. It would have to be supported by most of the people on the net.
On the other hand what if firms (e.g MS, AOL) started to support that, who could resists?
Or maybe we get a second Internet finally...
People won't take the IP protection crap and once it leaves the protected lands for the real world they'll rip it to bits.
The idea of content objects with unique ID's isn't at all new but is a good one. I always liked the idea of using encryption signatures as the keys. give it sig for itself and one for it's owner and build a simple search engine mechanism into the Net itself and you have a nice lil system. An important note might be that such a system does not need to, and possibly should not, replace TCP/IP or even rely on TCP/IP as it's only supported carrier. It should be as agnostic about transports as possible for the most flexibility.
Jabber might be a good start for this layer since it is a very flexible system for transporting XML-ized content and contact-type information. I really expect something like this to assimilate the web in a couple years. Maybe Jabber merged w/ FreeNet.
Someone who doesn't know the resource they want could search for it by known facts just as they do now at Yahoo, Google, etc.. once they find it they could store the objects unique id and then every time they needed that object again they could ask the net for it and the closest copy found would be returned.
At what price learning? At what cost wisdom? The price is a man's peace of mind, and the cost is his life.
Quoting from RFC1737: Functional Requirements for Uniform Resource Names
URNs are actually specified in RFC2141: URN Syntax, which gives identifiers in the form "urn:NAMESPACE:NAME", where NAMESPACE could be something like "dns" and NAME could be "slashdot.org".
The actual method used to retrieve the object that a URN refers to is left as an exercise to the reader.
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The Hotmail addres is my decoy account. I read it approximately once per year.
What is needed is something much like freenet, but with a different twist. Let's call this system infonet. Now, number one priority on infonet would be that information should never disappear. To make this work, there should always be at least three hosts at different locations storing each file. This should be ensured by infonet software. If one host go down, another should take over. Thus, there will always be redundancy. Furthermore, we need a central organization governing infonet, let's call it infonet-adm. It would have two tasks: (1) managing namespace (usenet is a fine model for this) (2) managing content and ensuring enough machine resources are available. The last task is the most difficult. I see several business models for infonet-adm
- charging a one-time fee for each file stored in infonet
- charging users for downloading content (probably stupid)
- charging ISP's for connecting to infonet
- demanding ISP's to set contribute a suitable amount of machine resources to infonet, the amount can be a function of number of users and their average activity on infonet.
A combination of option 1 and 4 sounds most reasonable to me. Note that as long as More's law is in effect, it will be now problem to save the old content forever.I thought Al Gore invented the Internet. Somebody is lying! ;^)
If you can't say something nice . .
I'm out of my mind, but feel free to leave a message.
The problem will be that someone needs to maintain this mapping.. and for how long do you keep it ? (1 year, 2 years, 5 years, forever ?)
UPS Sucks
The general concensus is that RFCs have been obsoleted by patents. The only difference is that with a patent, comments must be officially sanctioned by the holder. Woohoo! fuzzylogic!
Anyone else notice the part about the central Object Id database? Just think how much grief ICANN has caused with the DNS root. I love to think what the Object Id Root owner will be like. This is a lame duck. Companies will probably love it (in theory), however, it cant function in the real world unless almost everyone adopts it. And god knows that wont happen.
Its actually a good idea. DNS only tells you
the ip of the machine. IHS gives you the exact
location on the internet of some subject/information handle. So the handle is something that is generic and lasts a lifetime.
If you quiry the handle to the IHS server it
returns the exact URL, which can be dynamic
and changes every week.
Oh, and think of the new and exciting ways things can be censored. Filtering information by it's nature sounds like a real possible evolution of this.
Can't we just have IPv6 and take it from there? I'll take my class A and give an IP address to everything I want people to go straight to.
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Some people have a way with words, and some people, um, thingy.