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Verisign Shuts Down Domain Policy List
topeka writes: "From ICANN.Blog:
'Without warning or explanation, and without even providing list members an opportunity to reorganize, Verisign today closed the long-running 'DOMAIN-POLICY' list.'" tdye adds: "Even the archives are apparently gone,
before they could be rescued.
Some interesting comments on the shutdown here(1) and here(2)."
Verisign is a perfectly legit business. Nobody has to use them. They can do whatever they want (ever hear of freedom?).
ICANN shut down a mailing list housed on one of their private servers? Clearly this is a violation of freedom of speech!
57. Verisign employees targeted companies, including one Defendant Wolford called "a copy-cat ratbag registrar" in referring to a major competitor
Oh no! They called a competior names! The animals!
A trick is required? I thought that just happened naturally..
Use the Open DNS Root servers that people have been setting up ever since they have become disgusted in the way that they have seen things progressing. check out this place for more info.
45. Further, when the press release was distributed internally at Network of the signing by President Murbarak and the Chair of Network, Defendant Wolford said he was tempted to change the headline to: "Network, Telecom Egypt develop Pyramid Scheme." Plaintiff believed these comments, even in jest, was improper and evidence of racial intolerance as none of these remarks were made when the business opportunities involved a Fortune 1000 non protected class prospect.
How is that racist? Give me a break. If i was doing business with Japan and mentioned Mt. Fuji, would that make me a racist? How about if the deal was with the state of Minnesota and i made a joke about how many lakes they have?
Fucking PC insensitive whiny sore-loser.
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List owner: rforno@infowarrior.org
25 May 2001
Copy the archives at Google's cache. Do it before Verisign asks Google to remove them from its cache.
Questions:
Assuming a reliable, reasonably trustworthy competitor picks up running the list and is allowed to provide access to the cached archives, might this be a good thing? It adds value to the new company and diminishes the value of Verisign?
Maybe this would be more important if more people knew what the list was and how it might help them, could someone provide a good description of what the list is and how it has helped them?
http://HavenWorks.com/find
"Caffeine and indexes to books are God's little way of saying he cares."
- http://HavenWorks.com/hermit
A lot of confusion would be avioded by adding the word 'mailing' in front of the word 'list'. After about 5 minutes of reading the comments, it became clear that the 'domain policy list' is not some high-order DNS server configuration file or even a roster of a Verisign board of directors or some such.
When Declan sent this news to the politech list he cced a verisign contact asking if the list was to be released.
Text URL to the politech post: http://www.politechbot.com/p-02060.html
Returned Peace Corps IT Volunteer
This might work well, but it needs to start small. Somebody who decided to implement it should pick a particular area that was small enough (and large enough) to work as a useful test. Say, computer languages. You won't get a wholesale shift, because that's too much work. You might a small group of sites to list this way as an alternate. You'd probably need to start with "a small circle of friends", to get the system up and running so that you'd have something to show folk. That's probably the only way to answer the "It'll never fly!" crowd. Of course, you don't need to answer them. There's nothing that says that this is an all or nothing choice. It's probably quite easy to run both systems on any particular web site. And it would be an interesting way to set up intra-nets. Then gateways could be added to link them... Well, you get the idea.
Caution: Please try to design this so that there is no central node. Try to assign the numbers dynamically, by contention. Rather like dhcp, but with a much longer retention period. If you do design this with a central position, then we wouldn't gain much by doing the switch. ICANN used to be "pretty good" guys. Then their power increased, the board changed, and now they're "not so hot" and on the way toward "cursed monopolist!". So design the system without a place for any such entity.
Caution: Now approaching the (technological) singularity.
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
Yes, I do know that dhcp depends on a centralized control. That would need to be designed around. Possibly a net of high level nodes. Probably can't avoid that totally, but try to maximize the ease of adding and removing them automatically. Sort of, a node pops up and ask's "what's been happening since >?", gets updates, and is then a participant. Anybody should be able to volunteer, and then assign nodes. Which means that the nodes would need to be approved by a consensus of the members of the net. etc.
Caution: Now approaching the (technological) singularity.
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
I think you are the one that is mistaken this is from GOOGLE
Google takes a snapshot of each page examined as it crawls the web and caches these as a back-up in case the original page is unavailable. If you click on the "Cached" link, you will see the web page as it looked when we indexed it. The cached content is the content Google uses to judge whether this page is a relevant match for your query.
http://Lenny.com
She would not have argued that they had some form of obligation.
Be free and multiply.
Dude, stop guessing and LOOK at the URLs in the cached page. They point directly to the original.
--
Patrick Doyle
I mod down every jackass who puts his moderation policy in his sig. Oh, wait a sec....
Of course I do. I'm not sure what your point is; are you saying I'm wrong? You can look at the URLs in the cached pages for yourself. They point to the original documents.
--
Patrick Doyle
I mod down every jackass who puts his moderation policy in his sig. Oh, wait a sec....
You can't just click on the links in a Google cache. They link to the original documents.
--
Patrick Doyle
I mod down every jackass who puts his moderation policy in his sig. Oh, wait a sec....
New TLDs don't solve anything unless there is a policy to govern their usage, so that companies (or any entity) only gets to register under one or two of them.
--
Patrick Doyle
I mod down every jackass who puts his moderation policy in his sig. Oh, wait a sec....
unfortunately, there isn't a consensus (yet). At least three other lists have volunteered to take the traffic, two new lists have been set up (one at yahoo, one at ador-doc.org) and one other person has said they are setting one up after thinking (from seeing the traffic) that D-P didn't have long to live.
--
-=DaveHowe=-
Good - saves you being wrong twice
You want to buy a spark plug on the net. Do you go to sparkplug.co.uk (or .com etc)? Well you can but chances are slim that it will be any use to you. The domain names are very limited in usefulness as ways of finding things in themselves, particularly when they are applied globally. Saying that search engines don't work is ignoring the fact that they work better than relying on the domain name to find what you want.
.com model is too flat for use as a search engine; assume sparkplugs are a major item for sale on the net - the one company with sparkplugs.com will probably clean up - because of the assumption, but a halfway smart customer will either go to www.preferredmanufacturer.com or use a search engine.
This is what is commonly called a straw man.
Nobody has ever argued that DNS is a search engine - the fact that typing in www.companyname.com will usually find you at the company site is a convenience most companies will fight for - but the
DNS has a number of uses; it is easier to remember than an IP address; it can be static (when IP addresses on the internet can change overnight, even without the upcoming move to V6) and it can be easily printed on literature, typed into web browsers, and linked to with HTML.
It is not a search engine (that is what search engines are for, and your new scheme would still require them), it is not decentralised - but then, your scheme would not be either, and it is currently being abused (which is the main problem, but too much is invested in the current setup for it to easily change)
company names are *NOT* exclusive - you can have two companies with the same name selling different products, and two companies with the same name selling in the same product area, but in different countries. if you are outside the us, then you fight over company.co.cc-tld with the other company selling with the same name, *and* over company.com. is this right? no, but the solution isn't to scrap the whole thing and replace it with what amount to ip addresses.
The best solution I have heard is to scrap .com and .org entirely - force companies to register under a .businessarea.co.cc-tld fourth level domain, get the users used to looking there for their companies (and it would take a surprisingly short time before users got used to typing amazon.bookstore.co.us for the american amazon)
but of course this will never happen. There are two major factors - first, that there is a customer perception that only the .com company is the one true company, and the fact that american companies are proud that they do *not* use a .us tld, as every other country is "forced" to. that usually comes bundled with a distaste that non-us companies are allowed into the "american" .com domain.
Big deal. There are too many alt--roots and if any of them get popular it's ten minutes work for VS to kill them by adding their popular TLDs to the "real" DNS. Instant death. The fact that they've been around for years and have had zero impact indicates how little interest there is in buying a domain name that will be shat on by VS as soon as it looks valuable. .biz - at least legally; current .biz owners are considering a class-action suit against VS if they resell domains that they "own") where adding a new tld that dupicates a alt-root one will cause their domains to fail on alt-root referring ISPs unless the alt-roots chose to drop theirs co-operatively. Not a snowballs in hell in practice.
So presumably you plan to go tell the VC guys who invested in new.com that their money has been wasted?
The *only* argument against the alt-roots so far has been the inertia one - "there is nothing wrong with the current system"
well, now there most obviously is - so if everyone is so pissed at VS for their actions, and switch to the alter-roots (which of course fall though to the VS roots if they don't find a match in their alternate tlds) VS will find themselves in exactly the opposite position from the one they describe (which interestingly, they apparently may be with
plus you are of course carefully skating around the fact your own scheme is just a numerical alt-root - so if you really believed this argument, you would not be bothering to make it.
--
-=DaveHowe=-
Search engines don't work!
was that a little fast for you? sorry, I will say it again.
Search engines don't work!
Google think they are doing very well, having nearly 10% of the possible sites indexed, and sorted by number of other sites linking to them. that is 1 site in 10. How about the other 90%? are you going to make 100% coverage by search engines mandatory, or at least offer to fund this? and once they reach 100%, we will be having the same argument again about how search engines are "bad" because they rank one site above another.
I am not saying I approve of Verisign's latest example of how they will shit on the entire internet to squeeze a few extra pennies out of us - or the domain arguments, or the new TLDs. however, the main thing to remember is that they are the *default* root server. if enough of the ISPs start to use alternate roots (and new.net has signed up some already, not to mention that ORSC and Pacific Root have been around for years) then maybe they will realise a mandate from the US government that the US government doesn't even realise it has given, might not guarantee they are even in business two or three years from now... but at least they can fall back on selling certificates that say "microsoft" ;)
--
-=DaveHowe=-
So...
live == evil
veil == evil
vile == evil
leiv == evil
kickin' science like no one else can,
my dick is twice as long as my attention span.
Withdrawal before climax is very ineffective and those who try this are usually called "parents."
Why can't the list members recreate the archives. Assuming there are a sizeable number of people on the list, I would think that they should be able to recover a pretty good chunk of the mail if they all work together. And then, who says they can't create a list on their own?
kickin' science like no one else can,
my dick is twice as long as my attention span.
Withdrawal before climax is very ineffective and those who try this are usually called "parents."
Out of curiosity, where does this connection to ICANN come in? Neither posting mentioned ICANN in the context of having the lists removed.
Is it a coincidence that just a week ago they were given a sweet deal to manage the coveted .com domain for many more years? Did they wait to get this deal before pulling this stunt? Shows their true colors!
Works fine in theory. In practice? Without looking it up, do you know what involvement your congressmen had in this? Would it change your vote? Would it change anybody else's vote? There is no law that says congressmen shall follow the will of the people.
Elections are like a choice between a) lifetime explosive diarrhea but unlimited sexual prowess and b) fame, fortune, and you die at age 25. Which do you choose? Congressman A understands the 'net but is a member of the Ku Klux Klan. Congressman B is a member of the ACLU and on the payroll of Microsoft.
I'll put the gluestick down now.
D
Mad Scientists with too much time on thier hands
The first, last, and only tech news site on the net
...until you people quit bitching about our monopoly!
Ha! Looks like Geekizoid actually scooped Slashdot on this one.
Friends don't let friends use multiple inheritance.
As to the AOL effect, my experience is that most such users actually DON'T use the DNS system at all! They enter a site name in the search field and click on the result. Looking through our access logs at work reveals many people who "found" us by entering our URL into a search engine. These people would not even notice the change.
TWW
"Encyclopedia" is to "Wikipedia" what "Library" is to "Some people at a bus stop"
Mostly they had nothing positive to say, such as alternatives. Anyone who is arguing that the current system should be left alone is being stupid in my book.
Search engines don't work!
DNS doesn't work! I''ll not bother saying it again.
You want to buy a spark plug on the net. Do you go to sparkplug.co.uk (or .com etc)? Well you can but chances are slim that it will be any use to you. The domain names are very limited in usefulness as ways of finding things in themselves, particularly when they are applied globally. Saying that search engines don't work is ignoring the fact that they work better than relying on the domain name to find what you want.
If enough of the ISPs start to use alternate roots (and new.net has signed up some already, not to mention that ORSC and Pacific Root have been around for years)
Big deal. There are too many alt--roots and if any of them get popular it's ten minutes work for VS to kill them by adding their popular TLDs to the "real" DNS. Instant death. The fact that they've been around for years and have had zero impact indicates how little interest there is in buying a domain name that will be shat on by VS as soon as it looks valuable.
The attraction of numbers is that there isn't any big money in it for VS to be tempted and if we have a UNITED alt-root system there is a better chance of getting enough momentum up to start getting it installed as part of default settings. Who should RedHat or SUSE include in their DNS systems at the moment beyond the standard roots? Why would they pick any of them over the others?
Current attempts at alt-roots are doomed to failure because they are simply repeating the mistakes that are destroying the original root system.
TWW
"Encyclopedia" is to "Wikipedia" what "Library" is to "Some people at a bus stop"
It is this which dooms it to a slow death at the hands of the world's trademark lawyers. I know it's hard to move away from something so attractive but it is unsustainable in the long run.
(minor quibble: 1.2.3.4 is a valid IP address, so it can't also be a domain name without confusion.)
Yes, the system would have to use a different separator character to work properly in association with IPs. On the other hand, this would undermine the possibility of using current versions of Bind with it. Hmmm
To solve the second problem, we have to have some sort of listing service
Yes, that's what I was driving at when I was talking about the telephone directory. Given a numerical system then this is the only way forward.
TWW
"Encyclopedia" is to "Wikipedia" what "Library" is to "Some people at a bus stop"
On the other hand, the problem with the corruption that now runs through the whole ICANN system is not such a big deal with numbers. Look at the assignment of IP addresses: no trademark issues means no lawyers and no big profits so it works.
The real problem with the current system is not the system - it's the value of the names themselves. Numbers have a lot less intrinsic value. That's why I'm not too worried about centralised control. It would be better if it was decentralised but I don't think it has to be.
TWW
"Encyclopedia" is to "Wikipedia" what "Library" is to "Some people at a bus stop"
I've suggested this before and got loads of stupid replies as to why it wuldn't work (not many about what would, though) but I'm going to do it again:
Get rid of alphabetical domain names.
Every problem we have with the bastards at NS/VS comes from the fact that names are valuable. Numbers aren't (in the vast number of cases).
I have been reliably informed that the current version of Bind will accept numerical domain names (e.g., 1.293.1)
Someone (VA, Linus, FSF? Anyone!) set up a single new root server and start selling off the "numerical roots" starting at 1 , 2, 3 etc. If you buy a numerical root you can sell or use the subdomains 1.1, 2.1,.3.1 etc... for whatever charge you want.
How would you find sites? Use a search engine! Or start a new type of search engine bsaed on normal telephone books. In fact, if you can use a telephone system without keying in letters, why should a web based on the same idea be so hard to use?
No letters means no trademarks, no trademarks means no stupid squatting or bullying by large companies.
No letters means local companies are not at a disadvantage (Mr McDonald's electricity shop appears on the search engine beside Ronald's dead cow emporium and you simply click on the one you actually wanted).
With the roots all being numerical there is no danger of VeriShit ever duplicating the system (no money in it for a start) and taking it over, which is the reason alternative roots will NEVER work. If I set up .bit and VS start one up too, who's going to win?
We have to do this or the web will be taken from us.
If someone has a rational reason why this would be worse than letting things carry on as they are, I'd be surprised and interested in their argument.
Names were good when the net was small but they are strangling it now.
This would initally only work in the Bind-world but it would work with very little effort from the users (yet another killer for many alt-root systems) and we could build up some momentium until one day M$ has to add the new root to their software.
ICANN's only purpose is to keep everyone focused on "fixing" the current system by adding more pointless root domains and finding ways to abuse the ccTLDs. Forget that: the current system is NOT fixable.
TWW
"Encyclopedia" is to "Wikipedia" what "Library" is to "Some people at a bus stop"
Also, just to dispel any doubts, they are removing any mistaken appearance of democracy by pulling the plug on dissenting opinions.
Check out the Vinny the Vampire comic strip
"It is a greater offense to steal men's labor, than their clothes"
Verisign can't have a policy list without implicitly admitting that some kind of group approval is needed to make decisions. Hence, the list was whacked by the now self-proclaimed gods.
TLDs are unlimited. There is no resource shortage that will hold supply low during high demand that will respond w/ high price for verisign or (ICANN's $whore$ of choice at-the-time).
WTF is going on? Cluefull people know this - but who the fuck is making these decisions? Where the hell is the REALITY to this mess?
The US Dept. of Commerce needs to step aside - and give responsibility to a democratically elected, publicly funded (international participation), NGO affiliated with the United Nations (or some similarly respected body).
The DNS is *NOT* a place for profit - it just doesn't make sense - it costs virtually nothing to run, nothing to expand, nothing nothing nothing (except hardware and bandwidth - but im sure we can manage to support the DNS if all vested interests participate (like the users, ISPs, governments, domain 'owners' etc).
I am literally beside myself that Verisign can act this way with an 'essential public service' like DNS.
Oh, but I gladly would do that, except that to get one of those you have to shell out big bucks and prove you are actually an organization or a commercial entity. Alas, I am an individual and cannot prove such things. .com, .net and .org I only needed to fill in a form, shell out 12 EUR per domain and that was it. Of course I only have domain names out of vanity, but that doens't matter, does it?
I think www.jawtheshark.lu looks much cooler than the ones I've got. But for my
Ahhh...the great dumpster continuum. Many a free computer will be found there. -- sowth (748135)
..on what exactly this is?
This is all new to me.
Is there any consensus on who will serve as the refuge for the displaced list subscribers?
I assume that the list subscribers wish to continue the discussions which that list served to foster, regardless of ICANN or NSI corporate maneuvering.
I would offer to host the list myself except I expect that dozens of other have already made such an offer and I wouldn't want to contribute to the mess that usually results when trying to migrate a service.
--CTH
--
--Got Lists? | Top 95 Star Wars Line
I've never heard of this list before, but I am going to take an educated guess.
ICANN, the "new" Internet government, is like the Provisional Government in Russia after the revolution, but wields the power of fear, something said government did not have. Verisign is like the moderate socialists, who were pretty normal but got pushed around by the radicals, who belong to the Petrograd Soviet (ICANN).
ICANN is flexing its muscles, to make people fear it. I was an avid opponent of ICANN, but it looks like not much can be done now.
It would have been nice to have the archives online, but I guess Verisign could be pursuaded to republish them. If not, I'm pretty sure that some of the hard core (no pun intended) participants have collected all the postings.
This is not the end of the domain name policy discussions.
Pawlo.com
I looked a tthe links and found this is this the archives??? http://lists.netsol.com/archives/urn-ietf.html http://lists.netsol.com/archives/cnrp-ietf.html
Then I could sit and laugh when whiney geeks get upset when I play monopoly games. Geek #1: blah blah blah, bad monopoly. Me: Whatever kid, I'm too busy getting drunk with call girls, and lighting my cigars with 50s. Heh, the US government would arrest you if it caught you growing peanuts in your backyard.
God spoke to me
This was all a trick to get slashdotters to post really lame comments.
For slashdotters and more highly skilled users, this would indeed be an ideal solution. However, you have to remember that most Internet users are at a more-or-less permanent novice skill level. They do not understand the Internet, they do not want to understand the Internet, and they will not understand the Internet.
This renders those users vulnerable to something I call the "AOL Effect" - the preference above all other factors for user-friendliness. Even a small increase in user-friendliness (such as an easy-to-remember domain name) makes a novice user percieve a site as more professional and efficient.
In other words, the novice user will not be happy with entering hard-to-understand numbers (or even bookmarking them) when they could use sites with "friendly" domain names.
Also remember, all those big companies like AOL, Microsoft, etc, are aware of how people percieve an easy-to-remember domain name, and spend a lot of time in court defending not just their domains, but similar domain names. A domain name fot these companies is a huge investment in not just advertising-related cash, but court-time as well. They will not give up their domain names without a fight.
I'm the stranger...posting to
Just to play devil's advocate, why not kill the domain policy list? It was useful for Verisign to prove to the government they could be trusted as the keepers of the .com registry, but now they have it. Why would they do anything out of the goodness of their hearts? The list took up resource - not many, admittedly, but some. Cut enough small expenses and you save a lot of cash. Verisign is a business, not a saint.
I say this just to present a possible viewpoint, not because I believe it. I think that Versign could have at least helped with backing up the arhives to other servers.
I'm the stranger...posting to