Slashdot Mirror
VeriSign CEO on Commercializing the Internet
mdj writes "CNET has an interview with VeriSign CEO Stratton Scalvos, who says it's time to commercialize the internet's infrastructure and 'pull the root servers away from volunteers who run them out of a university or lab.' He admits that's going to be 'unpopular.'" Because, after all, taking the root servers away from bright, educated comp-sci longbeards who have nothing better to do than to make them run well, and putting them in the hands of MBA bean-counters who don't know what TCP/IP is, is a sure-fire way to improve reliability.
Last month Mr. Scalvos's approval rating went down to 3%. Think it will be lower this month? (vote here - bottom of page).
<sig>Guvf vf abg n frperg zrffntr
--Keeping the flame wars alive, one post at a time
Other corps, on occasion do the Right Thing(tm) out of self-interest (Ms vs Eolas patent suit come to mind), but these guys seem to be pure slime.
Hey!! New slashdot poll:
Who is more evil:
The only reason we have the rights we have is that people just like us died to gain those rights. -- Cheerio Boy
Oh please. Just the possibility that cultures and societies have placed far less cultural/political importance on the amassing and growth of personal and corperate wealth than the society we live in today seems to scare the bejeezus out of people.
No, the world has not always been about growing wealth (both organizational and personal).
Certainly in the past 400-500 years it has been, having started from the shift from feutal times to the following centuries of british and european capitalist economies, but there have been (are still are) pockets of society in which people are simply uninterested in increasing their wealth.
Very few people like to believe this tho, because it tends to suggest that people should feel guilty for wanting to increase their wealth and power. It's a natural thing to want a quality that might be perceived as bad to be a human constant instead of a personal choice, as it absolves the person from being driven to commit acts they might otherwise consider unethical.
Then there are countless examples of families, living today, who simply wish to retain their current standard of living, and are not neccessarily out to increase their wealth. However, such people are viewed as being 'losers who just couldnt gain wealth if they wanted to anyhow' as a means of not having to admit that the goal of growing ones personal wealth is actually a personal decision that may, in fact, have moral consequences.
Not that I'm against it, but it pisses me off when somebody says, "Well, thats the way its always been."
Murders have happened since the dawn of time, but that doesn't mean we let people 'kill or be killed' nor do we assume that the level of violence on the planet has been constant since the dawn of time.
We are in an age of the glorification of greed. Whether thats a good thing or not depends on your political and ethical leanings, I would imagine.
"Old man yells at systemd"
And that will probably happen. We're at the point now where it's starting to get a little painful for people who step outside of the black-and-white vision of the Net that businesses tend to have. People like me, for example, who run our own mail server at home. AOL won't listen to my mail. Why? Because I'm residential. A residential user should be sending mail through a business, or so AOL thinks.
That hurts a bit, but my reaction is to say that AOL doesn't need my mail. But what happens when ISPs start to enforce no-server limitations? What happens when governments start to enforce them?!
The same thing with name service. There are already several alternate roots, and they will only become more popular as Verisign pushes the "get the roots out of the hands of the accedmics" attitude.
Eventually, this will lead to healthy competition between the "subculture nets" and "The Internet" (we all know there's no such thing as The Internet, right? that it's just a generic term that we use to refer to consumers of IPV4 address space).
I'm hoping that wireless networks will eventually replace the default "Internet" that we've known with a decentralized cloud of mini-networks with physical routing information collected dynamically. That will require some major changes in the technology and pervasiveness of its use, but it could easily happen, and would be far more reliable and "ownership proof" than what we have today (lost all the nodes between you and your target? pause a second to re-calculate your routes and continue... self-healing network topologies are not new tech, and many useful designs exist).
Let's take the root out of the hands of these corporate greed-mongers and give it back to the people who created the world's most powerful computing infrastructure in the first place: all of us!
The amazing thing is his argument is based on security; he asserts that commercialized root servers will be better for security. What is the evidence of that? Microsoft? He asserts that recent hacker attacks on the root servers (which took out 9 of them at once) were because they're at universities and (one of them) in the military, but offers no argument as to why commercial ownership would be better. The whole thing has the tone of, it's time to grow up and take the toys away from the little kids because they rightfully belong to us grownups, who will do better with them. His arrogance is beyond belief! And then he's got the nerve to point out that security is more important than philosophical debates about commercialization of the net. Well, duh, but the only thing he's got supporting his position is a philosophical assumption (without evidence) that commercial servers are more secure than publicly owned ones.
Remember, VeriSign is busy telling them its side of the story. We need to tell them ours!