The Worldwide Domain Battle

pledibus writes "The New York Times's Sunday magazine contains an interesting article, Get Out of My Namespace, about the spate of conflicts over website names. The author synthesizes ideas from computer technology, law, history, onomastics, cultural anthropology, and probably a few other areas, and does a pretty nice job of it."

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[Anonymous Coward]

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Having read the entire article,

[way2trivial]

I'm amazed that they missed Nissan.com

this guy fought a hell of a battle with Nissan motors, and I think he should have outright won, and the final decision was- he may not use his domain for commercial purposes.. what kind of stupid ruling was/is that? if it's his, (and it should be) then he should be able to use it for ANYTHING that does not have to do with NISSAN or cars.

(which he never did....)

Good article, but has a couple of myths in it

[eggboard]

Gleick knows his technology, but he's spreading a couple of myths in the middle of a really interesting discussion on namespace and trademarks.

"...a computer that happens to be situated in Reston, Va. -- a computer known as the primary root server or, less affectionately, the Black Box..."

Paul Vixie posted this message on the IP list a few months ago to dispute that. There are many root nameservers, not just Network Solutions'.

"The mapping of a domain name to a particular address can be changed in a matter of moments; the necessary instructions propagate automatically across the network..."

Actually, the root nameservers communicate their mappings to each other for start of authority (SOA), but they don't propagate address changes.

I've had to explain this to many, many fellow reporters. DNS is a retrieve and cache on demand system. Browser says: what's slashdot.org? Resolver climbs the chain of authority and back down, retrieves the address information, provides it to the browser, and caches it locally for a period of time (or not, depending on the OS).

The next query after the cache expires retrieves fresh information. Updates to DNS records don't propagate: they only take affect on the next query after no cached information is found.

Re:Good article, but has a couple of myths in it

[Anonymous Coward]

There are many root servers, but there is only one primary database of domain data. It is in Reston. All root servers get their information from Reston.

Domains are mapped to nameservers in their domain record, not in DNS queries. This data is in the root servers (for the TLD, not for '.'), and changes do, in fact, propagate out to the other root servers when they ask the master for updates.

DNS data itself can be seen to propagate out, when you include the concept of TTL (time-to-live) for the data. You don't always query authoritative nameservers for an address -- it would overload them (and where would you stop? you'd have to go all the way up to the root servers to be sure you were getting good info). You ask your local cacheing nameserver, run by your ISP, who checks its cache to see if it already "knows" the answer, and whether the answer is "older" than its TTL. If it is older, it usually queries the authoritative nameserver for the domain. If it is younger, it just returns the same value as before.

So the data doesn't propagate per se, but the awareness of it does, and not instantly. Sometimes not even quickly.

And yes, your browser caches the response too, but that has nothing to do with DNS or TTL.

Re:Bleh

[pjt33]

Apple Records and Apple Computers have been able to coexist peacefully since the late 70s, as well.

Apart from two lawsuits.

Trademark Troubles for Open Source Projects

[wehe]

Besides domain name conflicts, there are many trademark conflicts, too. I have collected a list of trademark cases related to Open Source projects. Currently there are 18 cases known. But there are more, which are not made known public.