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Government Finishes Internet Study -- 7 years late
djp928 writes "A study commisioned by Congress in 1998 to report on internet traffic has finally been published -- 7 years, two presidents, and one internet boom/bust later.
Some of their findings include "DNS is good" and "We should probably have some more TLDs""
You've got to be kidding me.. How much did this cost us?
This internet thing is just a fad.
"We should probably have some more TLDs"
.museum and .aero are created which are either too long, or aren't restricted in use to just museums and aerospace companies. I feel that online commerce has bent themselves on destroying the usefulness of DNS. Nearly one quarter if not more of ccTLDs can be purchased by the public and used for any purpose. What will happen when countries like Tuvalu (.tv) reach technological savyness and find that their entire TLD has been used up by TV networks, domain brokers and companies that felt they needed to register theirname.com, .net, .org, .cc, .mx, .name, .info, and .tv just in case someone actually thought of typing one of those instead.
.ro extensions for over $500/year. What?!? Why? D
I don't think we need any more TLDs. Especially since silly TLDs like
On top of that, some ccTLDs are being sold for crazy prices. I found one regist
rar that was trying to sell
oes 'ro' mean something in the same way that 'tv' does?
People need to learn to properly use what they have before we can move on. Unfortunately, this has rarely happened in our society and in the end sadly, money rules the day.
- Big
- Complicated
- Busy
- Using Electrons
- Full of pornography
We won't be able to really relax our collective guard until they add unregulatable to this list."I have never won a debate with an ignorant person." -Ali ibn Abi Talib
FTA
"Lawmakers had demanded the $1 million federal study, ultimately called "Signposts in Cyberspace," under a 1998 federal law, the Next Generation Internet Research Act."
I hear that they also just finished their study on electricity.
Findings include: "AC good for long distance" and that "devices that use this new technology may sometime exist throughout a common home"
just asked Al Gore. He could have filled them in a lot quicker.
Without DNS, domain spoofing would've been kinda impossible...
Assembling etherkillers for fun an profit
Ahhh. Good to see another tie-in story...
I'll turn into a supernova and burn up everything. Well I'll turn into a black little hole and you'll turn into string.
.....anything about terror orgs using the 'net?
.....anything about how something called "broadband" would be "all the rage" in a few years?
.....anything about what this new-fangled thing called "SPAM" is?
Seriously, you would think that even the GOVERNMENT would be able to react more quickly than that in a tech market that changes by the month. If they planned this thing back in 1998 to take this long the planning committee and folks who approved the money should be brought up on criminal neglegance charges!
Was this study done by domain resellers?
I have a hard enough time getting people to use .net instead of .com on my email address. Too bad someone already took the .com version of my domain else I'd just have that too so people who didn't "get" it could still send me email.
“Common sense is not so common.” — Voltaire
So they can investigate reasons to goto war in a couple of weeks yet to find out porn and slashdot waste alot of geeks time takes 7 years.
Ever get the feeling the people doing the study got addicted to slashdot?
I like muppets.
maybe if they had a .blog for blogs, .xxx for the porn and and so on it would be much easyer than making .tk and .tv and .ro (what is that?). The .xxx would cut google time in half.
Coincidence? I think not!
Underholdning.info
Sorry everyone, it's my fault. You know how you get some directive from management and you just throw it on your desk and forget about it? Well, eventually it gets buried under everything else I was working and quickly forgotten about. (Didn't we just have a previous post about how 95% of software projects are late?) Anyway, I was doing some spring cleaning last week and found it.
Again, my apologies. It won't happen again.
That's the sound of millions of dollars going down the drain!
Quote from the article: "To be honest, most people forgot it was ever going to happen" [end quote]. I'm still counting on that every time a deadline arrives...
"Never trust a computer you can not throw out of a window..."
So basically, we had one dude getting paid $250k per year to surf pr0n and read /. all day long for 7 years, doing "research", until one day, a week ago, his supervisors remembered what he was there for and told him to report on his findings by today. So he pulled an all-nighter, cooked up "DNS is good" and "we need more TLDs", made liberal use of copy and paste, and published it.
A perfect example of your tax dollars at work. I sure am glad we aren't spending it on education or space exploration or something useful.
*sigh* A TLD is a Top Level Domain. Examples of Top Level Domains are .com .net and .org.
I don't keep a lid on my coffee so when I walk around I look busy -me
This reminds me of a Dilbert cartoon. Dilbert writes a memo, made up of three points:
1 Oxygen is good.
2 Competition is bad.
3 I like jelly.
And then the pointy-haired boss would tell him to take out the part about competition...
Is Dilbert working for the US gov't?
I have never made but one prayer to God, a very short one: "O Lord, make my enemies ridiculous." And God granted it.
What I want to know, does it say that Al Gore invented it?
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
The TLD we all need most of all: .sux
A place where no coropration is ever allowed to register their own trademark!
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
Well, there's spam egg sausage and spam, that's not got much spam in it.
My cynicism is in full force after reading this news item today.
Step 1: Claim there's WMD in Iraq.
Step 2: In the face of the rest of the world disagreeing with you, invade.
Step 3: When no WMD are found, launch an investigation into your intelligence.
Step 4: Investigation demands that spy agencies are unified and should have more power.
It's almost the perfect plan. You get to invade with no real reason (excepting the spin machine's claims of 'freedom and democracy') while simultaneously conglomerating power at home. 9/11 was the excuse used to create the DHS, Iraq gets to be the excuse used to create a new TLA.
ps: were this fark, someone would be all over me immediately pointing out how the rest of the world agreed that Iraq had WMD based on pre-war intel. i just wish more people would pay attention to the stories about *british* intelligence participating in black-intel, fabricating the Iraq-Niger connection.
pps: yes, i missed Step 6: Profit!
The "need for more TLDs" reminds me of an old SNL fake commercial:
...clownpenis.fart.
...clownpenis.fart.
...clownpenis.fart.
...at www.clownpenis.fart.
[Scene of father helping son ride a bicycle for the first time, then, cut to the living room of their house]
Father: Trust, an important part of building a family, and an important part of building his future. That's why I rely on Dillon/Edwards and Company. For nearly a century, investors on Wall Street have trusted Dillon and Edwards with their financial future. And now all of the resources from America's oldest investment firm are available on-line. [Father is at the computer as the website appears, along with web address] Dillon and Edwards on the Internet, at www.clownpenis.fart. A lot of investment companies rushed onto the Internet, but Dillon and Edwards took their time. Sure, when they were ready, there was one web address left, but it's one you can count on.
Announcer #1: For mutual funds, count on...
Announcer #2:
Announcer #1: Online brokerage...
Announcer #2:
Announcer #1: Retirement and tuition planning...
Announcer #2:
[Caption: Dillon/Edwards Investments-www.clownpenis.fart]
Announcer #1: Dillon and Edwards Investments...
Announcer #2:
It also recommended those traffic-directing computers continue to be operated by volunteers, organizations and corporations around the world rather than governments.
This seems to be an important conclusion of the study, which the summary failed to mention...
TCP/IP was designed to be reduant incase of a nuclear war. It was never meant to be secure or high performance.
I think a new secure (non drm) and multimedia and fiber optic friendly replacement is needed. Also application level protocals could use some new standards as well.
For example Email is a problem that both phishers and spammers are taking advantage of. I heard about Dmail as a replacement for SMTP and Pop3.
I am thinking perhaps several levels of security servers similiar to dns servers producing encryption keys and authenticating phisher scams (maybe a legit business could get a unique key) and email addresses would be nice. Its also too easy to spoof an IP address. Maybe security in a new DNS model that hands out keys would be nice too.
However Internet2 which is being experimented with has its own set of problems. Internet2 mainly deals with IPV6. IPv6 supposed to be a little bit better but spammers and phishers could change their IP addresses by the hour to prevent being caught and being filtered out. We need a better replacement that is more secure and allows better application level embedding for external protocals.
If I were a politician I would do this just and have Darpa and a few companies and academics invest in a newer architecture.
More router friendly support would be nice too to deal with bandwith allocation for different kinds of services like VOIP and UDP media streaming.
http://saveie6.com/
If it wasn't for porn, they'd have an answer in 1 year.
A conclusion one might draw from the article is that one can only study things that don't change:)...Seriously, though.
The main problem that this incident shows to me is how difficult it is to kill a government program of any kind once it has been started. Since the study was driven by an act of Congress, it would have taken another bill passed through the entire legislative process to kill the study. Since the people contracted to do the study and the congressmen of whatever state the study was done in had every incentive to keep the thing going, some other group would have had to notice and start a push to get rid of this.
Since it was a small budget item buried in the massive federal budget, nobody noticed it. If it had been noticed and some representative had brought the issue up in the House, the reps from the state involved would have thrown a fit. So it sticks around.
It's important to know that once something is authorized by Congress, it is budgeted for every year unless it is specifically killed in a budget bill.
In Bush's last budget request, the administration included a list of small programs like this one that they wanted to kill. Of course, every single item on the list had reps saying how critical it was to keep the funding.
Maybe we should be spending a little more time looking at what the government is actually doing rather than talking about tinfoil hats and berating George Lucas.
Cheers...
"Lack of technical competence coupled with the arrogance of power, as usual, leads to no good end."
Maybe it would make sense to start promoting SLD's (Second Level Domains) So, boeing could get boeing.aero.com Embraer (a brazilian company who manufactures planes) may get embraer.aero.com as well as embraer.com.br. A person who hacks may get 3v1l7w1n.hacker.net And TV broadcasters can get HBO.tv.com and get a refund for the 50 m paid to Tuvalu. And everyone can be happy appending a ".com" to everything.
No, you are. This is one of the worse Snopes articles, as it tries to gloss over these important facts:
Gore did claim to be the one to bring the Internet into being while in Congress. He used the word "Create". "Invent" means the same thing in this context.
Gore's claim was incorrect: the Internet had already existed, and was called the Internet for a few years before he was in Congress.
Don't blame Durga. I voted for Centauri.
Then NBC would have to sue the guys that squat on clownpenis.fart once the domain is available. And yes, I did say "squat on clownpenis." Better post this anonymousl...whoops.
[UID-HeinzIntel]
This is a great point, and I'd hate to see .xxx legally required, but that doesn't make it useless. It simply becomes an easy flag that says "I would prefer that whoever you consider to be minors not have access to this material." The vast majority of porn sites aren't interested in underage users anyway, I bet -- they don't have credit cards and they cause trouble if the parents find out. Are there any problems with xxx as a voluntary tool?
.res[tricted]? .adult? .old? I kind of like that one ...
I guess the only one that comes to mind for me is that not every "adult only" site would want to be associated with hard core pornography, which is what xxx more typically means. What are the alternatives, given that long TLDs suck?
After much careful thought and consideration, the government has decided to instate a new domain system represented by numbers instead of characters. The reason for this is that characters are much more difficult to organize into a hierarchy. The new DNS system implements a series of four 3-digit numbers seperated by '.'s. One official was quoted as saying, "We're trying to make the system more like the telephone numbering scheme, which has been around for decades, and which everyone is quite familiar with." Each DNS capable machine will include a "contacts" list similar to a cell phone that links the associated DNS number with a name specified by the user.
Kennedy did launch the Apollo program, actually. But the reason yout analogy is BAD is because the Internet existed before Gore claimed he created it. We did not put a man on the moon before Kennedy started Apollo. A matter of order of events that you are forgetting.
"And it turns out that these are all the same things that Gore did for the internet. Parts existed prior to Gore"
It existed, and it was called the Internet. Others created it before he was involved. Yes, we know he helped improve it greatly....after it was created by others.
"he's the one who put together the political support and money to take it to the next level and bring it public."
So? We all know that. However, this information of him helping it grow after the fact of its creation does not make his claim of "took the initiative in creating the Internet" any more true. There is an actual historic timeline here, and you seem to be ignoring that some events took place before others.
"Without him it might have remained a research project for another 5-10 years. Until someone else "invented" it, maybe someone more politically favorable to you."
Look at the history of the Internet and get back with us. It was "invented" before Gore, so "without him" it STILL would have been invented. The actual order of events, again. If event A occurs before event B, event A still occurs even if event B never did.
"Until someone else "invented" it, maybe someone more politically favorable to you."
So it is a matter of bias to you? It isn't to me. I'm just seeing whether his statement was true or not.
Don't blame Durga. I voted for Centauri.
I wanted eyry.com, but it had been snatched up as a four letter dictionary word by speculators. The same for eyry.net, so I ended up with eyry.org.
.
:)
The same thing, but worse, happened with dochawk. Within days of my my first query for dochawk.com, it was parked. So I checked for dochawk.net, and it went. I took dochawk.org immedeiately on checking.
Given the timing, I can't believe that anything happened other than someone monitoring the lookups and snatching domains . .
But at least we're posting this on slashdot.com
hawk
.movie .radio .stock
.movie TLD, studios could register the title of the movie under that TLD. Sure, there'd be a few conflicts, but it wouldn't be that bad.
.radio TLD, but registering their call letters seems like a pretty good idea to me (many already have with .com anyway, but there's really not much consistency here).
.stock is the best choice here, but it'd be nice to be able to enter a company's ticker symbol and get their web site. For example, mot.com and hpq.com are owned by those companies, but again this isn't standardized. I'd expect this TLD to be used mostly for redirects to a more attractive domain name (notice how www.mot.com redirects to www.motorola.com).
Every movie has a web site, but there's no way you could possibly guess the URL to most of them. If there were a restricted
Every radio and television station is assigned call letters by the FCC (well, the station chooses, but the FCC actually assigns it). Stations usually also choose a name that they use for marketing, usually related to their call letters somehow. There would be quite a bit of overlap if radio stations could register their chosen marketing name under the
I'm not sure if
Again, these TLDs would be useless if they weren't carefully restricted, but if usage became common enough that you could expect the domains to be registered, it would probably be pretty useful.
$x='S24;r)>63/* h@<5+oZ)32"5cz';$me='phroggy'x$];
$x=~y+ -xz+\0-Tx+;print$_^chop$me for split'',$x;