Your tracker is still 440'ing, so I have put up an alternative tracker. As I write this, I only have about 9% of the avi downloaded, so if someone else can seed the complete cormack-spam-xvid.avi file, I would greatly appreciate it.
By the looks of things, only 116 actual mails were sent.
Not quite. It appears that *at least* 116 people were sent the email, quite possibly more since the journalist's name wasn't one of those 116 people.
The most widely accepted definition of spam is "Unsolicited Bulk Email". I'm not sure that this particular email is really unsolicited since it appears to have been sent to a reporter in an area closely related to the subject matter of the PR. Bulk, however, has to be defined as anything over 1. If you put any hard cut off, of, say 100 or 1000 emails, then spammers will simply send 99 or 999 emails.
The *penalties* that ISPs (and others) should place on sending of unsolicited bulk email should take into account the actual volume. This is just like stealing a penny is wrong and still stealing, but you will get into a lot less trouble than if you steal a thousands of dollars.
Re-read the article. Rambam allegedly sued while the attack was going on: this is different from creating the attack.
I agree that the parent misstated the situation and that it is highly unlikely that Steve Rambam had anything to do with the DDoS attack on Joe Jarad.
Moreover, there is a fascinating letter at http://www.dotcomeon.com/injoewetrust.html that explains that the "DDOS" was not planned, it was the direct result of not having enough bandwidth to deal with all the DNS queries caused by the SoBig virus. The letter also explains that Mr. Joe Jared, the administrator of osirusoft.com, has been playing nasty games against the domains of quite innocent people, including poisoning the DNS for big chunks of the Internet for anyone who uses his services in a fit of pique after the DDOS.
That site, however, is run by a well known kook. Just read the link and the other pages on that site and make up your own mind. Using phrases like "People's Republic of Kalifornia", "unbalanced anarchist", "cyberextortion clearinghouse business", are enough a clue for me, but attacks on the same website against people like Paul Vixie are other good indicators that the guy is a kook.
Much of what is claimed on that site is highly selective and highly biased at best, and complete BS most of the rest of the time.
So I'm inclined to think that Mr. Rambam had nothing to do with this and is simply trying to slap down an incompetent blacklist author.
Uh, yeah, but if that was the case, Steve Rambam would have dropped the suit after Joe Jarad stopped running a DNSBL, but he didn't.
According to this article, he has been involved in a lawsuit against a spam blocker (his company was mistakenly placed on a spam blocklist), he has tracked Nazi war criminals, and he discovered that Elvis has Jewish ancestors.
Steve Rambam lost his law suit against the anti-spam DNSBL run by Joe Jarad. In the process Steve lost any respect I might have had for him for other things.
I find it informing that our politicians are willing to sanction trade with Sweden because *our* (i.e. Not Their) laws say they are infringing on our IP. But we haven't heard anything of the sort in relation to China and Nigeria over spam (a much bigger problem).
Uh, duh. China has a huge market for US businesses and nukes. Nigeria has oil. What assests does Sweden have? (Besides ones that would make neo cons uncomfortable.)
Re:monopolies to commodities: won't get fooled aga
on
Net Neutrality or Not?
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
Wrong - people DO want huge downloads from a central company,
Ah, I didn't polish my post enough and make my point clear enough. Geoff Huston did a much better job in his presentation that I mentioned.
The key word in the "a central company" is "a". Lots of different companies letting you download stuff pushes the telecommunication companies into the commodity market. The telecommunication companies hoped to be competing against other telecommunication companies for delivering their products from their TV and movie studios, the "great convergence" that caused Timewarner/CNN/AOL to merge and Disney to invest in the Go network, etc., not with companies like "youtube", "google" or "myspace" which no one ever heard of a decade ago.
The point in the first paragraph where I mentioned features "call waiting" and "answering machines" is that these companies were used to being the only ones that could create new features. Downloadable music would only happen when they had created the appropriate product that could be profitable, not when some company like "napster", "iTunes", or "allofmp3" figured out how to do it.
If you wanted the content controlled by your phone company, you would have to buy ISDN/ADSL. If you wanted the content controlled by your cable company, you would have to buy from them. If you wanted both of these differentiated products, well, you would have to buy both. And no one really wants any content other than what was on TV, movies or the major record labels, right?
By breaking net neutrality, these telecommunication companies hope to at least recover some of the control over packets that they send to you, even if they lost the ability to originate the packets.
monopolies to commodities: won't get fooled again
on
Net Neutrality or Not?
·
· Score: 4, Informative
Geoff Huston made a great presentation to the NANOG conference last fall called Won't Get.Fooled Again?.
In it, Geoff points out that for a very long time, telecommunication companies were monopolies or in some cases oligopolies (a few companies controling the market). They owned everything from the handset on one end to the handset on the other end and any feature like "call waiting" or "answering machines" had to be bought from them.
Depending on what part of the world you lived in, from the 70s to the 90s, these companies were forced to change from market monopolies to competative markets of differentiated goods. This is almost always a very rough transition to make and many companies, in any industry, often go bankrupt before they can make the structural, political, technical and cultural changes need to survive in such markets. The telecommunication industry is no different.
While the telecommunication companies are still trying to deal with competing in a differentiated market, e.g. the 80's slogan from AT&T "they are making second class phones!", to the huge number of options on cell phones, Geoff points out that they are really facing an even harder transition. They are having to go from a competative market of differentiated goods to a market of commodities. Even companies that are used to competative markets have a hard time successfully transitioning to commoditiy markets, again, they require even more changes to the organization. People just want to push packets.
Telecommunication companies thought they could create differentiated products like "video on demand" where everyone would get their TV, movies and music from the telecommunication companies. Instead, P2P systems have taken care of those needs, with the result of people not wanting huge downloads from a central company, but rather they will download from other "end users". But, even TV shows and Movies are just the tip of the iceberg. People are generating their own content and are bypassing the both the traditional media companies and the telecommuncation companies. They are creating pictures of their kids, and porn, They are creating blogs and small business websites. New features of the net are not added by the big companies under careful regulation, but spring forth from millions of places. The amount of data that is being passed around that has nothing to do with the big companies is mind boggling, and it is just going to get bigger.
People don't want content from the ISPs, they want packets pushed around, and that means a commodity market for packet delivery. Telecommunication companies that can adapt to a commodity market will survive. Ones that can't will talk about how they need to charge people for their "enhanced content".
I've preriodically work on the SpamOrHam stuff, and I *really* don't like the way you have captchas set up.
I don't mind entering a captcha every once and a while, like when you create an account, but requiring a new captcha every 11 spams is really annoying. Normally, I have to enter a captcha once every few weeks and even a 50% error rate wouldn't be that annoying, but requiring lots of captchas, even simple/easy ones, is a bad design.
I have also learned that if you enter the captcha at the top of your web page, but vote for the ham or spam with the buttons on the bottom of the page, your captcha is considered "wrong". This certinaly can account for part of that 20% error rate.
So, part of the problem with captchas is with they way some people use them.
Why not modify Blue Security's Firefox reporting tool?
Funny, yesterday on the #okopipi IRC channel, I suggested that okopipi should automate submissions to spamcop, nanas, dcc and razor, in addition to the FTC and SEC submissions that bluefrog did. Basically, it would give the spammers several more good reasons to pay attention to okopipi's do-not-spam list.
You can still use the free spamcop service to report spam to.
Spamcop has been around much longer than bluesecurity, it has already weathered many more DoS attacks than bluesecurity, spamcop has been sued a couple of times by spammers (and the spammers lost), spamcop has had its domain name hijacked, and yet it has survived. Granted, part of the reason they survived is because the are now owned by the anti-spam vendor, Ironport who also provides the free senderbase service.
I'm sorry to see bluesecurity go, but there are still other options for people who want to fight spam.
The problem with the "patent trolls" idea is that it's all but indistinguishable from the "small inventor with few resources" one in many cases.
from the article:
But doesn't the ruling also hurt bona fide inventors, not to mention the many universities that fund their research and own the patents? To be sure, it plainly erodes the power that has been typically bestowed by a patent. Patent law unambiguously grants owners of intellectual property the same rights as regular property holders, including the right to exclude others from using their property. But the law also clearly states that injunctions "may"--not "shall"--be issued "in accordance with the principles of equity."
If you are a small inventor that is actively working on developing your invention, the courts *MAY* grant an injunction, while they *MAY NOT* grant an injunction to a patent troll. They have left it up to the courts to destinguish the two cases.
As another reply pointed out, these two cases are often very easy to distinguish.
Last year, the pool was falling behind on servers. More clients were joining than servers, so the load on each server was growing. Since then, Ask Bjørn Hansen has created a bunch of automated scripts to handle all of the servers and the server growth has taken off. We still need more servers, and 500 is a nice round number to give as an excuse to say "Please join the NTP pool!".
What keeps someone from joining the pool and giving out the wrong time?
All machines in the NTP pool are monitored for quality and if they are bad enough, they won't be put into the pool.
Also, it is recommended that you have at least 3, maybe up to 5, NTP servers so that you can detect a bad NTP server. (If you have one time server, you won't know that anything is wrong. If you have two, you will know something is wrong, but you won't know which NTP server is bad. If you have three or more, you can pick the best one.)
Every time a machine in their network would ask our servers for the time, our servers responded with 10 packets spaced at 1 second intervals
Uh, your servers are supposed to only reply with *ONE* packet.
That said, I have also had a few people complain to me about my machine attacking them because they have configured their machine to use the NTP pool. Over the last 2 years, it has totalled around 3, so you must have had really bad luck.
Overall, I have been very happy with my involvement with the NTP pool. It has been working very well and I like being to help others out. I have also created a bunch of NTP monitoring scripts to help NTP pool members make sure things are running smoothly. These scripts confirm that being in the pool really doesn't generate that much traffic, so even people with cable modems/DSL (with static IP addresses) can easily participate.
And coming soon, the first OEM Hard drive where you can literally see your data go bad.
No, this would be far from the first OEM hard drive where you could literally see your data go bad. I watched, through a glass window, an IBM 2314 disk with a crashed head scrap the surface when the heads retracted. These disks had nice glass windows that you could *open* and remove the disk pack and replace it with another disk pack. Once the glass window was closed, the 2314 would blow air across the heads to clean any dust off the platters.
Oh, I also once saw an IBM mainframe catch fire. While smoke was pouring out of it, the system wouldn't let us shut it down because we had a pending tape mount request. Being a BOFHs, we killed that job.;-)
So, having lost the battle over who "owns" the Internet (or at least the DNS system), it seems as though the next step is to challenge the "owner" as a monopoly.
I think you are confused. The two different(?)groups suing ICANN (CFIT and WADND) don't appear to have anything to do with the EU and their complaints about ICANN and the US government control of ICANN. ICANN has made many enemies over the years.
That said, the Verisign agreement may well be related to the complaints by the EU. Part of this agreement between ICANN and Verisign calls for Verisign to support ICANN in the squabble over the US control over ICANN. Remeber, ICANN has made many enemies over the years and has few friends. Buying Verisign off by giving them the.COM zone forever may have been what ICANN felt the needed to do to prevent themselves from losing all control. Also remember that, after sitting unresolved for a long time, this agreement came about right after the EU vs ICANN squabble heated up.
I'm REALLY having a hard deciding who scares me more to have control over the top level domains: ICANN or the UN.
CircleID is reporting that ICANN has been sued over their deal with Verisign by a group called Coalition for ICANN Transparency Inc. These don't, on the surface, appear to be the same group as mentioned in the BBC and ZNET stories.
CFIT appears to be much less of "fuckweasels" to me.
Geoff Huston is the one mentioned in this article that IPv4 address exhaustion isn't a problem. It isn't a problem because scares IP addresses lets ISP charge more. I'm not sure that consumers would agree with this logic.
So, if even very anti-IPv6 folks are saying that IPv4 addresses will run out sooner than expected, I think it is time to start preparing to the conversion.
And if you really think about it, what is the actual cost to provide a service in which the yearly cost is that of *not* removing an entry for a database and in which the resources consumed are a few hundred bytes of disk space?
While completely agree with you about the price increases being out of line, I have to point out that what you said above isn't true. Verisign has to turn the dot-com name servers and have to provide an interface so that registrars (i.e. godaddy, netsol, joker, etc.).
I don't believe that the costs of running those name servers cost anywhere near $6 per domain per year that the currently charge. I also don't see how their costs are going to be increasing 7% per domain per year. Yeah, their total number of queries will be going up as the internet grows, but the cost per domain is going to go down as bandwidth and hardware costs go down.
ICANN didn't rule out the redeployment of sitefinder, Verisign has mearly agreed to inform ICANN first and ICANN has promised to give a quick technical review.
Verisign will support ICANN as the controller of the DNS root against EU attempts to break the monopoly.
Verisign has fought hard to protect domain owners by limiting ICANN domain fees to only grow by a factor of 3, while ICANN has fought hard to protect domain owners by limiting Verisign to increasing their fees by 7% per year. </sarcasm>
Just put their own root DNS servers in place, and legally mandate that all of their ISPs switch over.
That appears to be what the EU is doing, with the backing of even people like Paul Vixie. Ok, the EU hasn't mandated all of their ISPs to switch over, but that may well be done voluntarily anyway.
Once this alternate root has been set up and is being used and running well, it would be easy for everyone to switch over to it on a whim if ICANN every does anything really bad, thus reducing the chances that ICANN will do anything really bad. The US government has been known to do really stupid things all too often, but I think this reduces the chances that they will try and force ICANN to do something really bad.
Note that one of the key reasons why Paul Vixie supports OSRN is because they are *NOT* going to go around creating new TLDs and such that aren't supported by ICANN. This alternate DNS root is going to look *EXACTLY* the same as the ICANN root. Or, at least, it will until ICANN does something really stupid.
I can't get to Cogent's website, but according to a NANOG post, this is whatit says:
Cogent Network Status/DNS Server Status Description:
Date: 10/05/2005
Level 3 has partitioned its part of the Internet from Cogent's part of the Internet by denying Level 3's customers access to Cogent's customers and denying Cogent's customers access to Level 3 customers. Level 3 terminated its peering with Cogent without cause (as permitted under its peering agreement with Cogent) even though both Cogent and Level 3 remained in full compliance with the previously existing interconnection agreement.
Cogent will offer any Level 3 customer, who is single homed to the Level 3 network on the date of this notice, one year of full Internet transit free of charge at the same bandwidth currently being supplied by Level 3. Cogent will provide this connectivity in over 1,000 locations throughout North America and Europe.
Cogent is committed to an open Internet. The existing interconnection facilities between Level 3 and Cogent remain intact. Cogent hopes that Level 3 will reactivate these connections, restoring a full level of service to their customers.
For more information about the sales offer, please contact the numbers listed below.
NORTH AMERICA: 1-877-875-4432
ANYWHERE ELSE IN EUROPE: +33 (0)6 1101-7382
Raise your hand if you remember when the command for Instant Messaging was 'write'.
'write' came out many years after term-talk was standard on all CDC Plato systems. I really liked the per-character display of term-talk (and the chat rooms on) on the 1970's era Plato system rather than the per-line display of IRC and such. I wonder if the Internet will ever catch up to Plato. I know the emoticon's and ascii-art haven't caught up to the 1970's Plato yet. For that matter, Plato Notes were better than most web BBSes also.
*sigh*
It is too bad Plato was a proprietary system that the designers thought should only be used for educational purposes. It was way ahead of its time.
t's illegal for marketing types to call my cellular phone. I win. If you really don't want anyone calling you throw out your busted old landline.
You know that the telemarketing industry is trying very hard to "fix" this "loophole". With out being able to contact people on cellphones, how can they do proper political opinion (and push) polls? How can legitimate companies keep in contact with their customers? This is all very damaging to the US economy. You can't trample on the people's rights to political and economic speech like that, just because you have chosen to only have a cell phone.
While I'm being sarcastic, I'm sure that the DMA and political parties actually believe this stuff.
Slashdot Mirror
Your tracker is still 440'ing, so I have put up an alternative tracker. As I write this, I only have about 9% of the avi downloaded, so if someone else can seed the complete cormack-spam-xvid.avi file, I would greatly appreciate it.
Not quite. It appears that *at least* 116 people were sent the email, quite possibly more since the journalist's name wasn't one of those 116 people.
The most widely accepted definition of spam is "Unsolicited Bulk Email". I'm not sure that this particular email is really unsolicited since it appears to have been sent to a reporter in an area closely related to the subject matter of the PR. Bulk, however, has to be defined as anything over 1. If you put any hard cut off, of, say 100 or 1000 emails, then spammers will simply send 99 or 999 emails.
The *penalties* that ISPs (and others) should place on sending of unsolicited bulk email should take into account the actual volume. This is just like stealing a penny is wrong and still stealing, but you will get into a lot less trouble than if you steal a thousands of dollars.
Re-read the article. Rambam allegedly sued while the attack was going on: this is different from creating the attack.
I agree that the parent misstated the situation and that it is highly unlikely that Steve Rambam had anything to do with the DDoS attack on Joe Jarad.
Moreover, there is a fascinating letter at http://www.dotcomeon.com/injoewetrust.html that explains that the "DDOS" was not planned, it was the direct result of not having enough bandwidth to deal with all the DNS queries caused by the SoBig virus. The letter also explains that Mr. Joe Jared, the administrator of osirusoft.com, has been playing nasty games against the domains of quite innocent people, including poisoning the DNS for big chunks of the Internet for anyone who uses his services in a fit of pique after the DDOS.
That site, however, is run by a well known kook. Just read the link and the other pages on that site and make up your own mind. Using phrases like "People's Republic of Kalifornia", "unbalanced anarchist", "cyberextortion clearinghouse business", are enough a clue for me, but attacks on the same website against people like Paul Vixie are other good indicators that the guy is a kook.
Much of what is claimed on that site is highly selective and highly biased at best, and complete BS most of the rest of the time.
So I'm inclined to think that Mr. Rambam had nothing to do with this and is simply trying to slap down an incompetent blacklist author.
Uh, yeah, but if that was the case, Steve Rambam would have dropped the suit after Joe Jarad stopped running a DNSBL, but he didn't.
According to this article, he has been involved in a lawsuit against a spam blocker (his company was mistakenly placed on a spam blocklist), he has tracked Nazi war criminals, and he discovered that Elvis has Jewish ancestors.
Steve Rambam lost his law suit against the anti-spam DNSBL run by Joe Jarad. In the process Steve lost any respect I might have had for him for other things.
I find it informing that our politicians are willing to sanction trade with Sweden because *our* (i.e. Not Their) laws say they are infringing on our IP. But we haven't heard anything of the sort in relation to China and Nigeria over spam (a much bigger problem).
Uh, duh. China has a huge market for US businesses and nukes. Nigeria has oil. What assests does Sweden have? (Besides ones that would make neo cons uncomfortable.)
Ah, I didn't polish my post enough and make my point clear enough. Geoff Huston did a much better job in his presentation that I mentioned.
The key word in the "a central company" is "a". Lots of different companies letting you download stuff pushes the telecommunication companies into the commodity market. The telecommunication companies hoped to be competing against other telecommunication companies for delivering their products from their TV and movie studios, the "great convergence" that caused Timewarner/CNN/AOL to merge and Disney to invest in the Go network, etc., not with companies like "youtube", "google" or "myspace" which no one ever heard of a decade ago.
The point in the first paragraph where I mentioned features "call waiting" and "answering machines" is that these companies were used to being the only ones that could create new features. Downloadable music would only happen when they had created the appropriate product that could be profitable, not when some company like "napster", "iTunes", or "allofmp3" figured out how to do it.
If you wanted the content controlled by your phone company, you would have to buy ISDN/ADSL. If you wanted the content controlled by your cable company, you would have to buy from them. If you wanted both of these differentiated products, well, you would have to buy both. And no one really wants any content other than what was on TV, movies or the major record labels, right?
By breaking net neutrality, these telecommunication companies hope to at least recover some of the control over packets that they send to you, even if they lost the ability to originate the packets.
In it, Geoff points out that for a very long time, telecommunication companies were monopolies or in some cases oligopolies (a few companies controling the market). They owned everything from the handset on one end to the handset on the other end and any feature like "call waiting" or "answering machines" had to be bought from them.
Depending on what part of the world you lived in, from the 70s to the 90s, these companies were forced to change from market monopolies to competative markets of differentiated goods. This is almost always a very rough transition to make and many companies, in any industry, often go bankrupt before they can make the structural, political, technical and cultural changes need to survive in such markets. The telecommunication industry is no different.
While the telecommunication companies are still trying to deal with competing in a differentiated market, e.g. the 80's slogan from AT&T "they are making second class phones!", to the huge number of options on cell phones, Geoff points out that they are really facing an even harder transition. They are having to go from a competative market of differentiated goods to a market of commodities. Even companies that are used to competative markets have a hard time successfully transitioning to commoditiy markets, again, they require even more changes to the organization. People just want to push packets.
Telecommunication companies thought they could create differentiated products like "video on demand" where everyone would get their TV, movies and music from the telecommunication companies. Instead, P2P systems have taken care of those needs, with the result of people not wanting huge downloads from a central company, but rather they will download from other "end users". But, even TV shows and Movies are just the tip of the iceberg. People are generating their own content and are bypassing the both the traditional media companies and the telecommuncation companies. They are creating pictures of their kids, and porn, They are creating blogs and small business websites. New features of the net are not added by the big companies under careful regulation, but spring forth from millions of places. The amount of data that is being passed around that has nothing to do with the big companies is mind boggling, and it is just going to get bigger.
People don't want content from the ISPs, they want packets pushed around, and that means a commodity market for packet delivery. Telecommunication companies that can adapt to a commodity market will survive. Ones that can't will talk about how they need to charge people for their "enhanced content".
I don't mind entering a captcha every once and a while, like when you create an account, but requiring a new captcha every 11 spams is really annoying. Normally, I have to enter a captcha once every few weeks and even a 50% error rate wouldn't be that annoying, but requiring lots of captchas, even simple/easy ones, is a bad design.
I have also learned that if you enter the captcha at the top of your web page, but vote for the ham or spam with the buttons on the bottom of the page, your captcha is considered "wrong". This certinaly can account for part of that 20% error rate.
So, part of the problem with captchas is with they way some people use them.
Funny, yesterday on the #okopipi IRC channel, I suggested that okopipi should automate submissions to spamcop, nanas, dcc and razor, in addition to the FTC and SEC submissions that bluefrog did. Basically, it would give the spammers several more good reasons to pay attention to okopipi's do-not-spam list.
Spamcop has been around much longer than bluesecurity, it has already weathered many more DoS attacks than bluesecurity, spamcop has been sued a couple of times by spammers (and the spammers lost), spamcop has had its domain name hijacked, and yet it has survived. Granted, part of the reason they survived is because the are now owned by the anti-spam vendor, Ironport who also provides the free senderbase service.
I'm sorry to see bluesecurity go, but there are still other options for people who want to fight spam.
The problem with the "patent trolls" idea is that it's all but indistinguishable from the "small inventor with few resources" one in many cases.
from the article:
If you are a small inventor that is actively working on developing your invention, the courts *MAY* grant an injunction, while they *MAY NOT* grant an injunction to a patent troll. They have left it up to the courts to destinguish the two cases.As another reply pointed out, these two cases are often very easy to distinguish.
Last year, the pool was falling behind on servers. More clients were joining than servers, so the load on each server was growing. Since then, Ask Bjørn Hansen has created a bunch of automated scripts to handle all of the servers and the server growth has taken off. We still need more servers, and 500 is a nice round number to give as an excuse to say "Please join the NTP pool!".
All machines in the NTP pool are monitored for quality and if they are bad enough, they won't be put into the pool.
Also, it is recommended that you have at least 3, maybe up to 5, NTP servers so that you can detect a bad NTP server. (If you have one time server, you won't know that anything is wrong. If you have two, you will know something is wrong, but you won't know which NTP server is bad. If you have three or more, you can pick the best one.)
Uh, your servers are supposed to only reply with *ONE* packet.
That said, I have also had a few people complain to me about my machine attacking them because they have configured their machine to use the NTP pool. Over the last 2 years, it has totalled around 3, so you must have had really bad luck.
Overall, I have been very happy with my involvement with the NTP pool. It has been working very well and I like being to help others out. I have also created a bunch of NTP monitoring scripts to help NTP pool members make sure things are running smoothly. These scripts confirm that being in the pool really doesn't generate that much traffic, so even people with cable modems/DSL (with static IP addresses) can easily participate.
No, this would be far from the first OEM hard drive where you could literally see your data go bad. I watched, through a glass window, an IBM 2314 disk with a crashed head scrap the surface when the heads retracted. These disks had nice glass windows that you could *open* and remove the disk pack and replace it with another disk pack. Once the glass window was closed, the 2314 would blow air across the heads to clean any dust off the platters.
Oh, I also once saw an IBM mainframe catch fire. While smoke was pouring out of it, the system wouldn't let us shut it down because we had a pending tape mount request. Being a BOFHs, we killed that job. ;-)
A friend of mine has made quite a few nixie clocks, including one that sync's its time to WWVB. They are cool to watch.
I think you are confused. The two different(?)groups suing ICANN (CFIT and WADND) don't appear to have anything to do with the EU and their complaints about ICANN and the US government control of ICANN. ICANN has made many enemies over the years.
That said, the Verisign agreement may well be related to the complaints by the EU. Part of this agreement between ICANN and Verisign calls for Verisign to support ICANN in the squabble over the US control over ICANN. Remeber, ICANN has made many enemies over the years and has few friends. Buying Verisign off by giving them the .COM zone forever may have been what ICANN felt the needed to do to prevent themselves from losing all control. Also remember that, after sitting unresolved for a long time, this agreement came about right after the EU vs ICANN squabble heated up.
I'm REALLY having a hard deciding who scares me more to have control over the top level domains: ICANN or the UN.
CFIT appears to be much less of "fuckweasels" to me.
In July 2003, Geoff said that IPv4 addresses will run out in two decades.
About two years later, Goeff says that IPv4 addresses will run out in just one decade.
So, if even very anti-IPv6 folks are saying that IPv4 addresses will run out sooner than expected, I think it is time to start preparing to the conversion.
While completely agree with you about the price increases being out of line, I have to point out that what you said above isn't true. Verisign has to turn the dot-com name servers and have to provide an interface so that registrars (i.e. godaddy, netsol, joker, etc.).
I don't believe that the costs of running those name servers cost anywhere near $6 per domain per year that the currently charge. I also don't see how their costs are going to be increasing 7% per domain per year. Yeah, their total number of queries will be going up as the internet grows, but the cost per domain is going to go down as bandwidth and hardware costs go down.
ICANN didn't rule out the redeployment of sitefinder, Verisign has mearly agreed to inform ICANN first and ICANN has promised to give a quick technical review.
Verisign will support ICANN as the controller of the DNS root against EU attempts to break the monopoly.
Verisign has fought hard to protect domain owners by limiting ICANN domain fees to only grow by a factor of 3, while ICANN has fought hard to protect domain owners by limiting Verisign to increasing their fees by 7% per year. </sarcasm>
Check out this post to the ICANN mailing list for more details.
That appears to be what the EU is doing, with the backing of even people like Paul Vixie. Ok, the EU hasn't mandated all of their ISPs to switch over, but that may well be done voluntarily anyway.
Once this alternate root has been set up and is being used and running well, it would be easy for everyone to switch over to it on a whim if ICANN every does anything really bad, thus reducing the chances that ICANN will do anything really bad. The US government has been known to do really stupid things all too often, but I think this reduces the chances that they will try and force ICANN to do something really bad.
Note that one of the key reasons why Paul Vixie supports OSRN is because they are *NOT* going to go around creating new TLDs and such that aren't supported by ICANN. This alternate DNS root is going to look *EXACTLY* the same as the ICANN root. Or, at least, it will until ICANN does something really stupid.
'write' came out many years after term-talk was standard on all CDC Plato systems. I really liked the per-character display of term-talk (and the chat rooms on) on the 1970's era Plato system rather than the per-line display of IRC and such. I wonder if the Internet will ever catch up to Plato. I know the emoticon's and ascii-art haven't caught up to the 1970's Plato yet. For that matter, Plato Notes were better than most web BBSes also.
*sigh*
It is too bad Plato was a proprietary system that the designers thought should only be used for educational purposes. It was way ahead of its time.
You know that the telemarketing industry is trying very hard to "fix" this "loophole". With out being able to contact people on cellphones, how can they do proper political opinion (and push) polls? How can legitimate companies keep in contact with their customers? This is all very damaging to the US economy. You can't trample on the people's rights to political and economic speech like that, just because you have chosen to only have a cell phone.
While I'm being sarcastic, I'm sure that the DMA and political parties actually believe this stuff.