It certainly suggests the cure(s) (as in many other substance or technology distribution regulation problems) are nearly as bad as the "problem," the famous Pyrrhic victory...
I think if we get back to P2P or E2E, with good tools for users to opt-in to (enforcing filtering is as unpleasant as enforcing reciept) and the marketers realise that there is zero marginal value in sending to a user who has even the mildest filtering, as they are not going to buy... nor is it likely the random strings addressed in the spam-honeypot domains like hotmail.com...
It'll stop when they stop making money bothering unwilling recipients.
Why does spam exist? To sell, and if the spammers are too stupid to realise that I'm not going to accidentally buy their stupid product, not going to come to my senses and realise the value of extra throbbing inches .
A few sacrifices have to made to ensure those hardworking creative types have a lifetime, or even better, a lifetime plus 75 years of income from their work, should it find favour in the great lottery of entertainment.
Ditch-diggers don't get paid forever for the drains they dig, that's reserved for the elite.
And you're only whining 'cos your not one of them.
What Hollis and co appear to have overlooked is that if you constrain the use of the information that broadband can deliver, it's value to the consumer declines significantly... thus the value, the benefit of broadband is squandered.
If the retitled Bill does nothing but increase content proprietors ability to gouge (pay per view etc etc) the price may remain too high in the opinion of the majority of consumers.
The other issue is no-one appears to be asking the consumer if they are prepared to pay the higher costs for the secure devices so they can have their rights limited *and* pay for costly broadband.
Also, as far as I know, none of the citylink-connected ISPs will give you a gigabit connection
Just a small clarification, you connect to PublicLAN and then negotiate with a service provider(s) to get what you want. Ie, ISPs, while significant, are not the raison detre of the CityLink PublicLAN.
While ISPs are quite welcome to sell a connection to PublicLAN as part of gaining a subscriber, they rarely decline business from a customer on a connection they didn't sell... . So, if you have a GE connection (like LANPlace) you can still get to the Internet...
In fact, because we are a Ethenert MAN, we don't do much IP addressing, some administrative private IPs on a seperate VLAN and our corporate LAN Internet access.
IP addresses are provided by the ISPs on CityLink, after all, you don't need to leave town for PublicLAN to be of service, and so you can use selected private addresses if you just want local connection with zero volume charge.
Yup, $10/day for 10Mb/s is all you pay for PublicLAN, ISP charges are extra... (in fact all xSP charges are between you and the service provider).
This guys cracked it. Though I don't see the need for accounts per se, I just use disposable email addresses. I've had two compromised on/., but who cares.
Will give you all the addresses you will ever need. Sneakemail is more difficult to use since you need to return to the site to generate an address, but mailshell allows you to generate them on the fly...
It's just easier, and more effective, to wear slippers than try and carpet the world.
Bye MAPS, it was unpleasant being blocked by you, forced to use my ISP smtp servers, disallowed from operating my own deliveries. John Gilmore is right.
I was responding to an article here and got this response:
Lameness filter encountered. Post aborted.
Reason: Junk character post.
I wonder if it was the ? Who knows. I removed them, and tried again:
Easy does it!
This comment has been submitted already, 276139 hours , 40 minutes ago.
No need to try again.
I can't think of a better illustration of the tangled web we weave when first we practice technological control of human behaviours.
Re:Make a decision, folks
on
ORBS Forks
·
· Score: 2
"There is a huge freaking world of difference between censorship and closing open mail relays."
And there is now a huge freaking difference between the actions of ORB.*/MAPS and "closing open mail relays."
They do a lot more than just that, and some suspicion has fallen on the motives of some of the shutdowns that have been instituted, with no right to petition for redress.
It's not just for Open Relays anymore.
Re:Make a decision, folks
on
ORBS Forks
·
· Score: 1
> ORBS does not censor content.
Agreed.
> ORBS gives people the information they need to make an
> informed decision to filter traffic from incompetent idiots.
>
> Is that clear enough, or do I need to use shorter words?
Shorter words won't help, it won't change the fact that in many cases ORBS gives information to people who then decide, *on behalf of actual recipients*, whether to give the recipients the mail addressed to them, or not.
What happens when it's *not* spam?
Having been on the MAPS DUL briefly, I can speak from personal experience about the fury and frustration of being the innocent collateral damage in the war on some email.
If my recipients had chosen to make an informed decision about ORBS, fine and dandy, but the presumptuous paternal patronising that ISPs do by instigating these (and many other) corruptions of the "end to end" principle that is the core of the success, both technically and commercially, of the Internet, is not beneficial, IMHO.
The golden goose is being choked by all these "gateway" blocks that are being installed, for our own good, without choice, by well-meaning zealots.
I'm with Gilmore.
(http://sneakemail.com is a good end-user-choice choice, )
I didn't see a mention at +3 and I'm curious why... Seems like a much more general solution. One we can supply to ourselves without concerns about the spinelessness and greed of commerce.
Irrespective of the debate about server and server operating system sales numbers and shares, isn't the decline in the rate of increase of revenues an indication that the ambitions of those who sought to gut the market with commodity options, as Microsoft did in the past, are being realised? It's not world domination, but it's saving us all a healthy bit of cash.
The right to bear arms was to limit State power, where and when power came out of the barrel of a gun. It was to ensure balance in the force, <grin>.
Today coercive power more frequently resides in technology (which can also set us free). Such power should available to all, however the State is denying the people the right to knowlege through the bans on reverse engineering and prohibiting the defeat of non-legitimate powers assumed by technology companies, ie, the DMCA.
The consent of the governed is guaranteed in an armed society, it is being stolen from those ruled by technology and a technology "right to rebel effectively" is required.
IE, the coercive power is not with guns for the majority of us, as much as technology, it seems to me the right to "bear arms" is now the right to technology to defeat the technology fascists who would enslave via their baseless Region encodings and cryptography which *never* came out of copy right.
I don't think the idea funny, indeed I offered it as an Ask Slashdot, but...
2000-04-27 04:20:24 More Yopy, the Linux PDA (articles,news) (accepted)
2000-08-14 21:05:02 Why faster CPUs? Why not more of them? (askslashdot,hardware) (accepted)
2001-02-12 23:49:40 LEGO Mindstorms developer talks about "Lifelong Ki (articles,toys) (rejected)
2001-02-16 05:29:25 What's Wrong With Copy Protection!? (yro,news) (rejected)
2001-02-21 20:45:23 How Much Does IP Enforcement Cost? (askslashdot,money) (rejected)
Superb, after all the vanity and hubris of "artistic control" and the dog-in-manger whinging about someone else making money off their efforts, and honest workman in the creative area.
Ditch diggers and road builders don't get paid per use of what their muscles build, what is so special about writing or other mental creative effort that deludes those who choose it into thinking they deserve a "slice of the pie" or a "cut of the action" and a life long, or life plus 75 years of payment for their endeavours?
I also agree with this poster that the hypocrisy is in the "pay once/charge often" approach of publishers.
It simply seems an intellectual snobbery to suggest that "work for hire" like the rest of us grunts, is beneath the dignity of "creatives."
It would be nice if people like that could get over themselves and stop being so perfectly precious.
"sales of singles are down something like 10% in a strengthening economy, which begs the question, "was it Napster?" (my personal opinion : Yes it was)."
Singles are either a loss leader, in which case, what's the problem, lower sales is more money for RIAA, or a rip-off and frankly I favour the latter, so some other distribution mechanism needs to be found. This may require a change in the law to make it legal, which is fair as the current law is being abused and use to support a business model and guaranteed returns, to the detriment of the consumer.
What Ever Happened To Ridley Scott?
on
Hannibal's Return
·
· Score: 1
From the restrained terror of Alien to this OTT farce? Sardinian pigs, Venetian libraries, trepanning gross-outs, Mutilated millionaires?
It's as ludicrous as "American Psycho's" list of facial treatments or the restaurant menu.
I *love* Bladerunner, Alien, Thelma & Louise, and it's not the gore that got me, Natural Born Killers had more credible and horrific violence... the brain frying was laughable.
Spam is like porn, in that control of its distribution is the goal of some organisations.
Unfortunately the problem is always the same, what is spam/porn? This problem is exacerbated by the fact some people want spam/porn.
Thus it is properly a Receiver decision, not a third-party one.
The trick, is to give the end-point control.
The difficulty with spam is protecting your email address.
This cannot be done easily, the answer is to have many addresses.
Many people use web-based email this way, dumping compromised addresses and signing up with a new id. This is a temporary respite, as it starts the cycle again and imposes the burden of notifying all your correspondents.
The namespace (examples: www.name.com, www.entity.type.cc,
Hamish.MacEwan.gen.nz), which has at times attempted to by
its structure alone itself index and organise the content
on the internet, has been extended by the ICANN
organisation.
Whether these extensions will address the alledged problems
with the current architecture, is one great conjecture.
The internet name space has had only few and relatively
coarse categories,.org,.com,.net,.edu, are the well-known US
centric Top-Level Domains (TLDs), though there are others
less well known,.mil,.int. The majority of the rest are
ccTLDs, country top-level domains, like.nz for New Zealand.
While there is a.us domain, operationally it's not
appealing and so the big four were used in preference and
have a defacto, though now diluted, US-orgin status... Fair
enough the Americans should claim.com, rather in the way UK
stamps bear no country of origin, they invented it, and it's
a easier privilege to grant and bear than patent or
copyright... right?
So the.com domains and others are crowded with all types of
business, entities, individuals, religions and this lack of
organisation is the price we pay for the rapid deployment of
the Internet services we now depend on. There is no Dewey
System for Internet, though why no one has mapped it onto
the Net (I await correction on this) I have no idea.
The organisation of the net into hierarchies, taxonomies,
rings and other structures has been performed by other
servers on the Net. Search engines, characterised by Yahoo,
which after all is an acronym for Yet Another Hierarchically
Organised Oracle.
Thus there was never a need for the namespace to be
particularly arranged, so we didn't need to wait years for
the structure to be decided, (and look how long it has taken
ICANN, and how much money, to decide on even recommending
seven categories for further negotiation), or pay for some
bureaucrat to tell us what category they decided we were in.
Compare growth in the.nz domain against that in.au where
they have much stricter rules governing their category of the
namespace. Perhaps in a geographic and national context
such as the ccTLDs this is forgiveable, but it certainly is
not universal. The country code TLD was an easy way
to delegate responsbility, it should never have adopted the
notion that.tv implied a location, after all very few.tv
domains have any relationship with Tuvalu beyond paying
them $US50 for a couple of years rental on the name.
And it's rewarding, find some figures on income for
countries from domain rental.
But how can you be asked to pay for what is after all only a
name? There is probably some cost, but it would be
microscopic, certain incrementally it is, but we have a long
history of renting or paying for concepts that have little
physical analogy.
After all, direct dial number from the telephone company are
only seven or eight digit numbers, and people pay extra for
them, atop the rental for the line. Stories are after all
only extensive original arrangements of words from the free
pool of language, and we pay for that.
However, after long and painful gestation and the input of
very very many cooks the broth was served and tasted by an
unelected minority of the users of the system, and a
selection of seven denominated as candidates for ascension
to TLD-hood.
What were they, what new categories were chosen to improve
the problems of the internet name space.
.coop,.museum,.biz,.pro,.info,.aero,.name
If I need to explain what these extensions mean, doesn't
that immediately suggest ICANN have not simplified the
categorisation of internet names by these new extensions to
the namespace?
My reference for this is at Slashdot, and they reference and
I recommend both the C|Net article and the satire.
If I had told you the new TLDs included:
.kids,.post,.tel,.travel,.union,.web,.xxx
I don't think it would be difficult to explain the probable
contents of those new domains in the namespace.
These domains were proposed and dismissed by ICANN in favour
of the first group.
They would have been categories that are relatively clear by
comparison with those anointed by ICANN, but like all
judgements subject to dispute.
Yes, there is a Roman alphabet bias, and an English language
bias, if there is to be language related domains, to which I
don't object, let's have them relative to either the
geographic area they apply to, yes each of them if there are
more than one, and an international domain, ie, maori.nz,
francaise.fr, esperanto.int.
But the point about the TLDs is that they must be
universally understood, thus their number should be limited,
so the more detailed categories can be defined locally in
the local tongue with the local alphabet.
We've done international categorisation quite well before
with the telephone network, it's namespace of course
contained only numbers, which is so much less contraversial,
due of course to it's total lack of meaning to be
misunderstood or offended at... though I recognize 13 is a
concern to some.
No-one would ever try to guess the telephone number of any
thing by knowing it's business type, and name. Guessing the
URL though, seems to be one of the goals of the new TLDs.
ICANN has been much reviled and accused, and it probably had
a chance to redeem itself with this, the most visible and
perhaps important (to them at least, though as I say, search
engines and classification sites will remain essential)
decision and output.
The belated too-little and too-late TLDs ICANN have chosen
will do nothing to improve the structure or utility of the
namespace, it will however for the chosen operators, be a
license, as a license to operate a TV station used to be, a
license to print money.
Thus, in a namespace of some importance to the planet, we
have been given seven new continents to develop and
discover.
Entry to these new lands is controlled by an organisation
that has been decried as secretive, arrogant and
slow-moving, and its selection of new TLDs only makes those
accusations more credible.
We will now no doubt be inundated with call to populate
these new spaces, from what I can see, the demand will be
small, but the necessity for some may be high. I expect
much contraversy, in.name alone, for who will be
Hamish.MacEwan.name? Probably if the outcomes of ICANN's
Universal Dispute Resolution Process are anything to go by,
the richest or most famous Hamish MacEwan. Not me I fear.
Perhaps a geographic distinction will be established,
Hamish.MacEwan.nz.name, but then why couldn't that have been
left to.nz, Hamish.MacEwan.name.nz, or in France, to
nom.fr?
Thus I can only conclude, the rush for TLDs is nothing but a
mercenary land grab. It is being cynically managed by
several organisations for their benefit, WIPO, WTO, and ICANN
appear to be acting in concert, with ICANN granting licenses
to print money by attempting to simultaneously extend, and
preserve the scarcity and hence value, of domain names.
If there's only one Business.com, you might pay US$7.5
million for it, but if it's merely one of many Business.????
domains, who cares?
As I see it, that's what's happened, and why. Mercifully, I
think it probably will turn out irrelevant, and those
operators of the new domains will find themselves as out of
pocket as the Telephone companies who tried to buy back their
lost wired monopolies in the recent round of 3G mobile
frequency auctions, but that's another story.
I'd suggest we freeze any further TLDs, and instead confine
ICANN, and the other international organisations to mucking
around in their own TLD,.int. There they can do what they
wish without wasting and constraining the rest of us. If
they do finally come up with something useful, they can
compete like the other namespace companies.
I think the stellar example of the expansion when the end of the Earth-centric universe model moved humanity from the centre of the universe to a speck on the edge of an unfashionable arm of a totally ordinary spiral galaxy explains the change in religion as you knew it. I could believe in a God that made me centre of the universe and promised me Heaven, but not one that reduces me to the least mote in all creation.
As for the 51st State, c'mon Jon, it's the eighth continent surely?
My take on this, and other potential disasters, is that at worst it will only end life as we know it.
Extra Life Inventor? Yeah, Like Gore's Internet
on
1.21 Quickiewatts
·
· Score: 1
The "Extra Life" was no more or less than "Extra Ball" from pinball, which has been using it since Adam was a cowboy and I got 5 balls for six-pence and a "Free Game" at 1100 points.
They, like the poor in financial terms, will always be with us. Those too poor in spirit or poor in intellect to appreciate the magic of an intelligence a humanity that does not look like us.
We search the skies and science for intelligence, artificial or alien, while there are those who fear and loathe our own exotic intelligences right here on Earth.
To make them glamorous through paying them all this attention and making them forbidden, taboo, dangerous and thus elite is begging for them to gain favour.
Ignore them, they won't go away, but like the proverbial tar baby, engaging them is more trouble than it's worth. All our opposition only serves to validate their message.
A great idea, but the thrust of the NYT article seems to indicate that the "interests" of the producers are recieving more attention than those of the consumers.
The discussions between the components of the broadcast side, and the insidious notion of the PVR interpolating it's own suite of commercials suggests to me this is not the death of network television, instead it is the beginning of a fat client on that network.
Interestingly, we the consumer, are being asked to pay for this new an improved facility in exchange for some modest improvement in convenience.
The idea is marvelous, and if there were an open consumer-focussed implementation I'd applaud it even more, but it seems that we are only being granted these improvements in exchange for ceding greater advertising content control to the networks.
Slashdot Mirror
Letting the operator own the address is repeating the existing mistake with numbering plans.
Fair comment from Linus. Freedom 0, the right to use for any purpose.
But when the boot is on the other foot, and DRM is deciding about Linux, at the hardware level, I wonder whether Linus will be as indifferent to DRM.
It certainly suggests the cure(s) (as in many other substance or technology distribution regulation problems) are nearly as bad as the "problem," the famous Pyrrhic victory...
I think if we get back to P2P or E2E, with good tools for users to opt-in to (enforcing filtering is as unpleasant as enforcing reciept) and the marketers realise that there is zero marginal value in sending to a user who has even the mildest filtering, as they are not going to buy... nor is it likely the random strings addressed in the spam-honeypot domains like hotmail.com...
It'll stop when they stop making money bothering unwilling recipients.
Why does spam exist? To sell, and if the spammers are too stupid to realise that I'm not going to accidentally buy their stupid product, not going to come to my senses and realise the value of extra throbbing inches .
Ditch-diggers don't get paid forever for the drains they dig, that's reserved for the elite.
And you're only whining 'cos your not one of them.
Suck it up, and get on.
What Hollis and co appear to have overlooked is that if you constrain the use of the information that broadband can deliver, it's value to the consumer declines significantly... thus the value, the benefit of broadband is squandered.
If the retitled Bill does nothing but increase content proprietors ability to gouge (pay per view etc etc) the price may remain too high in the opinion of the majority of consumers.
The other issue is no-one appears to be asking the consumer if they are prepared to pay the higher costs for the secure devices so they can have their rights limited *and* pay for costly broadband.
Myself, http://bookcrossing.com seems the way to go.
Just a small clarification, you connect to PublicLAN and then negotiate with a service provider(s) to get what you want. Ie, ISPs, while significant, are not the raison detre of the CityLink PublicLAN.
While ISPs are quite welcome to sell a connection to PublicLAN as part of gaining a subscriber, they rarely decline business from a customer on a connection they didn't sell... . So, if you have a GE connection (like LANPlace) you can still get to the Internet...
In fact, because we are a Ethenert MAN, we don't do much IP addressing, some administrative private IPs on a seperate VLAN and our corporate LAN Internet access.
IP addresses are provided by the ISPs on CityLink, after all, you don't need to leave town for PublicLAN to be of service, and so you can use selected private addresses if you just want local connection with zero volume charge.
Yup, $10/day for 10Mb/s is all you pay for PublicLAN, ISP charges are extra... (in fact all xSP charges are between you and the service provider).
Codeine.
http://sneakemail.com
http://mailshell.com
Will give you all the addresses you will ever need. Sneakemail is more difficult to use since you need to return to the site to generate an address, but mailshell allows you to generate them on the fly...
It's just easier, and more effective, to wear slippers than try and carpet the world.
Bye MAPS, it was unpleasant being blocked by you, forced to use my ISP smtp servers, disallowed from operating my own deliveries. John Gilmore is right.
Ah, the irony.
I was responding to an article here and got this response:
I wonder if it was the ? Who knows. I removed them, and tried again:
I can't think of a better illustration of the tangled web we weave when first we practice technological control of human behaviours.
"There is a huge freaking world of difference between censorship and closing open mail relays."
And there is now a huge freaking difference between the actions of ORB.*/MAPS and "closing open mail relays."
They do a lot more than just that, and some suspicion has fallen on the motives of some of the shutdowns that have been instituted, with no right to petition for redress.
It's not just for Open Relays anymore.
> ORBS does not censor content.
Agreed.
> ORBS gives people the information they need to make an
> informed decision to filter traffic from incompetent idiots.
>
> Is that clear enough, or do I need to use shorter words?
Shorter words won't help, it won't change the fact that in many cases ORBS gives information to people who then decide, *on behalf of actual recipients*, whether to give the recipients the mail addressed to them, or not.
What happens when it's *not* spam?
Having been on the MAPS DUL briefly, I can speak from personal experience about the fury and frustration of being the innocent collateral damage in the war on some email.
If my recipients had chosen to make an informed decision about ORBS, fine and dandy, but the presumptuous paternal patronising that ISPs do by instigating these (and many other) corruptions of the "end to end" principle that is the core of the success, both technically and commercially, of the Internet, is not beneficial, IMHO.
The golden goose is being choked by all these "gateway" blocks that are being installed, for our own good, without choice, by well-meaning zealots.
I'm with Gilmore.
(http://sneakemail.com is a good end-user-choice choice, )
I didn't see a mention at +3 and I'm curious why... Seems like a much more general solution. One we can supply to ourselves without concerns about the spinelessness and greed of commerce.
Irrespective of the debate about server and server operating system sales numbers and shares, isn't the decline in the rate of increase of revenues an indication that the ambitions of those who sought to gut the market with commodity options, as Microsoft did in the past, are being realised? It's not world domination, but it's saving us all a healthy bit of cash.
But then it was framed, and it was all over for me. I called back from time to time, but it just got more and more bloated and ugly and intrusive.
Shot in a barrel.
The right to bear arms was to limit State power, where and when power came out of the barrel of a gun. It was to ensure balance in the force, <grin>.
Today coercive power more frequently resides in technology (which can also set us free). Such power should available to all, however the State is denying the people the right to knowlege through the bans on reverse engineering and prohibiting the defeat of non-legitimate powers assumed by technology companies, ie, the DMCA.
The consent of the governed is guaranteed in an armed society, it is being stolen from those ruled by technology and a technology "right to rebel effectively" is required.
IE, the coercive power is not with guns for the majority of us, as much as technology, it seems to me the right to "bear arms" is now the right to technology to defeat the technology fascists who would enslave via their baseless Region encodings and cryptography which *never* came out of copy right.
I don't think the idea funny, indeed I offered it as an Ask Slashdot, but...
And I can't recall which of those headlines relates to the idea... sorry.
Superb, after all the vanity and hubris of "artistic control" and the dog-in-manger whinging about someone else making money off their efforts, and honest workman in the creative area.
Ditch diggers and road builders don't get paid per use of what their muscles build, what is so special about writing or other mental creative effort that deludes those who choose it into thinking they deserve a "slice of the pie" or a "cut of the action" and a life long, or life plus 75 years of payment for their endeavours?
I also agree with this poster that the hypocrisy is in the "pay once/charge often" approach of publishers.
It simply seems an intellectual snobbery to suggest that "work for hire" like the rest of us grunts, is beneath the dignity of "creatives."
It would be nice if people like that could get over themselves and stop being so perfectly precious.
"sales of singles are down something like 10% in a strengthening economy, which begs the question, "was it Napster?" (my personal opinion : Yes it was)."
Singles are either a loss leader, in which case, what's the problem, lower sales is more money for RIAA, or a rip-off and frankly I favour the latter, so some other distribution mechanism needs to be found. This may require a change in the law to make it legal, which is fair as the current law is being abused and use to support a business model and guaranteed returns, to the detriment of the consumer.
From the restrained terror of Alien to this OTT farce? Sardinian pigs, Venetian libraries, trepanning gross-outs, Mutilated millionaires?
It's as ludicrous as "American Psycho's" list of facial treatments or the restaurant menu.
I *love* Bladerunner, Alien, Thelma & Louise, and it's not the gore that got me, Natural Born Killers had more credible and horrific violence... the brain frying was laughable.
I think that's my last for while from Chez Scott.
Spam is like porn, in that control of its distribution is the goal of some organisations.
Unfortunately the problem is always the same, what is spam/porn? This problem is exacerbated by the fact some people want spam/porn.
Thus it is properly a Receiver decision, not a third-party one.
The trick, is to give the end-point control.
The difficulty with spam is protecting your email address.
This cannot be done easily, the answer is to have many addresses.
Many people use web-based email this way, dumping compromised addresses and signing up with a new id. This is a temporary respite, as it starts the cycle again and imposes the burden of notifying all your correspondents.
SneakEmail, on the other hand provides you with:
1. An infinite number of email addresses (that all deliver to a single email box).
2. The addresses can be filtered in such a way that email which doesn't come from an acceptable address is held, or dumped.
3. A range of useful management tools for the multiple addresses.
The important difference is it is the end-user, not some self-appointed group who makes the decision.
Much too little, much too late.
.org, .com, .net, .edu, are the well-known US
.mil, .int. The majority of the rest are
.nz for New Zealand.
.us domain, operationally it's not
.com, rather in the way UK
.com domains and others are crowded with all types of
.nz domain against that in .au where
.tv implied a location, after all very few .tv
.museum, .biz, .pro, .info, .aero, .name
.post, .tel, .travel, .union, .web, .xxx
.name alone, for who will be
.nz, Hamish.MacEwan.name.nz, or in France, to
.int. There they can do what they
The namespace (examples: www.name.com, www.entity.type.cc,
Hamish.MacEwan.gen.nz), which has at times attempted to by
its structure alone itself index and organise the content
on the internet, has been extended by the ICANN
organisation.
Whether these extensions will address the alledged problems
with the current architecture, is one great conjecture.
The internet name space has had only few and relatively
coarse categories,
centric Top-Level Domains (TLDs), though there are others
less well known,
ccTLDs, country top-level domains, like
While there is a
appealing and so the big four were used in preference and
have a defacto, though now diluted, US-orgin status... Fair
enough the Americans should claim
stamps bear no country of origin, they invented it, and it's
a easier privilege to grant and bear than patent or
copyright... right?
So the
business, entities, individuals, religions and this lack of
organisation is the price we pay for the rapid deployment of
the Internet services we now depend on. There is no Dewey
System for Internet, though why no one has mapped it onto
the Net (I await correction on this) I have no idea.
The organisation of the net into hierarchies, taxonomies,
rings and other structures has been performed by other
servers on the Net. Search engines, characterised by Yahoo,
which after all is an acronym for Yet Another Hierarchically
Organised Oracle.
Thus there was never a need for the namespace to be
particularly arranged, so we didn't need to wait years for
the structure to be decided, (and look how long it has taken
ICANN, and how much money, to decide on even recommending
seven categories for further negotiation), or pay for some
bureaucrat to tell us what category they decided we were in.
Compare growth in the
they have much stricter rules governing their category of the
namespace. Perhaps in a geographic and national context
such as the ccTLDs this is forgiveable, but it certainly is
not universal. The country code TLD was an easy way
to delegate responsbility, it should never have adopted the
notion that
domains have any relationship with Tuvalu beyond paying
them $US50 for a couple of years rental on the name.
And it's rewarding, find some figures on income for
countries from domain rental.
But how can you be asked to pay for what is after all only a
name? There is probably some cost, but it would be
microscopic, certain incrementally it is, but we have a long
history of renting or paying for concepts that have little
physical analogy.
After all, direct dial number from the telephone company are
only seven or eight digit numbers, and people pay extra for
them, atop the rental for the line. Stories are after all
only extensive original arrangements of words from the free
pool of language, and we pay for that.
However, after long and painful gestation and the input of
very very many cooks the broth was served and tasted by an
unelected minority of the users of the system, and a
selection of seven denominated as candidates for ascension
to TLD-hood.
What were they, what new categories were chosen to improve
the problems of the internet name space.
.coop,
If I need to explain what these extensions mean, doesn't
that immediately suggest ICANN have not simplified the
categorisation of internet names by these new extensions to
the namespace?
My reference for this is at Slashdot, and they reference and
I recommend both the C|Net article and the satire.
If I had told you the new TLDs included:
.kids,
I don't think it would be difficult to explain the probable
contents of those new domains in the namespace.
These domains were proposed and dismissed by ICANN in favour
of the first group.
They would have been categories that are relatively clear by
comparison with those anointed by ICANN, but like all
judgements subject to dispute.
Yes, there is a Roman alphabet bias, and an English language
bias, if there is to be language related domains, to which I
don't object, let's have them relative to either the
geographic area they apply to, yes each of them if there are
more than one, and an international domain, ie, maori.nz,
francaise.fr, esperanto.int.
But the point about the TLDs is that they must be
universally understood, thus their number should be limited,
so the more detailed categories can be defined locally in
the local tongue with the local alphabet.
We've done international categorisation quite well before
with the telephone network, it's namespace of course
contained only numbers, which is so much less contraversial,
due of course to it's total lack of meaning to be
misunderstood or offended at... though I recognize 13 is a
concern to some.
No-one would ever try to guess the telephone number of any
thing by knowing it's business type, and name. Guessing the
URL though, seems to be one of the goals of the new TLDs.
ICANN has been much reviled and accused, and it probably had
a chance to redeem itself with this, the most visible and
perhaps important (to them at least, though as I say, search
engines and classification sites will remain essential)
decision and output.
The belated too-little and too-late TLDs ICANN have chosen
will do nothing to improve the structure or utility of the
namespace, it will however for the chosen operators, be a
license, as a license to operate a TV station used to be, a
license to print money.
Thus, in a namespace of some importance to the planet, we
have been given seven new continents to develop and
discover.
Entry to these new lands is controlled by an organisation
that has been decried as secretive, arrogant and
slow-moving, and its selection of new TLDs only makes those
accusations more credible.
We will now no doubt be inundated with call to populate
these new spaces, from what I can see, the demand will be
small, but the necessity for some may be high. I expect
much contraversy, in
Hamish.MacEwan.name? Probably if the outcomes of ICANN's
Universal Dispute Resolution Process are anything to go by,
the richest or most famous Hamish MacEwan. Not me I fear.
Perhaps a geographic distinction will be established,
Hamish.MacEwan.nz.name, but then why couldn't that have been
left to
nom.fr?
Thus I can only conclude, the rush for TLDs is nothing but a
mercenary land grab. It is being cynically managed by
several organisations for their benefit, WIPO, WTO, and ICANN
appear to be acting in concert, with ICANN granting licenses
to print money by attempting to simultaneously extend, and
preserve the scarcity and hence value, of domain names.
If there's only one Business.com, you might pay US$7.5
million for it, but if it's merely one of many Business.????
domains, who cares?
As I see it, that's what's happened, and why. Mercifully, I
think it probably will turn out irrelevant, and those
operators of the new domains will find themselves as out of
pocket as the Telephone companies who tried to buy back their
lost wired monopolies in the recent round of 3G mobile
frequency auctions, but that's another story.
I'd suggest we freeze any further TLDs, and instead confine
ICANN, and the other international organisations to mucking
around in their own TLD,
wish without wasting and constraining the rest of us. If
they do finally come up with something useful, they can
compete like the other namespace companies.
I think the stellar example of the expansion when the end of the Earth-centric universe model moved humanity from the centre of the universe to a speck on the edge of an unfashionable arm of a totally ordinary spiral galaxy explains the change in religion as you knew it. I could believe in a God that made me centre of the universe and promised me Heaven, but not one that reduces me to the least mote in all creation.
As for the 51st State, c'mon Jon, it's the eighth continent surely?
My take on this, and other potential disasters, is that at worst it will only end life as we know it.
The "Extra Life" was no more or less than "Extra Ball" from pinball, which has been using it since Adam was a cowboy and I got 5 balls for six-pence and a "Free Game" at 1100 points.
They, like the poor in financial terms, will always be with us. Those too poor in spirit or poor in intellect to appreciate the magic of an intelligence a humanity that does not look like us.
We search the skies and science for intelligence, artificial or alien, while there are those who fear and loathe our own exotic intelligences right here on Earth.
To make them glamorous through paying them all this attention and making them forbidden, taboo, dangerous and thus elite is begging for them to gain favour.
Ignore them, they won't go away, but like the proverbial tar baby, engaging them is more trouble than it's worth. All our opposition only serves to validate their message.
A great idea, but the thrust of the NYT article seems to indicate that the "interests" of the producers are recieving more attention than those of the consumers.
The discussions between the components of the broadcast side, and the insidious notion of the PVR interpolating it's own suite of commercials suggests to me this is not the death of network television, instead it is the beginning of a fat client on that network.
Interestingly, we the consumer, are being asked to pay for this new an improved facility in exchange for some modest improvement in convenience.
The idea is marvelous, and if there were an open consumer-focussed implementation I'd applaud it even more, but it seems that we are only being granted these improvements in exchange for ceding greater advertising content control to the networks.