Re:I said it before, and I'll say it again...
on
Legitimacy Of ICANN?
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· Score: 2
No, you are wrong. The Network Solutions registry and the Network Solutions registrar are two different divisions, for instance. And of the new ICANN approved registries, none are registrars (allthough some are owned wholly or in part by registrars). In the case of.name for instance (I work for the company that got the license for that), we are not a registrar and we have no registrars among our owners.
Re:I said it before, and I'll say it again...
on
Legitimacy Of ICANN?
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· Score: 2
And you say your company got.name. I'm sorry, but that's as useless as.tel.
Tell that to the registrars - they're drowning in preregistrations.
And yes,you did confuse a registrar with a registry, as you did again in this post. A registrar does NOT run any registries. In fact, there are severe limitations in the ICANN contracts on even cooperation between registrars and registries. Afilias for instance, had to spend a lot of work on ensuring ICANN that it's owners (registrars) would not get unfair access to the registry because of their status as shareholders.
These requirements from ICANN is also why Network Solution operates the registry and registrar as two separate departments with separate employees working on it, and very limited information flow
between them.
A registrar and registry can possibly be part of the same company, but they are completely different roles and require clear separation of work and information flow to be accepted by ICANN.
Well. ICANN is not a part of the US government, but it is still supervised by the US government.
The current incarnation of ICANN is a result of a compromise between the US and the rest of the world (who would presumably have preferred something with less US influence), since the US government has been very reluctant to give up control over central parts of the internet infrastructure.
ICANN has wide freedom to act, but has to get approval from the US Department of Commerce, so that the US government can override anything they might want to do that may seem to threatening to US interests.
Clue2: Part of the work that ICANN has done has been to ensure that Network Solutions have had to separate their registry and registrar businesses, and to get their registrar division competition by allowing more registrars equal access to their registry.
The internic did not "turn into Network Solutions", Internic was run by Network Solution under a contract with the NSF.
And if anyone attached aritrary limits on it, it
was the US government, not Network Solutions.
Re:If you don't like the news, make some of your o
on
Legitimacy Of ICANN?
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· Score: 2
Anybody can start their own TLD (even with the same name), and any network is able to choose which root servers to recognize.
And (surprise), most people use the global root that is under ICANNs administration, because most people only care about being able to rely on a domain name getting them to the same place no matter where they type it in.
First of all, ICANN doesn't "enter stuff into a central system". ICANN isn't a registry - they oversee and regulate registries and registrars working with TLDs in the global root servers.
Second, none of the registries get paid 70 bucks to enter anything in their databases. If you go to www.icann.org and look at the posted contracts and contract proposals, you'll find that the prices for the registries lie around 4-6 dollars per domain per year. (Also not that the prices negotiated between the registries and ICANN are maximum prices - the registries can lower prices but not increase them beyond that point)
Now, this is not just for registration, but to cover the infrastructure for modifications, whois lookups and the operating the DNS servers for the TLD under very strict quality of service requirements. The registries may loose their TLDs if they can't provide the level of service required by ICANN.
ICANN also impose restrictions on behaviour, business arrangements the registry may enter into,
and requires that the registry gives fair and equal treatment to all registrars. All of this because the registries effectively get a monopoly
on their TLD in the contract period.
When you buy a domain, you do so from a registrar. And the registrars, however, does not have any price limitations, since they aren't in a monopoly situation. Thus if you're unhappy about the price you get at a registrar, you can find another one.
(ObDisclaimer: I work for the company that got.name, but the above are personal opinions)
Uhm. The DNS root has been administered by the
US government since inception. As someone from outside the US I may not be happy with that, and would even prefer to see it handed over to an organization not related to the US government.
That wish from governments and institutions all over the world was what led the US government to form ICANN. No, ICANN is not independent of the US government. No, it does not have complete freedom. No, it is not a democratic organization where everyone gets to vote for the entire leadership.
But it is immensely more open that how it was before, when the process was completely closed for the public eyes and controlled exclusively by the US government.
It's a first step. Instead of crying about how bad ICANN is, why don't you suggest some constructive changes instead, and maybe more people would bother listening.
Re:I said it before, and I'll say it again...
on
Legitimacy Of ICANN?
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· Score: 2
Try not spewing silly errors like this, will you?
We got.biz. We got.info. We did not get.tel and.news. In addition to.biz/.info we also got.name (which I work for) for personal domain names,.aero specifically for the aerospace industry,.coop specifically for cooperatives,.museum specificall for museums, and.pro for licensed professionals (engineers, lawyers, doctors etc.).
Not expanding the potential web real estate?
And throughout your post you confuse registrars and registries all the time.
In addition, the selection process looked at the quality of the registry (because it would be no point choosing a new TLD if the company willing to operate it was incapable of doing so properly and fairly), whether the domain had an interesting concept, to what degree they differentiated themselves from the others (.name for instance is restricted to personal names and names of fictional characters, and only allows registrations on third level).
But yes, the quality of the registry was one of the factors. Would you like to buy a domain name that's only available every other day because the registry chosen turned out to be incapable of running it?
The 50.000 (not 10.000) USD requirement was a processing fee intended at ensuring that only people economically capable of running a registry would bother applying.
Another thing you've apparently not understood is that this is a proof of concept phase: It is a way for ICANN to see a) whether there's a market for new TLDs, or whether people will just stick with.com etc., b) whether their procedures - both technical and legal - are good enough to handle more TLDs, and c) whether they are capable of choosing registries that are capable of actually running a TLD linked into the global root.
The intent is that once ICANN gets some experience with the seven new gTLDs, that they will open up for more applications, and perhaps even a less stringent selection process.
You may have reasons to criticize ICANN, but at least have your facts straight before you do, or you'll just look like a moron.
(Ob disclaimer: I'm in charge of development at GNR, the company that got.name, so I'm kinda biased:-)
Because the purpose is to get experience with superconducting power cables in a production environment, as a first step towards using superconducting cables on a wider scale.
Personally I think a lot of people would give good money for some of what you're smoking...
<sarcasm>
Supercomputers to calculate? Yeah right. Guess they had lots of processing power during the Mercury and Apollo programs, because obviously
NASA must have access to alien technology that are
much more advanced than what the rest of the world had at that time.
</sarcasm>
Actually, first of all, the radius had been reasonably accurately calculated by several people in Europe as well, much closer to Columbus time, and in fact this was one of the objections that was raised at Salamanca: That he chose to ignore well founded recent calculations. Actually, the more common theory of why he used the wrong number is based on indications that he studied Ptolemy's works on geography, not Erastothenes.
Secondly, the Portuguese were active in parts of the Northern Atlantic in the 1400's, and increasing rapidly thereafter, particularly due to several expeditions searching for a northwest passage. Now, why they would search for that in the shores around Greenland, if they at the time did not have knowledge that America likely stretched far north, is an interesting question.
There are claims concerning Columbus visiting both Greenland and Iceland.
Much of this is of dubious quality, though, and I'm certainly not judging their quality, but it is an interesting theory whether correct or not.
While brining up more or less weird theories, though, there's a few people that have presented a theory that Columbus was originally Scandinavian, member of an important family with roots in royalty throughout Europe.
Decide for yourself whether to laugh at a funny story, or believe there's something in it. But either way, history from that far back isn't always as straightforward as people tend to
think - there are very few parts of history from that time period that is comprehensively documented in trustworthy sources.
Actually, there are some that believe Columbus were looking for a "New World", since he apparently did visit a small Portuguese colony on Greenland during his research for the voyage, and some claim he there must have heard about the viking stories about a land in the west, and may even have had a map giving some indications of distance.
Which might explain why he insisted that well founded claims that China was to far away were wrong (remember: The radius of earth was had been calculated to a reasonable accuracy many centuries before Columbus). It was much easier to fund a trip to China, which after Marco Polo was famed in Europe for it's riches, than fund a trip to somewhere unknown, that most learned people would insist probably didn't even exist.
Think. Most security breaches are a result of employees stealing data, whether for profit or
just to wreak havoc with an employer they don't
like. Also, what happens if an employer dies,
and important documents can't be accessed because
the encryption keys aren't available?
It may be excessive to prevent all encryption, but
at the very least I'd consider requiring all employees to deposit any keys used, and verify that in the mail gateway.
It may save you later, when trying to get at those
documents, or prove to a court that your employee
did in fact steal documents before leaving for a
competitor.
Civilization: Call To Power is a different game based on the same principles. If you tried playing
it after Civilization II style assumptions, then
I don't doubt it would suck:-)
Personally I like it, but I keep switching between
it and Freeciv - they're more different in gameplay than in quality, IMHO.
Ahem, are you stupid or something? How could this possibly be viewed as anything other than a direct threat? Do you actually mean to tell me you believe this is some pathetic attempt to describe a way to improve the functioning of the organization?
I guess this shows how CoS brainwashing works. If you really believed the text you quoted was a threat to anyones life, and you actually did read the rest of the post, I'm amazed at the lack of logic thinking you're showing.
The line in question was directly connected to a post that described a legal attack at the CoS aimed at damaging the organization - not any actual person. Now, using a lawsuit to attempt to
kill off the CoS would be perfectly legal to do,
and does not involve a threat to anyones life.
I guess perhaps your grasp of the English language might be too weak for you to realize that "kill" actually doesn't have to mean "take the life of a living being", but can refer to almost any act of
ending the life or existence of a something living but also inanimate objects, or abstract ideas.
I can't but feel pity at anyone tricked into CoS, and CoS is certainly one of the few "religious" organizations I actually would support looking into banning. Anyone should be free to teach whatever knowledge or ideas they want, but they should not be free to use brainwashing techniques
to do it.
Actually, come to think of it, I wonder if anyone
has brought charges against the CoS for illegal use of hypnosis or similar techniques in countries with restrictions on it. Norway for instance have
very strict rules about the use of hypnosis, and
provided it could be shown that the CoS brainwash
techniques uses hypnotic techniques (which is not
far fetched, if you've ever read any descriptions
on their "courses"), it's quite possible that they
could be found guilty of illegal use of hypnosis
in Norway.
It could have been an option, but to many it would
reduce the value of the service and make them
resort to another TLD instead.
It may be an option in the future, perhaps particularly to deal with the John Smiths, or other people stuck with very common names.
But in any case we would need to get ICANN to buy
into something like that too - ICANN impose a
lot of restrictions on us (and the other gTLD
operators), because we don't have any competition
within our namespace. That includes for instance
quality requirements, but also limits on how much we are allowed to charge for services, and how the
service we provides should be structured.
And there are other ways of expanding the namespace too: Allowing registrations under.name, or applying for more TLD strings in other languages. We're not going to
do either from the outset, but if people like the
service, and ICANN is favorable to it, who knows.
We're also running a free webmail with 1.2 million users on personal domain names (we have thousands of common lastnames on various TLDs) The lesson?
People find ways. They either use nicknames, middle initials, fully spelled out middle names, alternate spellings, etc.
Also, in some countries lastnames aren't commonly
used, and people normally use different denotations as a replacement depending on usage,
and hence have a large set of options for choosing
a name to find something that doesn't clash.
Further countries (at least Spanish and Portuguese speaking, which account for a few hundred million
people), can use one, two or four last names depending on whether they use only their fathers first lastname, their mother and their fathers first lastnames, or the first and last of both.
The last option is uncommon, but even the first two reduce the problem of duplicates immensely.
Based on the research done for that we also have perhaps the worlds best statistics on occurence of names, and by far most of the worlds population have rather uncommon name combinations. For the
ones that don't (like John Smith, of which there
are at least 50.000), it will undoubtably be a
bit more difficult, and they might end up having
to resort to another TLD to get their "ideal"
domain.
Alternatively, all countrycodes are reserved, and
if we are allowed to, we may in the future allow
registrations under.name as well, or
apply for different language TLD strings (.jina,.nom etc.), and that might expand the personal
namespace further. Obviously this relies on ICANNs
support for it.
Actually, the company I work for was awarded the
".name" TLD expressly for the purpose of providing
personal domains based on names only. The names
will be registered on third level. For example
"vidar.hokstad.name", to allow people to also
share the second level for e-mail (I'd could
register vidar@hokstad.name to forward to any
address I'd like, and use vidar.hokstad.name as
my domain name).
The ".name" TLD will give preferential treatment
to persons who can demonstrate that the name they register is their personal name, or a nickname
they use.
Uhmm. I guess you're right. Maybe we just just
switch off that nasty internet, and get rid of
the DNS system that the US government funded
development and initial deployment of...
I don't like the US government, but pretending
that government involvement in Internet and the
DNS system is new shows an amusing lack of knowledge of recent history.
This is a proof of concept phase, where ICANN
are trying out a few different models and wants
to see that it actually can deal with getting new
gTLDs up and running safely, before they do any
larger rollouts.
Since you bring up runways and South America, the
obvious plateau to bring up would be Nasca, which
is very real, very big, and unfortunately for the
UFO fanatics has a number of very plausible
explanations that are quite a bit more earthly.
Däniken is one of the many authors who have claimed they were runways.
Among the reasons to take his theories with a bucket or two of salt (even if one disregards his
other examples of blatant ignorance about how
to present a credible "proof") one find interesting discoveries that show that a large
portion of the lines connects sites of importance to the old Nasca culture, such as buildings of religious importance, water sources etc.. That
explains most of the straight lines.
As for the figures, one of the more credible theories is that they were used for seremonies. There are indications of seremonies that involved
walking along the lines of the figures, that are consistent with other findings at the Cahuachi site, the ruins of a city now believed to be
a religious center for the Nasca culture.
Dänikens central thesis, which is nothing more than ignorant conjecture, is that the figures must have been created by ETs, or with the help of ETs because no humans where capable of doing so at the time. Which is the same as assuming that a nobody at that time had ever tried what even many
children discover by themselves: Using rope, wire
or thread to scale a figure.
Slashdot Mirror
No, you are wrong. The Network Solutions registry and the Network Solutions registrar are two different divisions, for instance. And of the new ICANN approved registries, none are registrars (allthough some are owned wholly or in part by registrars). In the case of .name for instance (I work for the company that got the license for that), we are not a registrar and we have no registrars among our owners.
Tell that to the registrars - they're drowning in preregistrations.
And yes,you did confuse a registrar with a registry, as you did again in this post. A registrar does NOT run any registries. In fact, there are severe limitations in the ICANN contracts on even cooperation between registrars and registries. Afilias for instance, had to spend a lot of work on ensuring ICANN that it's owners (registrars) would not get unfair access to the registry because of their status as shareholders.
These requirements from ICANN is also why Network Solution operates the registry and registrar as two separate departments with separate employees working on it, and very limited information flow between them.
A registrar and registry can possibly be part of the same company, but they are completely different roles and require clear separation of work and information flow to be accepted by ICANN.
The current incarnation of ICANN is a result of a compromise between the US and the rest of the world (who would presumably have preferred something with less US influence), since the US government has been very reluctant to give up control over central parts of the internet infrastructure.
ICANN has wide freedom to act, but has to get approval from the US Department of Commerce, so that the US government can override anything they might want to do that may seem to threatening to US interests.
Clue2: Part of the work that ICANN has done has been to ensure that Network Solutions have had to separate their registry and registrar businesses, and to get their registrar division competition by allowing more registrars equal access to their registry.
And if anyone attached aritrary limits on it, it was the US government, not Network Solutions.
And (surprise), most people use the global root that is under ICANNs administration, because most people only care about being able to rely on a domain name getting them to the same place no matter where they type it in.
Second, none of the registries get paid 70 bucks to enter anything in their databases. If you go to www.icann.org and look at the posted contracts and contract proposals, you'll find that the prices for the registries lie around 4-6 dollars per domain per year. (Also not that the prices negotiated between the registries and ICANN are maximum prices - the registries can lower prices but not increase them beyond that point)
Now, this is not just for registration, but to cover the infrastructure for modifications, whois lookups and the operating the DNS servers for the TLD under very strict quality of service requirements. The registries may loose their TLDs if they can't provide the level of service required by ICANN.
ICANN also impose restrictions on behaviour, business arrangements the registry may enter into, and requires that the registry gives fair and equal treatment to all registrars. All of this because the registries effectively get a monopoly on their TLD in the contract period.
When you buy a domain, you do so from a registrar. And the registrars, however, does not have any price limitations, since they aren't in a monopoly situation. Thus if you're unhappy about the price you get at a registrar, you can find another one.
(ObDisclaimer: I work for the company that got .name, but the above are personal opinions)
That wish from governments and institutions all over the world was what led the US government to form ICANN. No, ICANN is not independent of the US government. No, it does not have complete freedom. No, it is not a democratic organization where everyone gets to vote for the entire leadership.
But it is immensely more open that how it was before, when the process was completely closed for the public eyes and controlled exclusively by the US government.
It's a first step. Instead of crying about how bad ICANN is, why don't you suggest some constructive changes instead, and maybe more people would bother listening.
We got .biz. We got .info. We did not get .tel and .news. In addition to .biz/.info we also got .name (which I work for) for personal domain names, .aero specifically for the aerospace industry, .coop specifically for cooperatives, .museum specificall for museums, and .pro for licensed professionals (engineers, lawyers, doctors etc.).
Not expanding the potential web real estate?
And throughout your post you confuse registrars and registries all the time.
In addition, the selection process looked at the quality of the registry (because it would be no point choosing a new TLD if the company willing to operate it was incapable of doing so properly and fairly), whether the domain had an interesting concept, to what degree they differentiated themselves from the others (.name for instance is restricted to personal names and names of fictional characters, and only allows registrations on third level).
But yes, the quality of the registry was one of the factors. Would you like to buy a domain name that's only available every other day because the registry chosen turned out to be incapable of running it?
The 50.000 (not 10.000) USD requirement was a processing fee intended at ensuring that only people economically capable of running a registry would bother applying.
Another thing you've apparently not understood is that this is a proof of concept phase: It is a way for ICANN to see a) whether there's a market for new TLDs, or whether people will just stick with .com etc., b) whether their procedures - both technical and legal - are good enough to handle more TLDs, and c) whether they are capable of choosing registries that are capable of actually running a TLD linked into the global root.
The intent is that once ICANN gets some experience with the seven new gTLDs, that they will open up for more applications, and perhaps even a less stringent selection process.
You may have reasons to criticize ICANN, but at least have your facts straight before you do, or you'll just look like a moron.
(Ob disclaimer: I'm in charge of development at GNR, the company that got .name, so I'm kinda biased :-)
Because the purpose is to get experience with superconducting power cables in a production environment, as a first step towards using superconducting cables on a wider scale.
<sarcasm> Supercomputers to calculate? Yeah right. Guess they had lots of processing power during the Mercury and Apollo programs, because obviously NASA must have access to alien technology that are much more advanced than what the rest of the world had at that time. </sarcasm>
While that reader might not mind, I would expect VA to mind.
Ehh. No. Aimster is an independent company. The Aimster software does piggyback on AIM to create it's networks, but that's their only connection.
Secondly, the Portuguese were active in parts of the Northern Atlantic in the 1400's, and increasing rapidly thereafter, particularly due to several expeditions searching for a northwest passage. Now, why they would search for that in the shores around Greenland, if they at the time did not have knowledge that America likely stretched far north, is an interesting question.
There are claims concerning Columbus visiting both Greenland and Iceland.
Some claims about Portuguese activity in the North Atlantic can be found here: a message referring to claims about Portuguese slave traders, an article (in Norwegian, unfortunately) referring to theories about Columbus reaching Labrador in 1477, with subsequent Portuguese activity in the Northern regions as a result, a claim that Vatican records tells of a slaving raid in 1418, and information about a possible Portuguese expedition to Greenland around 1479, an article about possible contact between Columbus and Vikings on Iceland, based on memoirs written down by his son.
Much of this is of dubious quality, though, and I'm certainly not judging their quality, but it is an interesting theory whether correct or not.
While brining up more or less weird theories, though, there's a few people that have presented a theory that Columbus was originally Scandinavian, member of an important family with roots in royalty throughout Europe.
Decide for yourself whether to laugh at a funny story, or believe there's something in it. But either way, history from that far back isn't always as straightforward as people tend to think - there are very few parts of history from that time period that is comprehensively documented in trustworthy sources.
Which might explain why he insisted that well founded claims that China was to far away were wrong (remember: The radius of earth was had been calculated to a reasonable accuracy many centuries before Columbus). It was much easier to fund a trip to China, which after Marco Polo was famed in Europe for it's riches, than fund a trip to somewhere unknown, that most learned people would insist probably didn't even exist.
It may be excessive to prevent all encryption, but at the very least I'd consider requiring all employees to deposit any keys used, and verify that in the mail gateway.
It may save you later, when trying to get at those documents, or prove to a court that your employee did in fact steal documents before leaving for a competitor.
Personally I like it, but I keep switching between it and Freeciv - they're more different in gameplay than in quality, IMHO.
I guess this shows how CoS brainwashing works. If you really believed the text you quoted was a threat to anyones life, and you actually did read the rest of the post, I'm amazed at the lack of logic thinking you're showing.
The line in question was directly connected to a post that described a legal attack at the CoS aimed at damaging the organization - not any actual person. Now, using a lawsuit to attempt to kill off the CoS would be perfectly legal to do, and does not involve a threat to anyones life.
I guess perhaps your grasp of the English language might be too weak for you to realize that "kill" actually doesn't have to mean "take the life of a living being", but can refer to almost any act of ending the life or existence of a something living but also inanimate objects, or abstract ideas.
I can't but feel pity at anyone tricked into CoS, and CoS is certainly one of the few "religious" organizations I actually would support looking into banning. Anyone should be free to teach whatever knowledge or ideas they want, but they should not be free to use brainwashing techniques to do it.
Actually, come to think of it, I wonder if anyone has brought charges against the CoS for illegal use of hypnosis or similar techniques in countries with restrictions on it. Norway for instance have very strict rules about the use of hypnosis, and provided it could be shown that the CoS brainwash techniques uses hypnotic techniques (which is not far fetched, if you've ever read any descriptions on their "courses"), it's quite possible that they could be found guilty of illegal use of hypnosis in Norway.
It may be an option in the future, perhaps particularly to deal with the John Smiths, or other people stuck with very common names.
But in any case we would need to get ICANN to buy into something like that too - ICANN impose a lot of restrictions on us (and the other gTLD operators), because we don't have any competition within our namespace. That includes for instance quality requirements, but also limits on how much we are allowed to charge for services, and how the service we provides should be structured.
And there are other ways of expanding the namespace too: Allowing registrations under .name, or applying for more TLD strings in other languages. We're not going to
do either from the outset, but if people like the
service, and ICANN is favorable to it, who knows.
Also, in some countries lastnames aren't commonly used, and people normally use different denotations as a replacement depending on usage, and hence have a large set of options for choosing a name to find something that doesn't clash.
Further countries (at least Spanish and Portuguese speaking, which account for a few hundred million people), can use one, two or four last names depending on whether they use only their fathers first lastname, their mother and their fathers first lastnames, or the first and last of both. The last option is uncommon, but even the first two reduce the problem of duplicates immensely.
Based on the research done for that we also have perhaps the worlds best statistics on occurence of names, and by far most of the worlds population have rather uncommon name combinations. For the ones that don't (like John Smith, of which there are at least 50.000), it will undoubtably be a bit more difficult, and they might end up having to resort to another TLD to get their "ideal" domain.
Alternatively, all countrycodes are reserved, and if we are allowed to, we may in the future allow registrations under .name as well, or
apply for different language TLD strings (.jina, .nom etc.), and that might expand the personal
namespace further. Obviously this relies on ICANNs
support for it.
The ".name" TLD will give preferential treatment to persons who can demonstrate that the name they register is their personal name, or a nickname they use.
Take a look at our webpage
I don't like the US government, but pretending that government involvement in Internet and the DNS system is new shows an amusing lack of knowledge of recent history.
This is a proof of concept phase, where ICANN are trying out a few different models and wants to see that it actually can deal with getting new gTLDs up and running safely, before they do any larger rollouts.
Däniken is one of the many authors who have claimed they were runways.
Among the reasons to take his theories with a bucket or two of salt (even if one disregards his other examples of blatant ignorance about how to present a credible "proof") one find interesting discoveries that show that a large portion of the lines connects sites of importance to the old Nasca culture, such as buildings of religious importance, water sources etc.. That explains most of the straight lines.
As for the figures, one of the more credible theories is that they were used for seremonies. There are indications of seremonies that involved walking along the lines of the figures, that are consistent with other findings at the Cahuachi site, the ruins of a city now believed to be a religious center for the Nasca culture.
Dänikens central thesis, which is nothing more than ignorant conjecture, is that the figures must have been created by ETs, or with the help of ETs because no humans where capable of doing so at the time. Which is the same as assuming that a nobody at that time had ever tried what even many children discover by themselves: Using rope, wire or thread to scale a figure.
Neither of those will usually comprise the majority of usage, though.