I'm afraid that there aren't any moral arguments than can be presented
against allowing the agencies that protect us and our children to attempt
to make the net a safer, more secure place for everyone. Strawman
arguments for privacy only benefit those with something to hide, and
allow criminals and terrorists to plan their campaigns behind the shield
of anonymity. If we were supposed to be able to hide our wrongdoings,
the Lord wouldn't have made us all different.
Anonymous mailers, encryption, and online security is just the application of the ideals of privacy and personal rights in our technological society. Certainly they are used by criminals, in much the same way criminals now use banks, cars, and hand tools to perpetrate their crimes. At some point, the majority of the online population will be computer savvy enough to use these tools. That is the goal of the developers, to make online security and privacy as available as physical security and privacy.
I'll accept the risks. I'll do my best to prevent other people from making that decision for me.
They're coming for the privacy nuts now. Who's going to be left when they
come for you?
Hmm.. At work there is a 4 cpu HP K580 system. It has 3 gig of RAM and fastboot enabled, which is supposed to speed up the process, however, it still takes about 1/2 hour to boot. I've also seen a horribly misconfigured tandem box (running SII software) that took 2 hours from power on till all the systems (partitions/zones whatever you call them) were up.
There was a rather interesting bit in the book "Hackers" (Steven Levy, 1994) about Bill and his version of (IIRC) BASIC for the Altair. It seems he wrote it, and tried to sell it for ~$80. In the end, everybody just made a copy from someone else's copy (as they did with all of their hacks) without paying Bill. This could have been the starting point of Bill's dislike of open-source, and the attitudes it inspires.
I'd have to agree that I don't think ICANN will be much better.
It seems up till now it's just been eccentrics or idealists and greedy corporations working towards replacing the roots and adding additional gTLD's. Perhaps the ongoing showdown between ICANN and NSI will force more of the pragmatists that are actually running the net to look at alternatives. Perhaps Vixie will start bundling pointers to alternative roots with the BIND distribution. Perhaps I'm also becoming an idealist.....
While it's true that individual admins can point their name servers at any roots, the problem lies in reaching critical mass. Until such a time as enough people are using the new roots (and thus the new tld's) to make it a viable alternative, there will not be large scale support.
This is the same problem the government would face if they were to set up new root servers. This is why ICANN is working hard to wrestle administrative control of the existing root servers away from NSI.
So far as just running the root, the bandwidth and administrative costs are not nearly as high as you think. The majority of the traffic going to the existing roots is for the gTLD queries. A name server need only query the root when the root name servers expire, or when somebody misspells a tld.
The Internet Namespace Cooperative is one of the alternative roots out there, already running a root with more gTLD's, and servers on several continents. This may be biased, since I'm a member of this effort.
Slashdot Mirror
Anonymous mailers, encryption, and online security is just the application of the ideals of privacy and personal rights in our technological society. Certainly they are used by criminals, in much the same way criminals now use banks, cars, and hand tools to perpetrate their crimes. At some point, the majority of the online population will be computer savvy enough to use these tools. That is the goal of the developers, to make online security and privacy as available as physical security and privacy.
I'll accept the risks. I'll do my best to prevent other people from making that decision for me.
They're coming for the privacy nuts now. Who's going to be left when they come for you?
Hmm.. At work there is a 4 cpu HP K580 system. It has 3 gig of RAM and fastboot enabled, which is supposed to speed up the process, however, it still takes about 1/2 hour to boot. I've also seen a horribly misconfigured tandem box (running SII software) that took 2 hours from power on till all the systems (partitions/zones whatever you call them) were up.
There was a rather interesting bit in the book "Hackers" (Steven Levy, 1994) about Bill and his version of (IIRC) BASIC for the Altair. It seems he wrote it, and tried to sell it for ~$80. In the end, everybody just made a copy from someone else's copy (as they did with all of their hacks) without paying Bill. This could have been the starting point of Bill's dislike of open-source, and the attitudes it inspires.
I'd have to agree that I don't think ICANN will be much better.
It seems up till now it's just been eccentrics or idealists and greedy corporations working towards replacing the roots and adding additional gTLD's. Perhaps the ongoing showdown between ICANN and NSI will force more of the pragmatists that are actually running the net to look at alternatives. Perhaps Vixie will start bundling pointers to alternative roots with the BIND distribution. Perhaps I'm also becoming an idealist.....
While it's true that individual admins can point their name servers at any roots, the problem lies in reaching critical mass. Until such a time as enough people are using the new roots (and thus the new tld's) to make it a viable alternative, there will not be large scale support.
This is the same problem the government would face if they were to set up new root servers. This is why ICANN is working hard to wrestle administrative control of the existing root servers away from NSI.
So far as just running the root, the bandwidth and administrative costs are not nearly as high as you think. The majority of the traffic going to the existing roots is for the gTLD queries. A name server need only query the root when the root name servers expire, or when somebody misspells a tld.
The Internet Namespace Cooperative is one of the alternative roots out there, already running a root with more gTLD's, and servers on several continents. This may be biased, since I'm a member of this effort.