Use the Wayback Machine to take a look at Dr. Pearson's predictions circa 1997. Not very accurate so far, and that's just trying to go 5 years in the future. On this basis I don't think he has much credibility for his future predictions.
This is the software for the Freedom server. To make it into a useful system, people need to coordinate to run the servers as part of an interconnected network. There needs to be some centralized place where the client software can locate lists of servers in order to choose its routes.
And speaking of the client, has its code ever been released? I know at one point they did release code for a Linux client, but what about Windows?
Freedom also used a "Nym" concept where customers paid for Nyms. When you browsed on the net or sent email through a chain of Freedom servers, the last server in the chain learned your Nym (but not your true identity). Then if you had misused the service, your Nym could be cancelled. This provided some protection against servers in the network, because users would not want to lose Nyms, as they cost real money.
In an open source Freedom network, what would replace the Nym concept? Would server operators no longer have this protection, so that spam or hacking could go through their systems and there is no way to stop the people involved, who are hidden at the other end of a chain of Freedom servers? Or would they coordinate to set up a centralized Nym server and perhaps even require a monetary donation to purchase a Nym, in order to discourage abuse?
Many questions remain to be resolved before even this generous release of source code can replace the service formerly offered by ZKS.
Ted Nelson's original Xanadu concept anticipated this controversy. He advocated what he called "transclusion", which is similar to this concept of taking someone else's published data and embedding it into your own document. Nelson proposed that transclusion should be a built-in feature of the system and that contractual relationships should govern its use. People would get royalties when their published data was transcluded within someone else's site. Of course his whole system was built around a pay per view model, so the main issue was how to distribute the payments from viewers.
Xanadu had many problems of course, which is why it never went anywhere, but it seems that on this issue it was way ahead of the Web. A universal system for negotiable royalty payments would be more flexible and adaptable than the kinds of legal prohibitions which are evolving today.
You could do worse than look at what Alan Kay is involved with. Kay is a true computer pioneer and has from the beginning focussed on children as users of computers. His goal is to empower them by giving them new kinds of tools that let them create, not locking them into predefined worlds.
His current project is Squeak, which is designed to let kids create dynamic documents, games and worlds and interact with them.
Teaching kids to use technology as creators rather than as passive consumers would be one of the most important lessons you could present.
My Gnutella client (LimeWire) won't let me search for episodes of "24" because it requires searches to be at least 3 characters "to avoid congesting the network". That's tough, because they don't show reruns and if you miss an episode, good luck catching up.
But maybe that's the solution for TV producers: make all your show titles 1 or 2 characters long. Either that or just call the show "Sex" or "Porn". Nobody will ever find it.
Despite the fact that people with low IQ scores tend to reproduce faster than people with high scores, it is a myth that people are becoming less intelligent. In fact, the opposite is the case.
The Flynn effect, discovered by James Flynn, shows that IQ test scores have been increasing 5 to 25 points per generation in every country which has been studied, over the past century. The average person today would score at near-genius levels on tests of a century ago.
And don't think it's just that we get more schooling today. The greatest increases are on those subtests which have the least reliance on concrete knowledge, tests which are purely abstract and require people to look for patterns and solve problems in a flexible way. That's exactly what most people mean by "intelligence".
The Flynn effect is not widely known, perhaps because people prefer to believe that the world is getting worse. The idea that we are getting smarter doesn't fit with our prejudices. If people would come to understand and believe the truth about human progress in the past century they might have a clearer understanding of the future which lies ahead. Our descendants will be smarter, richer, and more talented than we can imagine.
TiVo continues to make some inroads into popular culture. On the Friends rerun last night, Rachel is afraid to tell her father that she is pregnant. She starts out bravely but then chickens out: "I got... Tivo." Her father: "Tivo?! What's Tivo?" Phoebe helps out: "It's slang for 'pregnant'."
I control my online time - not AOL, not MS, not Earthlink, X10, Slashdot, or The Onion.
Absolutely. The reason people are spending time at a smaller number of sites is because those sites are improving their service and quality so as to attract more people. These sites are simply out-competing others for online viewers. It means the web is getting better, not worse.
Ironically, just as technology has advanced to the point where distributed, grass-roots surveillance ("sousveillance") is becoming possible, it has simultaneously advanced to the point where faking video is equally becoming possible.
Within a few years, unauthenticated video footage will be useless, because anyone will be able to conjure up whatever fakery they like. All those underground sousveillance cameras will be producing data which could have been made just as easily on a high end workstation.
Only authenticated video will be trusted. That means that the police and government will trust their own video cameras and be able to use them at trial. But video records from private citizens will be no better than hearsay.
Technology giveth, and technology taketh away. So it will always be.
"They don't think that reverse engineering for system interoperability should be illegal.
Also specifically protected by the DMCA."
Then how come the DeCSS thing is such a problem? Perhaps because the DMCA does in fact protect against circumventing protective measures on Copyrighted materials?
The legality of DeCSS has yet to be established. All of the court proceedings so far are preliminary.
In fact, one of the main issues in controversy is whether DeCSS was intended for the purpose of system interoperability. Defenders of DeCSS argue that in fact it was created by reverse engineering Windows software for the purpose of creating Linux DVD viewers. Opponents of the program argue that it was created to allow copying movies from DVD disks and sharing them illegally. They point to the fact that the initial release was on Windows and was associated with hackers (using the term in the pejorative sense).
In fact DeCSS can be used for both purposes, which makes the interoperability defense somewhat problematic. If it could only be used for interoperability then the defense would be much stronger. But since it can facilitate privacy as well, the defense may not work. It appears that the court is leaning towards this view given the preliminary decisions.
The news today is that your lawsuit has been dismissed; you have lost this first round. No doubt you will appeal, but it seems that the main legal issue is that the chilling effect has been completely hypothetical. You feared that you would be sued, and you have many statements from other researchers sharing these concerns, but no one has actually been sued yet.
It appears that until you or some other legitimate researcher goes forward with publication and is sued or prosecuted for it, the courts may think you are just crying wolf to try to get a law you don't like changed. A number of researchers have stated that they now intend to stop working on analyzing content protection. If this court decision is upheld, that will prevent the DMCA from being overturned.
Are you willing to go forward with research and publication in violation of the DMCA? The only way to stop you then will be to actually use the DMCA against you, and it can finally be tested in court. Will you take this risk when so many researchers are backing away?
Providing 'fair-use' was never something these companies were requried to do. Fair use is not something they give you or permit you to do..
it's something copyright law says you are allowed to do, period.
To clarify, copyright law says that you can't be sued for making fair use of copyrighted materials. It does not obligate the copyright holder to make it easy for you to make such use, it just says that you can't be sued if you do. However as you say the DMCA adds additional restrictions on what you can do in terms of circumventing restriction technology.
Anybody notice the spelling and grammatical errors the appellate court pointed out in the trial court's injunction? The trial court thought license was spelled licence, and referred to "both" alternatives when listing four of them. It made the trial court judge look illiterate.
Judges hate to be reversed, and here the appeals court not only overturns the injunction but also points out that the judge can't spell or write.
Do I have a right to speak to my woman friend or wife or children in private? If I do, then I have the right to unbreakable encryption.
You don't have this right if a law enforcement agency has obtained permission to tap your telephone line via a court order.
Of course you do! You can say anything you like to your wife in private. You can walk outside and talk together, you can whisper, you have many ways of communicating in private.
All the court order can do is to allow monitoring of certain kinds of communication. It can't force you to communicate in such a way as to help the people doing the monitoring. They can't force you to speak loudly and clearly, or to avoid the use of personal references that the eavesdroppers can't understand. The subject is under no obligation whatsoever with regard to his communications. He can do anything he likes. All the court can do is to give law enforcement the permission to try to capture and understand certain of his communications.
They used the mouse cells because they were necessary for the human stem cells to grow. There is some unknown process or chemical that the mouse cells provide.
So if new stem cell lines were allowed, it still wouldn't help, because the mouse cells still have to be used, right? The article makes it sound like the restriction to old stem cells is causing the problem, but what is the alternative? If we still have to use the mouse cells, then even if new stem cell lines were allowed, we'd still have the problem.
I don't want someone else looking at my page to see anything other than what I put in there. There's reasons I pay for my web hosting instead of just using a geocities-like service.
You are overreaching. By your reasoning it is illegal for the user to squint when he looks at your page. Users can view your page any way they want to. They can use any fonts they like, they can set any colors they like. They can cover up parts of the page, they can refrain from scrolling to see parts. You have no right to stop them from doing any of these things.
Furthermore you have no right to stop users from installing software which makes these kinds of modifications. All you can do is send him a data stream. You can't stop him from looking at it any way he wants to. The user is not your slave.
No, the shower actually peaked Wednesday night / Thursday morning. See this page on the Bootids, which explains that the maximum of activity falls on the 28th.
It would have been nice if the article had given more than a few hours' notice but it was not 24 hours out of date as was claimed.
The analysis misunderstands one of the most fundamental principles of the PGP trust model: trust is not transitive.
What this means is that if Alice trusts Bob to sign keys, and Bob trusts Carol, Alice does not automatically trust Carol. She may not even know Carol. Just because Bob trusts her, that doesn't necessarily mean that Alice should trust her.
After all, Alice is trusting Bob to accurately sign keys. She judges in her own mind how trustworthy and reliable he is at this task. How likely is he to screw up and sign a bogus key? These are the issues she considers.
To have transitive trust, she needs to make a much more careful evaluation of Bob. She must decide not just how good he is at mechanically verifying keys, but also how good a judge of character he is. If she were going to trust Carol just on his say-so, she would need to know that he is able to judge good key signers. This is a different type of skill than just being a good key signer. It is a people skill, not a technical one.
For these reasons and more, PGP does not use transitive trust. If Alice trusts Bob as a signer, and he signs Carol's key, Alice concludes that she has a good key for Carol, that is, a key that truly belongs to Carol and not someone else. But she does not conclude that Carol is a good signer. PGP software will not treat signatures Carol makes as valid.
Alice must make a decision in her own mind about whether Carol is a trusted signer. Only if Alice marks Carol's key as trusted will Carol's signatures then start being effective. In PGP, it is the end user who makes the decisions about trust.
Because PGP uses non-transitive trust, the metric in the dtype.org article is not very relevant. It doesn't matter if there is a chain of signatures from Alice to Zelda, because that will not make Zelda's key trusted. Alice (and every other end user) needs to decide for themselves which keys they will trust.
What, then, is the role of the "Web of Trust" in PGP? It works like this. In the example above, suppose Alice knew Carol and did in fact want to trust her. Well, to trust her she needs her key. But how does she know that she got the right key? This is where the web of trust comes in.
If she gets Carol's key from the key server and it is signed by Bob, whom Alice knows and trusts, she can conclude from this that she has Carol's true key. She can then mark this key as a "trusted introducer" (in PGP terminology) and at this point, signatures issued by Carol's keys are trusted by Alice.
The web of trust played a part, by helping Alice to know that she had a good key from Carol. She didn't have to call Carol up and verify fingerprints, she didn't even have to sign Carol's key. Bob's signature on Carol's key was enough to know that the key was correct.
Once Alice has a good key for Carol and marks it as trusted, she can then extend the WoT by then getting keys which Carol has signed. She knows that these keys are correct as well, and possibly some of those key holders are people Alice will also trust as introducers. In this way the Web of Trust gets extended, but each person makes his or her own trust decisions.
I hope this clarifies how the Web of Trust works in actuality.
The free speech issues are fun to debate about, but this is flikx's life we're talking about here. His top priority should be to get this settled and get his degree. That is what is going to have a long term influence on his life.
His best bet is to cool the rhetoric and talk frankly to the administration about putting this issue behind them. If they won't budge then he can see about getting a lawyer. But chances are if he calms down, they will too and the whole thing can be settled. He can get his degree, and then they won't have that leverage over him.
If he wants to he could then set up his web site elsewhere. The worst that will happen is that they would sue him and force him to take it down. He could fight with them if he wants and his only risk is legal expenses.
But I'll bet that once he is out of there he won't have much interest in this old battle. He'll be in a new place with new interests. Fighting with his old school administration won't seem so important once he has a new life.
You are mistaken, flag burning IS speech and protected, which is why there are frequent suggestions to add an amendment to the U.S. constitution to make it illegal.
It was draft card burning, in the O'Brien case, which was found not to be speech and to be illegal. The government was said to have a legitimate interest in preventing the destruction of official documents.
Nicknames vs Persistent Names
on
IETF vs. ICANN
·
· Score: 1
There are two different issues being confused here.
One is to have nicknames, short, memorable names which people can guess at or easily remember, typing them in manually. This is a hard problem because good nicknames are extremely valuable, which means that whoever gets to be in charge of issuing them can make a mint.
The other problem is to have persistent names. These are names which are suitable as part of URLs for web page or emailed links. They don't necessarily have to be memorable or short, but they should not change as systems become reconfigured.
Today, we map directly from nicknames to unpersistent IP addresses, so people naturally assume that nicknames == persistent names. But it would not have to be so.
Technically you could have one infrastructure which mapped from persistent names to IP addresses, where the names would not have to be short or memorable, and could be random strings of letters. A second infrastructure would map from nicknames to persistent names.
By doing this, you would simplify the problem for the many uses of the net which don't require nicknames. Experienced net users seldom type a URL. They click on links, in email, in web pages, or in bookmark files. For all these purposes they could use a persistent name which was not catchy or memorable. (And in fact most web pages don't have very memorable URLs. The URL displayed at the top of my browser window right now is over 120 characters long!)
Nicknames are mostly needed when people are going to guess a URL. This will still be an important use, especially for commercial interests. But by splitting off persistent names it would allow many users to opt out of the political battles around catchy nicknames.
Slashdot Mirror
Use the Wayback Machine to take a look at Dr. Pearson's predictions circa 1997. Not very accurate so far, and that's just trying to go 5 years in the future. On this basis I don't think he has much credibility for his future predictions.
This is the software for the Freedom server. To make it into a useful system, people need to coordinate to run the servers as part of an interconnected network. There needs to be some centralized place where the client software can locate lists of servers in order to choose its routes.
And speaking of the client, has its code ever been released? I know at one point they did release code for a Linux client, but what about Windows?
Freedom also used a "Nym" concept where customers paid for Nyms. When you browsed on the net or sent email through a chain of Freedom servers, the last server in the chain learned your Nym (but not your true identity). Then if you had misused the service, your Nym could be cancelled. This provided some protection against servers in the network, because users would not want to lose Nyms, as they cost real money.
In an open source Freedom network, what would replace the Nym concept? Would server operators no longer have this protection, so that spam or hacking could go through their systems and there is no way to stop the people involved, who are hidden at the other end of a chain of Freedom servers? Or would they coordinate to set up a centralized Nym server and perhaps even require a monetary donation to purchase a Nym, in order to discourage abuse?
Many questions remain to be resolved before even this generous release of source code can replace the service formerly offered by ZKS.
Ted Nelson's original Xanadu concept anticipated this controversy. He advocated what he called "transclusion", which is similar to this concept of taking someone else's published data and embedding it into your own document. Nelson proposed that transclusion should be a built-in feature of the system and that contractual relationships should govern its use. People would get royalties when their published data was transcluded within someone else's site. Of course his whole system was built around a pay per view model, so the main issue was how to distribute the payments from viewers.
Xanadu had many problems of course, which is why it never went anywhere, but it seems that on this issue it was way ahead of the Web. A universal system for negotiable royalty payments would be more flexible and adaptable than the kinds of legal prohibitions which are evolving today.
You could do worse than look at what Alan Kay is involved with. Kay is a true computer pioneer and has from the beginning focussed on children as users of computers. His goal is to empower them by giving them new kinds of tools that let them create, not locking them into predefined worlds.
His current project is Squeak, which is designed to let kids create dynamic documents, games and worlds and interact with them.
Teaching kids to use technology as creators rather than as passive consumers would be one of the most important lessons you could present.
My Gnutella client (LimeWire) won't let me search for episodes of "24" because it requires searches to be at least 3 characters "to avoid congesting the network". That's tough, because they don't show reruns and if you miss an episode, good luck catching up.
But maybe that's the solution for TV producers: make all your show titles 1 or 2 characters long. Either that or just call the show "Sex" or "Porn". Nobody will ever find it.
Despite the fact that people with low IQ scores tend to reproduce faster than people with high scores, it is a myth that people are becoming less intelligent. In fact, the opposite is the case.
The Flynn effect, discovered by James Flynn, shows that IQ test scores have been increasing 5 to 25 points per generation in every country which has been studied, over the past century. The average person today would score at near-genius levels on tests of a century ago.
And don't think it's just that we get more schooling today. The greatest increases are on those subtests which have the least reliance on concrete knowledge, tests which are purely abstract and require people to look for patterns and solve problems in a flexible way. That's exactly what most people mean by "intelligence".
The Flynn effect is not widely known, perhaps because people prefer to believe that the world is getting worse. The idea that we are getting smarter doesn't fit with our prejudices. If people would come to understand and believe the truth about human progress in the past century they might have a clearer understanding of the future which lies ahead. Our descendants will be smarter, richer, and more talented than we can imagine.
TiVo continues to make some inroads into popular culture. On the Friends rerun last night, Rachel is afraid to tell her father that she is pregnant. She starts out bravely but then chickens out: "I got... Tivo." Her father: "Tivo?! What's Tivo?" Phoebe helps out: "It's slang for 'pregnant'."
Absolutely. The reason people are spending time at a smaller number of sites is because those sites are improving their service and quality so as to attract more people. These sites are simply out-competing others for online viewers. It means the web is getting better, not worse.
Ironically, just as technology has advanced to the point where distributed, grass-roots surveillance ("sousveillance") is becoming possible, it has simultaneously advanced to the point where faking video is equally becoming possible.
Within a few years, unauthenticated video footage will be useless, because anyone will be able to conjure up whatever fakery they like. All those underground sousveillance cameras will be producing data which could have been made just as easily on a high end workstation.
Only authenticated video will be trusted. That means that the police and government will trust their own video cameras and be able to use them at trial. But video records from private citizens will be no better than hearsay.
Technology giveth, and technology taketh away. So it will always be.
Will people change their usage? Mebi, mebi not.
Also specifically protected by the DMCA."
Then how come the DeCSS thing is such a problem? Perhaps because the DMCA does in fact protect against circumventing protective measures on Copyrighted materials?
The legality of DeCSS has yet to be established. All of the court proceedings so far are preliminary.
In fact, one of the main issues in controversy is whether DeCSS was intended for the purpose of system interoperability. Defenders of DeCSS argue that in fact it was created by reverse engineering Windows software for the purpose of creating Linux DVD viewers. Opponents of the program argue that it was created to allow copying movies from DVD disks and sharing them illegally. They point to the fact that the initial release was on Windows and was associated with hackers (using the term in the pejorative sense).
In fact DeCSS can be used for both purposes, which makes the interoperability defense somewhat problematic. If it could only be used for interoperability then the defense would be much stronger. But since it can facilitate privacy as well, the defense may not work. It appears that the court is leaning towards this view given the preliminary decisions.
It appears that until you or some other legitimate researcher goes forward with publication and is sued or prosecuted for it, the courts may think you are just crying wolf to try to get a law you don't like changed. A number of researchers have stated that they now intend to stop working on analyzing content protection. If this court decision is upheld, that will prevent the DMCA from being overturned.
Are you willing to go forward with research and publication in violation of the DMCA? The only way to stop you then will be to actually use the DMCA against you, and it can finally be tested in court. Will you take this risk when so many researchers are backing away?
it's something copyright law says you are allowed to do, period.
To clarify, copyright law says that you can't be sued for making fair use of copyrighted materials. It does not obligate the copyright holder to make it easy for you to make such use, it just says that you can't be sued if you do. However as you say the DMCA adds additional restrictions on what you can do in terms of circumventing restriction technology.
Anybody notice the spelling and grammatical errors the appellate court pointed out in the trial court's injunction? The trial court thought license was spelled licence, and referred to "both" alternatives when listing four of them. It made the trial court judge look illiterate.
Judges hate to be reversed, and here the appeals court not only overturns the injunction but also points out that the judge can't spell or write.
Of course you do! You can say anything you like to your wife in private. You can walk outside and talk together, you can whisper, you have many ways of communicating in private.
All the court order can do is to allow monitoring of certain kinds of communication. It can't force you to communicate in such a way as to help the people doing the monitoring. They can't force you to speak loudly and clearly, or to avoid the use of personal references that the eavesdroppers can't understand. The subject is under no obligation whatsoever with regard to his communications. He can do anything he likes. All the court can do is to give law enforcement the permission to try to capture and understand certain of his communications.
SI
They used the mouse cells because they were necessary for the human stem cells to grow. There is some unknown process or chemical that the mouse cells provide.
So if new stem cell lines were allowed, it still wouldn't help, because the mouse cells still have to be used, right? The article makes it sound like the restriction to old stem cells is causing the problem, but what is the alternative? If we still have to use the mouse cells, then even if new stem cell lines were allowed, we'd still have the problem.
You are overreaching. By your reasoning it is illegal for the user to squint when he looks at your page. Users can view your page any way they want to. They can use any fonts they like, they can set any colors they like. They can cover up parts of the page, they can refrain from scrolling to see parts. You have no right to stop them from doing any of these things.
Furthermore you have no right to stop users from installing software which makes these kinds of modifications. All you can do is send him a data stream. You can't stop him from looking at it any way he wants to. The user is not your slave.
It would have been nice if the article had given more than a few hours' notice but it was not 24 hours out of date as was claimed.
-- SE
The analysis misunderstands one of the most fundamental principles of the PGP trust model: trust is not transitive.
What this means is that if Alice trusts Bob to sign keys, and Bob trusts Carol, Alice does not automatically trust Carol. She may not even know Carol. Just because Bob trusts her, that doesn't necessarily mean that Alice should trust her.
After all, Alice is trusting Bob to accurately sign keys. She judges in her own mind how trustworthy and reliable he is at this task. How likely is he to screw up and sign a bogus key? These are the issues she considers.
To have transitive trust, she needs to make a much more careful evaluation of Bob. She must decide not just how good he is at mechanically verifying keys, but also how good a judge of character he is. If she were going to trust Carol just on his say-so, she would need to know that he is able to judge good key signers. This is a different type of skill than just being a good key signer. It is a people skill, not a technical one.
For these reasons and more, PGP does not use transitive trust. If Alice trusts Bob as a signer, and he signs Carol's key, Alice concludes that she has a good key for Carol, that is, a key that truly belongs to Carol and not someone else. But she does not conclude that Carol is a good signer. PGP software will not treat signatures Carol makes as valid.
Alice must make a decision in her own mind about whether Carol is a trusted signer. Only if Alice marks Carol's key as trusted will Carol's signatures then start being effective. In PGP, it is the end user who makes the decisions about trust.
Because PGP uses non-transitive trust, the metric in the dtype.org article is not very relevant. It doesn't matter if there is a chain of signatures from Alice to Zelda, because that will not make Zelda's key trusted. Alice (and every other end user) needs to decide for themselves which keys they will trust.
What, then, is the role of the "Web of Trust" in PGP? It works like this. In the example above, suppose Alice knew Carol and did in fact want to trust her. Well, to trust her she needs her key. But how does she know that she got the right key? This is where the web of trust comes in.
If she gets Carol's key from the key server and it is signed by Bob, whom Alice knows and trusts, she can conclude from this that she has Carol's true key. She can then mark this key as a "trusted introducer" (in PGP terminology) and at this point, signatures issued by Carol's keys are trusted by Alice.
The web of trust played a part, by helping Alice to know that she had a good key from Carol. She didn't have to call Carol up and verify fingerprints, she didn't even have to sign Carol's key. Bob's signature on Carol's key was enough to know that the key was correct.
Once Alice has a good key for Carol and marks it as trusted, she can then extend the WoT by then getting keys which Carol has signed. She knows that these keys are correct as well, and possibly some of those key holders are people Alice will also trust as introducers. In this way the Web of Trust gets extended, but each person makes his or her own trust decisions.
I hope this clarifies how the Web of Trust works in actuality.
The free speech issues are fun to debate about, but this is flikx's life we're talking about here. His top priority should be to get this settled and get his degree. That is what is going to have a long term influence on his life.
His best bet is to cool the rhetoric and talk frankly to the administration about putting this issue behind them. If they won't budge then he can see about getting a lawyer. But chances are if he calms down, they will too and the whole thing can be settled. He can get his degree, and then they won't have that leverage over him.
If he wants to he could then set up his web site elsewhere. The worst that will happen is that they would sue him and force him to take it down. He could fight with them if he wants and his only risk is legal expenses.
But I'll bet that once he is out of there he won't have much interest in this old battle. He'll be in a new place with new interests. Fighting with his old school administration won't seem so important once he has a new life.
It was draft card burning, in the O'Brien case, which was found not to be speech and to be illegal. The government was said to have a legitimate interest in preventing the destruction of official documents.
There are two different issues being confused here.
One is to have nicknames, short, memorable names which people can guess at or easily remember, typing them in manually. This is a hard problem because good nicknames are extremely valuable, which means that whoever gets to be in charge of issuing them can make a mint.
The other problem is to have persistent names. These are names which are suitable as part of URLs for web page or emailed links. They don't necessarily have to be memorable or short, but they should not change as systems become reconfigured.
Today, we map directly from nicknames to unpersistent IP addresses, so people naturally assume that nicknames == persistent names. But it would not have to be so.
Technically you could have one infrastructure which mapped from persistent names to IP addresses, where the names would not have to be short or memorable, and could be random strings of letters. A second infrastructure would map from nicknames to persistent names.
By doing this, you would simplify the problem for the many uses of the net which don't require nicknames. Experienced net users seldom type a URL. They click on links, in email, in web pages, or in bookmark files. For all these purposes they could use a persistent name which was not catchy or memorable. (And in fact most web pages don't have very memorable URLs. The URL displayed at the top of my browser window right now is over 120 characters long!)
Nicknames are mostly needed when people are going to guess a URL. This will still be an important use, especially for commercial interests. But by splitting off persistent names it would allow many users to opt out of the political battles around catchy nicknames.
-- Sil