I remember when you could find programs for the original Macintoshes that could play tunes on the variable speed floppy drive.
SuperScriptsit for the TRS-80 did something similar -- the files were arranged on the disk such that when it was loading, the movement of the read/write head across the disk played a tune.
A plush toy manufacturer approached a Web-design and hosting company about creating a Web site for their company. It was agreed on that 'plushitems.com' would be a good domain to promote the site with. InterNIC wouldn't register the domain because it contained...yep, you guessed it.
...violating make crypto export laws is the least of my problems.
And the government is missing the obvious points about the whole crypto situation:
It's illegal to export mechanisms to achieve certain strengths of encryption. However, it's perfectly legal for me to send an encrypted message outside of the country. Then again, if I'm encrypting confidential information that I wouldn't want the government to see, I probably wouldn't care if they tried getting me for breaking crypto/munitions laws. (See above.)
People inside the United States already have the means to achieve strong levels of encryption. If the government is trying to say they're having problems spying on their on people, then they're screwed from the get-go -- continuing to make crypto exports illegal won't make their lives any easier since US citizens already have the technology.
There is no logic in not allowing US-developed strong crypto to leave the country. It screws the individuals and companies in the US that do crypto research and develop the products.
Look at Netscape/Microsoft -- they weren't able to export 128-bit versions of their browsers for years because of munitions export laws. Non-US-developed "wrappers" for Netscape Navigator/MS Internet Explorer shortly popped up, however, giving the 40-bit export versions of the browsers nearly the same functionality as the 128-bit versions. Who got screwed? Netscape and MS. Who accomplished nothing? The US government.
If the government is worried about not being able to easily peek at data in other countries, they're screwed from the get-go again -- chances are that the other countries already have the technology that the US government is legally preventing from going across the borders.
Berkeley's TranSend service is a cluster of workstations working together to act as a massive HTTP proxy. This proxy "transforms" Web pages based on clients settings. Was the basis of the ( now-commercial) Top Gun Wingman Web browser for the PalmPilot.
The Anonymizer acts as a proxy that strips out all the unwanted/unneeded header lines that your Web browser sends.
I had started hacking together an HTTP/1.1-compliant proxy in perl that did on-the-fly compression if the client supported it, but I never got around to completing it. Initial results were impressive, especially when it was paired with a caching proxy like Squid or a CacheFlow box. Of course, with DSL and cable modems getting more widespread use, people like myself that are still pinned to a 33.6k connection are being left behind.
Caching/compressing/proxying is still in widespread usage outside North America (most notably Australia and European countries). Their problem was (is!) outrageous access prices and relatively slow overseas connections, so they've been using caching for a long time to help solve it. The US and Canada have solved their "problem" of Web pages not instantaneously loading by throwing more bandwidth at it...
For a domain registrar, you would think they'd would ensure their Web site is viewable by as many browsers as possible. That's just good e-commerce (ugh, I hate that word) sense...
I guess you could argue that "other use" prevents spamming, but that seems unneccessarily broad, especially when coupled with the repackaging and dissemination bit. Specifically dissemination - that means that no-one has the right to redistribute this information without NSI's permission.
Yeah, this license might have an effect on spam, but its effect on the availiabilty of the information in general is chilling.
Thinking this revised "license" will help stop spam is a pipe dream -- Network Solutions routinely sends spam to the contact e-mail addresses in its database. And since when has licensing or law stopped spammers?
Does anyone remember the last time Network Solutions tried acting in the customer's best interest? Information about domains' last-updated dates was removed from the whois database. Woo, that really stopped the domain hoarding, didn't it? Of course, they must have figured out it didn't do squat -- the information is back. If Network Solutions really wanted to help "the problem," they'd require payment before domain activation. That would at least curb hoarders who register a domain, sit on it for a month, let it be dropped for non-payment, and start the cycle over. That's akin to holding a domain hostage -- the hoarder hasn't paid for it, and it wastes NetSol's resources. You'd think they'd act in their own best interests on this one...
Anyway, my guesses about the new license:
Network Solutions figured out they have a vast database of e-mail addresses of people who have registered one or more domains and will probably register again. ("Hey, maybe if we spam our existing customers they won't defect to those rogue registrars! It's not like they like us, anyway...")
Network Solutions now has competition. It would really suck if one of those other registrars could freely use the information in Network Solutions' "proprietary" database, wouldn't it? ("We're not going to be outdone by these new guys... They're not even U.S. Government-sanctioned monopolies!")
The writing has been on the wall for a long time. The big change that should have tipped everyone off was when www.internic.net was essentially replaced with www.netsol.com, a site where Network Solutions can also peddle its domain parking/web hosting/e-mail services. I'm sure a bunch of clueless upper-management types go there to register a domain, see all the stuff about foreign terms like "nameservers," "DNS," "content hosting," etc., and then see where Network Solutions can handle it all for them! (For a fee, of course.) Just then, the sound of a cash register ding can be heard at Network Solutions' office, and an angel gets set on fire.
Just business as usual with "the dot screw-the-customer people."
The WHOIS database isn't useful for anything these days anyway.
NetSol's whois database isn't the only one to suffer from lack-of-usefulness.
After repeatedly being the victim of smurf attacks (yes, there are still many broken networks out there), I wrote a perl script which analyzed the Netflow export from a Cisco 7000-series router, tested the source IPs' networks for "brokenness," and used whois.arin.net to get contact information for those networks. Much to my dismay, I was getting stuff like...
150.174.97.255 52 Virginia State University (NET-VSUNET) "Grey, Michael" vsuars@VCUVM1.BITNET 161.223.245.0 32 Indian Health Service (NET-IHS-BNET) "Jaramillo, Valentino" [No mailbox] 192.48.125.0 33 Solar Energy Research Institute (NET-SERI-2) "Powers, Chuck" [No mailbox]
...in the logs. This makes it really hard to do automated "your network is broken, here's how to fix it" mailings.
Some of these organizations have had their IP allocations since the mid-1980s and apparently haven't updated their contact information in all this time. (BITNET? Can we say "way of the dodo"?) Of course, since there's no "enforcement" to keep the contact information up-to-date, things won't be changing anytime soon. (At least the.nu registry has strong wording in their policy regarding valid contact information...)
"[No mailbox]" shouldn't be allowed as a contact e-mail address, in my opinion. With the abundance of free/near-free e-mail services out there ( HotMail, Net@ddress, etc.), there is no excuse for not having a valid, working e-mail address. If you don't have an e-mail address, then you probably don't need to have IP addresses, either...
Slashdot Mirror
SuperScriptsit for the TRS-80 did something similar -- the files were arranged on the disk such that when it was loading, the movement of the read/write head across the disk played a tune.
A plush toy manufacturer approached a Web-design and hosting company about creating a Web site for their company. It was agreed on that 'plushitems.com' would be a good domain to promote the site with. InterNIC wouldn't register the domain because it contained...yep, you guessed it.
...violating make crypto export laws is the least of my problems.
And the government is missing the obvious points about the whole crypto situation:
It's illegal to export mechanisms to achieve certain strengths of encryption. However, it's perfectly legal for me to send an encrypted message outside of the country. Then again, if I'm encrypting confidential information that I wouldn't want the government to see, I probably wouldn't care if they tried getting me for breaking crypto/munitions laws. (See above.)
People inside the United States already have the means to achieve strong levels of encryption. If the government is trying to say they're having problems spying on their on people, then they're screwed from the get-go -- continuing to make crypto exports illegal won't make their lives any easier since US citizens already have the technology.
There is no logic in not allowing US-developed strong crypto to leave the country. It screws the individuals and companies in the US that do crypto research and develop the products.
Look at Netscape/Microsoft -- they weren't able to export 128-bit versions of their browsers for years because of munitions export laws. Non-US-developed "wrappers" for Netscape Navigator/MS Internet Explorer shortly popped up, however, giving the 40-bit export versions of the browsers nearly the same functionality as the 128-bit versions. Who got screwed? Netscape and MS. Who accomplished nothing? The US government.
If the government is worried about not being able to easily peek at data in other countries, they're screwed from the get-go again -- chances are that the other countries already have the technology that the US government is legally preventing from going across the borders.
Here are a few more links for more information about HTTP and some neat things that are being done with it...
I had started hacking together an HTTP/1.1-compliant proxy in perl that did on-the-fly compression if the client supported it, but I never got around to completing it. Initial results were impressive, especially when it was paired with a caching proxy like Squid or a CacheFlow box. Of course, with DSL and cable modems getting more widespread use, people like myself that are still pinned to a 33.6k connection are being left behind.
Caching/compressing/proxying is still in widespread usage outside North America (most notably Australia and European countries). Their problem was (is!) outrageous access prices and relatively slow overseas connections, so they've been using caching for a long time to help solve it. The US and Canada have solved their "problem" of Web pages not instantaneously loading by throwing more bandwidth at it...
For a domain registrar, you would think they'd would ensure their Web site is viewable by as many browsers as possible. That's just good e-commerce (ugh, I hate that word) sense...
Thinking this revised "license" will help stop spam is a pipe dream -- Network Solutions routinely sends spam to the contact e-mail addresses in its database. And since when has licensing or law stopped spammers?
Does anyone remember the last time Network Solutions tried acting in the customer's best interest? Information about domains' last-updated dates was removed from the whois database. Woo, that really stopped the domain hoarding, didn't it? Of course, they must have figured out it didn't do squat -- the information is back. If Network Solutions really wanted to help "the problem," they'd require payment before domain activation. That would at least curb hoarders who register a domain, sit on it for a month, let it be dropped for non-payment, and start the cycle over. That's akin to holding a domain hostage -- the hoarder hasn't paid for it, and it wastes NetSol's resources. You'd think they'd act in their own best interests on this one...
Anyway, my guesses about the new license:
The writing has been on the wall for a long time. The big change that should have tipped everyone off was when www.internic.net was essentially replaced with www.netsol.com, a site where Network Solutions can also peddle its domain parking/web hosting/e-mail services. I'm sure a bunch of clueless upper-management types go there to register a domain, see all the stuff about foreign terms like "nameservers," "DNS," "content hosting," etc., and then see where Network Solutions can handle it all for them! (For a fee, of course.) Just then, the sound of a cash register ding can be heard at Network Solutions' office, and an angel gets set on fire.
Just business as usual with "the dot screw-the-customer people."
NetSol's whois database isn't the only one to suffer from lack-of-usefulness.
After repeatedly being the victim of smurf attacks (yes, there are still many broken networks out there), I wrote a perl script which analyzed the Netflow export from a Cisco 7000-series router, tested the source IPs' networks for "brokenness," and used whois.arin.net to get contact information for those networks. Much to my dismay, I was getting stuff like...
150.174.97.255 52 Virginia State University (NET-VSUNET)
"Grey, Michael" vsuars@VCUVM1.BITNET
161.223.245.0 32 Indian Health Service (NET-IHS-BNET)
"Jaramillo, Valentino" [No mailbox]
192.48.125.0 33 Solar Energy Research Institute (NET-SERI-2)
"Powers, Chuck" [No mailbox]
Some of these organizations have had their IP allocations since the mid-1980s and apparently haven't updated their contact information in all this time. (BITNET? Can we say "way of the dodo"?) Of course, since there's no "enforcement" to keep the contact information up-to-date, things won't be changing anytime soon. (At least the .nu registry has strong wording in their policy regarding valid contact information...)
"[No mailbox]" shouldn't be allowed as a contact e-mail address, in my opinion. With the abundance of free/near-free e-mail services out there ( HotMail, Net@ddress, etc.), there is no excuse for not having a valid, working e-mail address. If you don't have an e-mail address, then you probably don't need to have IP addresses, either...