Ya dumb canuck. You probably say it yourself. Everybody here does but you can't notice it.
I was born in the UK in 1957; we moved to Canada in 1964. I moved to Los Angeles in 1979 and was ridicules soundly for saying "aboot". After about a year I noticed I was doing it myself ans started saying "about" instead.
I moved back to Canada in 1990 and noticed how everybody says "aboot". These days nobody seems to.
"Do the world a favor and whenever you see a site that relies on flash without an alternative, send an email to the owner of the site informing him that his web designer is an incompetent moron (though you might want word it a bit nicer than that)"
With HDTV quality screens, I would rather make my purchases from my couch, not sitting at my desk. Why go to the computer, when the rest of my house is more comfortable?
I dunno, I'm not that cynical. I don't think it would he hard at all to do better than ICANN. All you'd have to do is abide by the guiding principles laid down in the white paper ICANN was supposed to be following in the first place. The internet has many examples of projects much larger than ICANN (ferinstance the Apache project). There was little disagreement in 1996 that something else besides NSI was needed and and the camps were divided into "non profit" and "for profit" bitterly. Ironically the "non profit" guys won and are now ICANN. How's that for fucked up? More ironic is the tennants those guys argued against is now their day jobs. Ditto. Squared.
I disagree with the idea the mistake was the Internic contract. I think the mistake was when Bill Wolff took the internet out from under government controlled/AUP to commercial - this was brilliant. He said he didn't think to do the same for DNS - it didn't seem important then. Oops.
Jon's source of funding seemed a little bizarre to me and I'm not entirely certain I understand it. I know he had a DARPA grant and I know he was also under contract from NSI.
I heard about the initiative to move A root about 18 months before it happened, albeit obliquely; at the time, Vixie, Postel and Gilmore might have pulled it off, but because they waited so long the whole thing was squarely in the governments sights under Magaziners watch. Ira in retrospect had an agenda and threatened Jon in a real blackbag "you'll disappear" sort of way.
But, this raises the point, IS it too late to do someting about it? I think not. But does that mean we should not try? Ditto. It's clear you don't like what I do - that's fine, so come up with a better solution; we're not doing what we do because we're egomaniacs that have a "my way or the highway" attitude, come up with a better plan and you'll instantly have a very large number of supporters. It might not even have to be a better plan, a worse plan that we all agree to if preferable.
As for NSI, there's a difference between what NSI said in public and what they told their lobbyists to push for in private. Of course they weren't about to agree to a structure that would have allowed ICANN or whatever to take away their cash cow.
One of the nice things about the ICANN meetings is you get to see where the real stuff happens - in the hallways, in the bars after hours etc. I met and stayed near NSI's lobbyist there and made sure I could eavesdrop. Their position was consistant Keith. If you have anythuing other than heresay evidence to the contrary I'd love to hear it.
It was also possible to sit on on the closed door GAC meetings in Berlin at the creation of the DNSO by virtue of the fact the upstiars gallery doors of the Hotel Adlon were not locked or guarded. The I* people and notably Cerf all but encouraged the GAC as part of some sordid quid pro quo; NSI and the Interent community at large was dead set against them. The "Cerf good NSI bad" idea simply does not hold water when held up to scrutiny.
If you care to poke around the Berkman archives you'll find me on Saturday after noon calling for a quick straw vote to see hoe many people thin the GAC is neccessary. 13 out of 200 said yes, bu this was stricken bery quickly by a nervous Paul Twomey (nor president or CEO or someghing of ICANN) saying "It's best to not interfere with these things" or words to that effect.
Suuuure, not THIS is an organization that measure s "community consensus".
There seems to be a common fault among the grays that NSI can do no good. These serves nobody well; judge what an organization actually does piece by piece without prejudice; prejudice apparantly blinds people.
If you think the DNS was ever not under US government aegis you're dead wrong. Vixie had his chance to throw the tea in the harbour and blew it by doing it two years too late.
Sorry, but the grays screwed this all up; Jon was a swell guy and all and I liked him a lot but this did happen on his watch and his ilk has handed all this to the USG on a silver platter out of vested self interest, guised as "for the good of the community".
You're slipping Keith, Randy Bush usualy refers to me as a "dangerous psychopath", Paul Vixie refers to me as a "misguided lunatic" and never mind the fact that Vixies boss who funded the $2M of DEC's money for development of BIND is behind all that I do in this arena, as a follow on act to his creating of the back-then wildly unpopular alt newsgroups (which Vixie prediced would be the death of usenet.
Who exactly are you referring to as "paranoid lunatics" Keith?
The obvious technical argument to your first paragraph is to self-primary the root and do away with any reliance on the legacy root servers or NSI's operation of them.
Non-legacy tlds aside, anybody that uses the legacy root servers is not going to get as fast or reliable nameservice than if they do it for themselves.
This would be the first step to wean yourselves away from the tit of the US Government controlled DNS. If you used ORSC dns that would be nice, but you don't have to, you can use the legacy root.
Placing unrealistic obstacles in the way of eveyrbody is not the Internet way. That's the ISO way and look how stunningly successful THAT was.
NSI tried to enforce.net registrations. What they found was dishonest people were able to get.net domregs and honest people were inconvenienced at best and denied at worst.
As to verifying identity this is at odds with the greater consumer demand for low cost registration. Just how much work are YOU willing to do for six bucks? How often will you reverify the name? While it's possible to verify some US identities with existing services for under a buck this all falls apart once you say "outside the US".
Whois is a convenince, not a technical requirement. At the end of the day the DNS is a system for naming computers on a network, the additional whims and desires various humans put on top of that are the subject of great disagreement.
The internet works by consensue, not truth. Never confuse turh with consensus" - Brian Reid
That's actually one of the better ideas putr forth here today. There is absolutey no technical reason why there can't be an extremley large number of TLDs, and in fact Vixie and Denninger looked at this in the mid 90's and did the math and found no problem beyonf 100,000 tlds althougjh they were unsude what happened after a million tlds. Now that we have a roughly 30-50 million zone com file it seems pretty clear it actually woudln't be an issue.
If you really wanted to be slick about this you'd get everybody to primary the root zone for themselves to take the load and dependancy off the root servers and distribute the root zone via cryptographically signed usenet postings. This is DJ Bernsteins idea, not mine.
Dude, that's even more lame than hosts.txt. If you do the math you'd see there is no data trasnport big enough to prevent the root servers from melting down. Yo could decentralize it by having each host have the entire hosts file. You have a spare terrabyte on each machine that wants to do this, jah, to say nothing of the costs to trnasport the daily updates to that file.
This has been a problem for about a decade now. There really isn't anything that can be done about it. Where do you drsw the line? There was a guy in BC that snapped up damn near everybody's last name in.com, truly annoying, but, for $5 a year or something you got an address with your name in it.
Then there are the guys that just horde names and want egregous prices for them. Guess what? They never sell any ans just end up holding the bag on those fees.
Then there are people that have hundreds of thousand of domains. They won't sell them and theyt set up search pages and make money on each one. While I personally don't like this I like even less somebody telling me what I can and cannot do with a domain name.
You didn'y HAVE to do that, you chose to. If somebody used a similar name to yours either the court system takes care of them if they're infringing on your mark or it won't cause they aren't.
You tell me what your name is and I'll find you a dozen names you didn't register that are still available in.com that will very probably piss you off. But I can legitimatly use them. Take them away from me and I can find 12 more. I can do this all day/week/year.
This kind of thinking is really dumb, offfensive not defensive and just a waste of time, money and resources.
Get a lawyer. If you have one already, fire him, he's an idiot.
Dude, it's neither. It's a way of referring to services by name instead of number. Any interpretation you put on it other than that is just, well, your iterpretation of it.
DNS isn't this or that, it just is. The only property everybody agrees on is that it should work. After that you're free to look at it any way you wish, although it would be nice if you didn't prevent other people from having a dissimilar view if they're doing no harm.
In theoretical terms you are correct. But in practival terms, absolutely not. You're very very unlikely to get a TLD vetted by ICANN unless you have a "sunrise provision".
We've been fighting this (to no avail) for years. The tradmark lobby has been bigger than you, me, NSI and ICANN put together since about 1995. If you look deep enough you'll find trademaek lawyers and nobody else define the DNS landscape.
Slashdot Mirror
http://apnews.excite.com/article/20040724/D840RLR0 0.html.
Morons.
We could call it a feasability study.
Ya dumb canuck. You probably say it yourself. Everybody here does but you can't notice it.
I was born in the UK in 1957; we moved to Canada in 1964. I moved to Los Angeles in 1979 and was ridicules soundly for saying "aboot". After about a year I noticed I was doing it myself ans started saying "about" instead.
I moved back to Canada in 1990 and noticed how everybody says "aboot". These days nobody seems to.
Hmmmm.....
"Do the world a favor and whenever you see a site that relies on flash without an alternative, send an email to the owner of the site informing him that his web designer is an incompetent moron (though you might want word it a bit nicer than that)"
Or not.
So, Eric Raymond, how is your 380SEL anyway?
With HDTV quality screens, I would rather make my purchases from my couch, not sitting at my desk. Why go to the computer, when the rest of my house is more comfortable?
Dude, you need a better desk.
I only saw a few initial episodes of enerprise...
I agree with you about 99% of the things you said, but personally I don't like T'pol as a character at all! a Vulcan addict sex fiend?!
Saaaaaaaay, you got her number? Or coordinates or something... I may need decontaminating
I dunno, I'm not that cynical. I don't think it would he hard at all to do better than ICANN. All you'd have to do is abide by the guiding principles laid down in the white paper ICANN was supposed to be following in the first place. The internet has many examples of projects much larger than ICANN (ferinstance the Apache project). There was little disagreement in 1996 that something else besides NSI was needed and and the camps were divided into "non profit" and "for profit" bitterly. Ironically the "non profit" guys won and are now ICANN. How's that for fucked up? More ironic is the tennants those guys argued against is now their day jobs. Ditto. Squared.
I disagree with the idea the mistake was the Internic contract. I think the mistake was when Bill Wolff took the internet out from under government controlled/AUP to commercial - this was brilliant. He said he didn't think to do the same for DNS - it didn't seem important then. Oops.
Jon's source of funding seemed a little bizarre to me and I'm not entirely certain I understand it. I know he had a DARPA grant and I know he was also under contract from NSI.
I heard about the initiative to move A root about 18 months before it happened, albeit obliquely; at the time, Vixie, Postel and Gilmore might have pulled it off, but because they waited so long the whole thing was squarely in the governments sights under Magaziners watch. Ira in retrospect had an agenda and threatened Jon in a real blackbag "you'll disappear" sort of way.
But, this raises the point, IS it too late to do someting about it? I think not. But does that mean we should not try? Ditto. It's clear you don't like what I do - that's fine, so come up with a better solution; we're not doing what we do because we're egomaniacs that have a "my way or the highway" attitude, come up with a better plan and you'll instantly have a very large number of supporters. It might not even have to be a better plan, a worse plan that we all agree to if preferable.
But, to do nothing, is, I think, a cop out.
Perhaps you could clarify what you did mean then?
As for NSI, there's a difference between what NSI said in public and what they told their lobbyists to push for in private. Of course they weren't about to agree to a structure that would have allowed ICANN or whatever to take away their cash cow.
One of the nice things about the ICANN meetings is you get to see where the real stuff happens - in the hallways, in the bars after hours etc. I met and stayed near NSI's lobbyist there and made sure I could eavesdrop. Their position was consistant Keith. If you have anythuing other than heresay evidence to the contrary I'd love to hear it.
It was also possible to sit on on the closed door GAC meetings in Berlin at the creation of the DNSO by virtue of the fact the upstiars gallery doors of the Hotel Adlon were not locked or guarded. The I* people and notably Cerf all but encouraged the GAC as part of some sordid quid pro quo; NSI and the Interent community at large was dead set against them. The "Cerf good NSI bad" idea simply does not hold water when held up to scrutiny.
If you care to poke around the Berkman archives you'll find me on Saturday after noon calling for a quick straw vote to see hoe many people thin the GAC is neccessary. 13 out of 200 said yes, bu this was stricken bery quickly by a nervous Paul Twomey (nor president or CEO or someghing of ICANN) saying "It's best to not interfere with these things" or words to that effect.
Suuuure, not THIS is an organization that measure s "community consensus".
There seems to be a common fault among the grays that NSI can do no good. These serves nobody well; judge what an organization actually does piece by piece without prejudice; prejudice apparantly blinds people.
If you think the DNS was ever not under US government aegis you're dead wrong. Vixie had his chance to throw the tea in the harbour and blew it by doing it two years too late.
Sorry, but the grays screwed this all up; Jon was a swell guy and all and I liked him a lot but this did happen on his watch and his ilk has handed all this to the USG on a silver platter out of vested self interest, guised as "for the good of the community".
You're slipping Keith, Randy Bush usualy refers to me as a "dangerous psychopath", Paul Vixie refers to me as a "misguided lunatic" and never mind the fact that Vixies boss who funded the $2M of DEC's money for development of BIND is behind all that I do in this arena, as a follow on act to his creating of the back-then wildly unpopular alt newsgroups (which Vixie prediced would be the death of usenet.
Who exactly are you referring to as "paranoid lunatics" Keith?
The obvious technical argument to your first paragraph is to self-primary the root and do away with any reliance on the legacy root servers or NSI's operation of them.
Non-legacy tlds aside, anybody that uses the legacy root servers is not going to get as fast or reliable nameservice than if they do it for themselves.
This would be the first step to wean yourselves away from the tit of the US Government controlled DNS. If you used ORSC dns that would be nice, but you don't have to, you can use the legacy root.
ftp://internic.net/domain/root.zone.gz still works if your favorite flavour is vanilla.
ftp://rz.vrx.net/db.root also works if you like other flavours.
Cordially,
Richard Sexton
Placing unrealistic obstacles in the way of eveyrbody is not the Internet way. That's the ISO way and look how stunningly successful THAT was.
.net registrations. What they found was dishonest people were able to get .net domregs and honest people were inconvenienced at best and denied at worst.
NSI tried to enforce
As to verifying identity this is at odds with the greater consumer demand for low cost registration. Just how much work are YOU willing to do for six bucks? How often will you reverify the name? While it's possible to verify some US identities with existing services for under a buck this all falls apart once you say "outside the US".
Whois is a convenince, not a technical requirement. At the end of the day the DNS is a system for naming computers on a network, the additional whims and desires various humans put on top of that are the subject of great disagreement.
The internet works by consensue, not truth. Never confuse turh with consensus" - Brian Reid
That's actually one of the better ideas putr forth here today. There is absolutey no technical reason why there can't be an extremley large number of TLDs, and in fact Vixie and Denninger looked at this in the mid 90's and did the math and found no problem beyonf 100,000 tlds althougjh they were unsude what happened after a million tlds. Now that we have a roughly 30-50 million zone com file it seems pretty clear it actually woudln't be an issue.
If you really wanted to be slick about this you'd get everybody to primary the root zone for themselves to take the load and dependancy off the root servers and distribute the root zone via cryptographically signed usenet postings. This is DJ Bernsteins idea, not mine.
What makes you think it is?
Damn, now isn't that a good way to melt the root servers. Every time somebody wants to send you mail the root servers get hit.
.AI TLD tried this... for about a week, in 1997.
The
Dude, that's even more lame than hosts.txt. If you do the math you'd see there is no data trasnport big enough to prevent the root servers from melting down. Yo could decentralize it by having each host have the entire hosts file. You have a spare terrabyte on each machine that wants to do this, jah, to say nothing of the costs to trnasport the daily updates to that file.
This has been a problem for about a decade now. There really isn't anything that can be done about it. Where do you drsw the line? There was a guy in BC that snapped up damn near everybody's last name in .com, truly annoying, but, for $5 a year or something you got an address with your name in it.
Then there are the guys that just horde names and want egregous prices for them. Guess what? They never sell any ans just end up holding the bag on those fees.
Then there are people that have hundreds of thousand of domains. They won't sell them and theyt set up search pages and make money on each one. While I personally don't like this I like even less somebody telling me what I can and cannot do with a domain name.
Uh, I think you need to change your bong water, dude.
You didn'y HAVE to do that, you chose to. If somebody used a similar name to yours either the court system takes care of them if they're infringing on your mark or it won't cause they aren't.
.com that will very probably piss you off. But I can legitimatly use them. Take them away from me and I can find 12 more. I can do this all day/week/year.
You tell me what your name is and I'll find you a dozen names you didn't register that are still available in
This kind of thinking is really dumb, offfensive not defensive and just a waste of time, money and resources.
Get a lawyer. If you have one already, fire him, he's an idiot.
Sure, cause that's news. the other 98% isn't news so you don't hear about it, and it works fine.
Is it a free market? Is it infrastructure?
To who? To me? To you?
Dude, it's neither. It's a way of referring to services by name instead of number. Any interpretation you put on it other than that is just, well, your iterpretation of it.
DNS isn't this or that, it just is. The only property everybody agrees on is that it should work. After that you're free to look at it any way you wish, although it would be nice if you didn't prevent other people from having a dissimilar view if they're doing no harm.
YOU can't keep track of this so the entire internet suffers? Nice.
Traditionally on the internet problems like this are solved by the creation of new resources, not regulation and limitation of existing ones.
Is there some overriding technical reason these days why TLD's need to be restricted to a small and controlled minority? Or is it something else?
Yup, absolutely. Trademark lawyers. No shit.
In theoretical terms you are correct. But in practival terms, absolutely not. You're very very unlikely to get a TLD vetted by ICANN unless you have a "sunrise provision".
We've been fighting this (to no avail) for years. The tradmark lobby has been bigger than you, me, NSI and ICANN put together since about 1995. If you look deep enough you'll find trademaek lawyers and nobody else define the DNS landscape.
See http://sunrise.open-rsc.org/
The puropse of a trademark is to prevent people from using your mark. Never mind the fact the USPTO said you can't do this, you wouldn't want to.
Now if you were talking service marks that's different.