(there isn't really a space between the "p" and the "e" in "hype". That's a bug in Opera; it wraps when it sees a hyphen and it shouldn't. The link seems to work though.
I've used Netscape since Andresson announced the first version on Usenet and only upgraded when I had to. When I could't stand 4.77 "correcting" me when I typed in an address in the Location: line I tried 6.2.2 and thought for a second my CPU had been replaced by a 4 Mhz Z80. Up to one second to respond to a right mouse click is sheer idiocy.
I tried Opera and Mozilla two weeks ago. Mozilla is only half as slow as NS6.2.2, and I'm sticking with Opera, only resorting to other browsers for compatability testing.
I'd rather use Mozilla, but I don't have time to wait for the mouse to catch up to me.
I realize a fast processor and gobs or RAM probably mitigates that, but NS4.76 (and every previous version of NS) got that part right; IE never did. Can we expect Mozilla to address this?
I've had 7 calls in 6 days about carpet cleaning. No I don't want to take any damn survey thank you and will you please take my name off your list. They say they will and then call back the next day. It's always a different voice.
...and maybe once or twice a day I have to turn it on to look at some page. That's fairly quick and easy to do in Opera.
Maybe running with JS off isn't for everybody, but to me the advantages outweigh the disadvantages. Frankly I have more of a problem with badly coded HTML that Opera won't parse than I do with JS sites.
1985: a California graphics board manufacturer - I wrote firmware. The products actually shipped with a manual that said "This manual says what our product actually does, no matter what the salesman may have told you it does".
And ran mail and news in the mid 80's. Brian Reid got us a UUCP feed from a real TCP/IP connected site - JPL, and put gryphon.com on the usenet backbone, no doubt helping to lead to it's demise.
Xenix worked perfectly well; we fed news and mail to over a hundred downstream sites with UUCP and had a doezen news peers.
If you look at old usenet postings in Google, anything that was gryphon.com or gryphon.cts.com came from that lowly i286 development system running Xenix administered by Greg Laskin (who died in 1990). Gryphon.com posters were constantly in the top 25 bandwidth wasters postings that K*net Paul Dolan annoyed everybody with.
Whether it had a chance on the desktop depends on whose desk it was on.
If documentation is short, it's useless. If it's complete and accurate you'll never have time to find which page of the 35 volume set you want to read.
I think there are a few things amiss with the pfir plan and I'd like to suggest and comment on some alternatives and have a few comments about our continues use of 20th century DNS.
Look back at the creation of ICANN and it's not difficult to see why it has failed. The timeline goes something like this: when the Wired article came out in 1994 where Joshua Quittner reported he registered mcdonalds.com and McDonalds didn't want it he ended up selling it to Burger King. At the time InterNIC registrations were taking about 3 days. This shot up to 11 weeks in a matter of days. The NSF, who funded NSI to run the InterNIC, did not feel it's role, which is to foster academic and scientific advancement, included subsidizing deodorant.com and the like, so, it asked the FNCAC to do something. What they did was instruct the NSF to tell NSI to begin charging for domains. This caught the Internet community rather off guard and discussion ensued on a "newdom" mailing list (whose archives can be found here). Several forces came into play. First was the rift between the group that felt they too could run a TLD and the group that though this should be run from a great big central registry. The latter became the IAHC/CORE thing while the former became the first alternative root. The US Government shut down the IAHC and began it's own proceedings: the white paper was produced. Other governments, most notably in the form of Paul Twoomey from Australia and Chris Wilkinson from the EU balked at the plan and the revised plan, the green paper took out the language about creating 5 new TLDs immediately (thereby throwing each conflicted group at least one bone). At the time Mikki Barry and Kathy Kleinman suggested in Becky Burr's office that a set of global meetings take place, not to decide answers to tough problems, but to determine just where there was consensus on the various issues. This became the IFWP forum and 3 meetings were held in Reston Va., Geneva, and Singapore. There was to be a followup meeting to merge these consensus points into a framework for the new corporation that was to replace IANA. While this was happening, NSI and IANA were negotiating, and Ira Magaziner, Clinton's senior science advisor and Roger Cochetti, a VP of IBM were running around selecting a new board. The IFWP wrap up meeting never happened, it was scuttled by Mike Roberts (suspicion is high he had been told be would be president) and the vast amount of time and energy, money, hopes and aspirations that was IFWP went down the toilet - which is a real shame as it was a significant body of work. Three proposals went in to the US government to form the new corporation. The IANA/NSI proposal drafted by Joe Sims and NSI, the Boston Working Group proposal (which is where the wrap-up meeting was to have been) which was a sane version of the NSI/ICANN proposal, and the ORSC proposal which was the BWG plan with greater fiscal responsibility and an existing corporate shell. Citing popular public support for the IANA/NSI plan it was selected - but if you read the public comments on the NTIA site carefully you'll see far less support than implied and much of it was tentative, frankly. A board materialized out if thin air, selected because they didn't know anything about DNS. So what went wrong? Was the original ICANN plan flawed or were the people just the wrong choices? I suggest that if Karl Aurbach and 9 people like him has been the original board we would not now be even talking about DNS; the board appointed from in high did not represent the Internet community whatsoever and instead represented telco, government and trademark special interests. It is believed the concessions made so that foreign government supported the "green paper" was that they got to pick certain members of the board. The first big clue there was trouble was when the board missed it's deadline to define a process for their replacement and simply extended their jobs; they should have been gone over two years ago now.
So what have we learned from this? In my opinion, no group that says "we're in charge" really is; respect is earned, not asserted and I think this was the great failing of both IAHC and ICANN. So while I generally like Weinstein, Newman and Farber, I do distrust the IAB to some extent based on previous debacles like the Boston Tea party where they were thrown out for claiming OSI and not TCP/IP was the way to go. The ISOC is another non-starter, it's wanted to get it's hands on the DNS for over a decade and has been a great supporter of the authoritarian regimes of both IAHC and ICANN. The key, I believe, is not some group claiming they should be in charge or that they have all the answers - nobody does - but the good old fashioned and time proven method of Internet collaborative cooperation. And this means actually doing it, not paying lip service to it like ICANN did. Oh and cut out the 5 star hotels and first class Concorde flights.
Is this about Internet governance? No. Absolutely not. In it's most basic form this is nothing more than an institutionalized debate between Dave Crocker and Karl Denninger in 1986 taken to it's logical conclusion. But it's nothing to do with governance of the Internet. Face it, if all you do is read and write email and/or usenet news, and play on ISC or muck about on the web, you may never have heard of ICANN and it certainly has zero effect on you. This is just about new top level domains, period; the IP addresses have virtually all been handed over to the regional registries and the port allocations are handles by somebody than CAN add one to a number and write it down on a piece of paper.
But didn't ICANN break up NSI ? Nope. That was Ira Magaziners plan executed through the Department of Commerce. You don't really think NSI gave in because ICANN though it was a good idea do you? What has ICANN really done in 4 years? They've knuckled under to WIPO and given us the horribly flawed UDRP and 7 really stupid TLDs that despite $2.$M worth of scrutiny still had huge problems to the point of being dragged into court over it.
What alternative roots exist? Quite a few actually, and while on the face of it you might think this would be a problem, but face it, if you can pick up your mail and get to Yahoo! then they work, and any of them will let you do that. The differences in them are what new TLDs they publish in their root zones. I need to disclaim right away that I coordinate, with Brian Reid's help, the ORSCroot, and it's generally believed to have the greatest penetration and is certainly the longest continuously operating one. The barrier to entry it low: show us working TLD servers and we'll list you. Other notable ones are the TINC root which is operated by some old time Usenet people such as Peter da Silva which has a policy of one tld per entity, which I don't like think can be made to work (the now defunct eDNS tried this and it was found to be too easily worked around), PacROOT which in my opinion swings too far the other way with their NameSlinger client - I don't think I know the proper number of TLDS any entity should operate but I do know it's not in the hundreds if not thousands; this raises anti-trust issues, and OpenNIC which is pretty good but only has a small number of new TLDs. There is also NameSpace which believes they should run all tlds. This grates against the notion of the root as a collection of independantly run TLDs in my opinion. But, it doesn't matter to me which one people use as long as they use one of them. Vote with your nameservers - it is in nobody's interest to break anything and using any of these roots will let you see all current DNS names and a whole universe of new ones although how many depends on which one you pick.
Why do we still use root servers? Now this is where it gets interesting. What if the US Government suddenly shut off the legacy root servers? 90% of the net would feel some sort of perturbation immediately especially since at least one TLD (.SE) is name-served directly from the root (not TLD!) servers as are many in-addr.arpa delegations. As the TTLs to TLD servers expired, users of the legacy root would not be able to resolve any DNS names. But, people that use other root servers would be immune to the demise of the legacy roots (modulo one of Swedens 7.SE nameservers of course) but an even better tactic in my opinion is to primary the root zone for yourself. Then, any or all root servers could be shut off and you wouldn't notice a thing. This would leave you with one remaining problem and that is where could you get the root zone from. Your upstream might be a good place or as DJB has suggested, a cryptographically signed root zone could be posted to usenet periodically. This has the inherent advantage of being out of band of TCP/IP; that is, even a UUCP connection could inject the zone into the news stream. That's one answer to "how do you bootstrap DNS without DNS".
Do I think ORSC should be the next ICANN as the ICANNWATCH poll suggests? No and hell no! Nobody should be in charge, and given that the net and the DNS itself is edge controlled - that is, whoever has the root password to a nameserver determines what dns names exist and what don't - any model that asserts a central authority is doomed to fail. There is need for coordination, but not authority.
Vote with your nameserver; vote early and vote often.
They're "reaching out", as an international, uh, thing. The host is on the hook for the vast majority of the expenses.
They are paying roughtly $13K US for first class tickets to get to Ghana for each of the board members from the US; the Yurrupeans presumably pay less.
The thing is spearheded in Ghana by Nii Quaynar who is a great guy but has been sucked in, IMO by ISOC to toe the party line. Remember Sean Dorans great screeds in the 80's: ISOC = "It seeks Overall Control" - same poeple, different I* organization.
I have never, in 2 years, recieved a piece of spam...
I run my own e-mail server...
Are you sure it's working?
I've had tagged domain addresses since '94 and get spam both postal and email to addresses on whois records that were deleted up to 5 years ago. IME the mean time between registering a domain and getting spam to that address is in days, not months. I'm pretty sure I'm not selling addresses from my mailserver too.
It really isn't tough to generate lists of email addresses to newly registered domains.
I've had tagged whois entries since 1994 and get snail-spam from big companies and e-spam from small ones. Consider the possability that companies who claim they need access to it also harvest it.
As for the issue of privacy vs. the need to contact domain owners... if anybody has a workable solution (sounds like the.dk registry might get busier than they want to be, and, what is the latency in getting a response on average and over time?) I'd love to hear it. I've never been able to figure out one.
At the end of the day perhaps what's needed is anti-spam policies and or legislation with teeth; and that whois mining is not the real issue.
Well, if your vision is to have sole control over a generic word or phrase, then yes, that's one vision that can't be fulfilled. At least not in a fair system.
You mean like net ? I dunno Brad, I'm one of the dwindling few that still believes what's written in rfc1591, especially the bit about ``it is inappropriate to talk of "ownership" and more appropriate to talk of "service to the community"''. I really don't care who runs.NET, I just care that it works. Since there's no legal machanism that lets you "own" a tld (the USPTO has sad so outright) "ownership" is a strawman argument.
Trademark law figured that out, with centuries to do it. You don't give anybody a monopoloy on an ordinary word.
For some definition of "ordinary word". If your last name is "Kodak" (these people do exist), because it's a "famous mark" you're not going to use that word in any business, ever. But, you can take a word, stick a dot in it and you sure can get monopoly rights to it. "stre.am" for example. That's very much a generic word and the USPTO will grant you a trademark on that domain.
And yes, that means in any language. That doesn't mean you can't use real words as TLDs, it just means you can't use them in their generic sense.
What about words that are generic in one langauge but not in another?
For example, "Apple directories Inc." might want to run the TLD.apple, and they would be allowed to do so, but they would not be allowed to register lower level domains which are generic pertaining to real apples, the kind that grow on trees. Any other domain would be fine.
"Apple" is generic, and I'm doing my best to understand here, are you saying that if some company with Apple in it's name wanted that TLD then it's no longer generic? If so, then wouldn't this open the doot for any generic work to aquire secondary meaning and no longer be generic?
Thus nobody can have "delicious.apple" -- that's generic, and trademark law (and this system) would quite rightly refuse to give ownership of it to anybody. "Freds-delicious.us.apple" is not generic so it could be OK.
"Delicious apple" taken by itself is generic. If I start, say "delicious apple comics" them it's now aquired secondary meaning and for the specific class of goods and services it's registered in as a tradmark, it's no longer generic. So how would you decide what's generic or not when it can be both depending on context?
So yes, this prohibits one vision -- the idea of people getting monopoly ownership on generic names. Can you tell me how that vision can be accomodated in a fair system? If you can I am happy to accomodate it!
You havn't eliminated the problem, with this ontology, you've merely shifted it because of the dot! If somebody registers a name you see fit and they subdelegate a thousand third level subdomains and one of them turns out to be generic do you cancel that SLD and put 999 people offline because of it? How would you find the re$ources to be constantly checking for this?
The DNS is a system of uniquely nameing computers on a network. The trademark system allows multiple parties to register thesame name (delta faucets, delta airlins, who arbitrate the squabbble over.DELTA? Even though it's also a generic word?) and the two are not orthogonal.
There are laws to protect trademarks. I don't see the marginal utility of recapitulaing them in the DNS - what do you gain by this. Net is generic, com isn't, both have millions of names under them and experience has shown there id no unique problem set to either one despite that.
So Carl Oppedahl has patents.com. Woopie. Where's the harm?
If cen be set up to do things like "look up a.info name in name.space's dns servers (FCFS!) and if you don't find it look it up in the icann dns servers.
It's a bit leading edge, but it does work. I agree you should't have to know or care what root server cluster you use.
It's no secret the whole net cannot resolve alternative tlds. The important thing to note here is that the percentage of that net that can is increasing. Get an alternative name - for free, don't pay for God's sake. Use it with your friends that can, and use it. If you don't you're stuck with what ICANN gives you. In other words, yeah it's not great but the alternative is worse.
Scammy? If it's really a scam it's illegal and will be shut down. The alt roots have been aorund for years. Maybe you're thinking of the ICANN approved.BIZ tld that was dragged into court and found to be an illegal lottery (pay a fee get a "chance" to get a domain) - THAT was a scam.
40+ companies paid $50,000.00 USD to ICANN for as "TLD application fees" and only 7 of them actually got tlds. The losers money was used to scrutinize the winners applications. THAT's not a lottery? What did they get besides a "chance"???
I like your vision for the DNS Brad, but the problem with your vision of it... and ICANN's vision of it is that it's well, one persons vision of it. The DNS is big enough such that a subset of it can contain one mans vision of what it should be. That it, throw all the ideas of what it should d be together. I don't believe any one person - or organizatin should decide what the namespace should be (I don't see anything partitularly wrong with generic tlds, YMM indeed V), it should be allowed to grow organically like, say, usenet namespace did. Despite it's many flaws, usenet, and particularly it's namespace is still the worlds largest cooperative collaboratin.
The actual mechanics of how this is done is not terribly difficult (and yes, golly yo uhave some good ideas there, thanks) but is not as important as "you respect my ideas and suppoert them and I'll reciprocate" much in the same was as the UUCP paradigm of "I'll pass your packets if you pass mine".
Jon used to run the IANA as a part time task. Think about it. One guy... part time. If you're familiar with the organizational structre of the ICANN that replaces it, it's a little mind boggling.
The only mistake he ever made was accepting government funding. That gave the USG the crack it needed to claim owbership of it: "we paid for it".
So don't use any root servers. Secondary the root zone of your choice and cut out that intermedate step in name resolution, and you'll be diminishing the load of those poor overworked legacy root servers, and you'll be resolving names as fast if not faster than what you're doing now.
Remember hosts.txt? Think of your own copy of the root zone as that on steroids. You can even do this with old Windoze with a really nifty program called "Simple DNS+".
It may interest you to know there is a mailing list where alt.root coordinators talk to slowly but surely work towards the goal of a unified alternative namespace. It's slow, dull and boring work but the endgame is no matter what alt.root you choose, the same names work no matter what root server cluster you use. So, as the coordinator of the ORSC root I say go use PACROOT - hit their servers:-)
The tlds born in the ORSC root work just fine there. And vice versa.
It's difficult to imagine why you think we're a scam Bill, when it's the ICANN franchiees that were dragged into court for running an illegal lottery after ICANN staff ("lawyers") had spent the losing applicants money to review the winners proposals and bless them.
Perhaps you have a bad taste in your mouth from some of the 1996/7 bad craziness that went on. That didn't do anybody any good, no argument there, but those people have, uh, "retired" mercifully. And hey, if it's good enough for an ICANN baord member to use the ORSC root, it's good enough for you:-)
If you don't want to be scammed, don't spend any money. You can still have an non-ICANN domain name , honest.
Slashdot Mirror
I see a great need (tm).
How can you expect TrustE to do anything when their own people send spam and do not repeated honour "unsubscribe requests" ? Get real.
p e.html
http://www.dnso.com/comics/2002/Feb/21/
http://www.dnso.com/comics/2002/Feb/21/shallow-hy
(there isn't really a space between the "p" and the "e" in "hype". That's a bug in Opera; it wraps when it sees a hyphen and it shouldn't. The link seems to work though.
I've used Netscape since Andresson announced the first version on Usenet and only upgraded when I had to. When I could't stand 4.77 "correcting" me when I typed in an address in the Location: line I tried 6.2.2 and thought for a second my CPU had been replaced by a 4 Mhz Z80. Up to one second to respond to a right mouse click is sheer idiocy.
I tried Opera and Mozilla two weeks ago. Mozilla is only half as slow as NS6.2.2, and I'm sticking with Opera, only resorting to other browsers for compatability testing.
I'd rather use Mozilla, but I don't have time to wait for the mouse to catch up to me.
I realize a fast processor and gobs or RAM probably mitigates that, but NS4.76 (and every previous version of NS) got that part right; IE never did. Can we expect Mozilla to address this?
I've had 7 calls in 6 days about carpet cleaning. No I don't want to take any damn survey thank you and will you please take my name off your list. They say they will and then call back the next day. It's always a different voice.
...and maybe once or twice a day I have to turn it on to look at some page. That's fairly quick and easy to do in Opera.
Maybe running with JS off isn't for everybody, but to me the advantages outweigh the disadvantages. Frankly I have more of a problem with badly coded HTML that Opera won't parse than I do with JS sites.
http://rfc1591.com/
http://annotated.rfc1591.com/
http://new.rfc1591.com/
1985: a California graphics board manufacturer - I wrote firmware. The products actually shipped with a manual that said "This manual says what our product actually does, no matter what the salesman may have told you it does".
And ran mail and news in the mid 80's. Brian Reid got us a UUCP feed from a real TCP/IP connected site - JPL, and put gryphon.com on the usenet backbone, no doubt helping to lead to it's demise .
Xenix worked perfectly well; we fed news and mail to over a hundred downstream sites with UUCP and had a doezen news peers.
If you look at old usenet postings in Google, anything that was gryphon.com or gryphon.cts.com came from that lowly i286 development system running Xenix administered by Greg Laskin (who died in 1990). Gryphon.com posters were constantly in the top 25 bandwidth wasters postings that K*net Paul Dolan annoyed everybody with.
Whether it had a chance on the desktop depends on whose desk it was on.
If documentation is short, it's useless. If it's complete and accurate you'll never have time to find which page of the 35 volume set you want to read.
Write good code and pray.
It's old and been in Canada a very long time. It may be headed for Siberia but it's really just lost on it's way to Miami.
Somebody should give it directions. I don't think its compass is working properly.
I think there are a few things amiss with the pfir plan and I'd like to suggest and comment on some alternatives and have a few comments about our continues use of 20th century DNS.
.SE nameservers of course) but an even better tactic in my opinion is to primary the root zone for yourself. Then, any or all root servers could be shut off and you wouldn't notice a thing. This would leave you with one remaining problem and that is where could you get the root zone from. Your upstream might be a good place or as DJB has suggested, a cryptographically signed root zone could be posted to usenet periodically. This has the inherent advantage of being out of band of TCP/IP; that is, even a UUCP connection could inject the zone into the news stream. That's one answer to "how do you bootstrap DNS without DNS".
Look back at the creation of ICANN and it's not difficult to see why it has failed. The timeline goes something like this: when the Wired article came out in 1994 where Joshua Quittner reported he registered mcdonalds.com and McDonalds didn't want it he ended up selling it to Burger King. At the time InterNIC registrations were taking about 3 days. This shot up to 11 weeks in a matter of days. The NSF, who funded NSI to run the InterNIC, did not feel it's role, which is to foster academic and scientific advancement, included subsidizing deodorant.com and the like, so, it asked the FNCAC to do something. What they did was instruct the NSF to tell NSI to begin charging for domains. This caught the Internet community rather off guard and discussion ensued on a "newdom" mailing list (whose archives can be found here). Several forces came into play. First was the rift between the group that felt they too could run a TLD and the group that though this should be run from a great big central registry. The latter became the IAHC/CORE thing while the former became the first alternative root. The US Government shut down the IAHC and began it's own proceedings: the white paper was produced. Other governments, most notably in the form of Paul Twoomey from Australia
and Chris Wilkinson from the EU balked at the plan and the revised plan, the green paper took out the language about creating 5 new TLDs immediately (thereby throwing each conflicted group at least one bone). At the time Mikki Barry and Kathy Kleinman suggested in Becky Burr's office that a set of global meetings take place, not to decide answers to tough problems, but to determine just where there was consensus on the various issues. This became the IFWP forum and 3 meetings were held in Reston Va., Geneva, and Singapore. There was to be a followup meeting to merge these consensus points into a framework for the new corporation that was to replace IANA. While this was happening, NSI and IANA were negotiating, and Ira Magaziner, Clinton's senior science advisor and Roger Cochetti, a VP of IBM were running around selecting a new board. The IFWP wrap up meeting never happened, it was scuttled by Mike Roberts (suspicion is high he had been told be would be president) and the vast amount of time and energy, money, hopes and aspirations that was IFWP went down the toilet - which is a real shame as it was a significant body of work. Three proposals went in to the US government to form the new corporation. The IANA/NSI proposal drafted by Joe Sims and NSI, the Boston Working Group proposal (which is where the wrap-up meeting was to have been) which was a sane version of the NSI/ICANN proposal, and the ORSC proposal which was the BWG plan with greater fiscal responsibility and an existing corporate shell. Citing popular public support for the IANA/NSI plan it was selected - but if you read the public comments on the NTIA site carefully you'll see far less support than implied and much of it was tentative, frankly. A board materialized out if thin air, selected because they didn't know anything about DNS. So what went wrong? Was the original ICANN plan flawed or were the people just the wrong choices? I suggest that if Karl Aurbach and 9 people like him has been the original board we would not now be even talking about DNS; the board appointed from in high did not represent the Internet community whatsoever and instead represented telco, government and trademark special interests. It is believed the concessions made so that foreign government supported the "green paper" was that they got to pick certain members of the board. The first big clue there was trouble was when the board missed it's deadline to define a process for their replacement and simply extended their jobs; they should have been gone over two years ago now.
So what have we learned from this? In my opinion, no group that says "we're in charge" really is; respect is earned, not asserted and I think this was the great failing of both IAHC and ICANN. So while I generally like Weinstein, Newman and Farber, I do distrust the IAB to some extent based on previous debacles like the Boston Tea party where they were thrown out for claiming OSI and not TCP/IP was the way to go. The ISOC is another non-starter, it's wanted to get it's hands on the DNS for over a decade and has been a great supporter of the authoritarian regimes of both IAHC and ICANN. The key, I believe, is not some group claiming they should be in charge or that they have all the answers - nobody does - but the good old fashioned and time proven method of Internet collaborative cooperation. And this means actually doing it, not paying lip service to it like ICANN did. Oh and cut out the 5 star hotels and first class Concorde flights.
Is this about Internet governance? No. Absolutely not. In it's most basic form this is nothing more than an institutionalized debate between Dave Crocker and Karl Denninger in 1986 taken to it's logical conclusion. But it's nothing to do with governance of the Internet. Face it, if all you do is read and write email and/or usenet news, and play on ISC or muck about on the web, you may never have heard of ICANN and it certainly has zero effect on you. This is just about new top level domains, period; the IP addresses have virtually all been handed over to the regional registries and the port allocations are handles by somebody than CAN add one to a number and write it down on a piece of paper.
But didn't ICANN break up NSI ? Nope. That was Ira Magaziners plan executed through the Department of Commerce. You don't really think NSI gave in because ICANN though it was a good idea do you? What has ICANN really done in 4 years? They've knuckled under to WIPO and given us the horribly flawed UDRP and 7 really stupid TLDs that despite $2.$M worth of scrutiny still had huge problems to the point of being dragged into court over it.
What alternative roots exist? Quite a few actually, and while on the face of it you might think this would be a problem, but face it, if you can pick up your mail and get to Yahoo! then they work, and any of them will let you do that. The differences in them are what new TLDs they publish in their root zones. I need to disclaim right away that I coordinate, with Brian Reid's help, the ORSC root, and it's generally believed to have the greatest penetration and is certainly the longest continuously operating one. The barrier to entry it low: show us working TLD servers and we'll list you. Other notable ones are the TINC root which is operated by some old time Usenet people such as Peter da Silva which has a policy of one tld per entity, which I don't like think can be made to work (the now defunct eDNS tried this and it was found to be too easily worked around), PacROOT which in my opinion swings too far the other way with their NameSlinger client - I don't think I know the proper number of TLDS any entity should operate but I do know it's not in the hundreds if not thousands; this raises anti-trust issues, and OpenNIC which is pretty good but only has a small number of new TLDs. There is also NameSpace which believes they should run all tlds. This grates against the notion of the root as a collection of independantly run TLDs in my opinion. But, it doesn't matter to me which one people use as long as they use one of them. Vote with your nameservers - it is in nobody's interest to break anything and using any of these roots will let you see all current DNS names and a whole universe of new ones although how many depends on which one you pick.
Why do we still use root servers? Now this is where it gets interesting. What if the US Government suddenly shut off the legacy root servers? 90% of the net would feel some sort of perturbation immediately especially since at least one TLD (.SE) is name-served directly from the root (not TLD!) servers as are many in-addr.arpa delegations. As the TTLs to TLD servers expired, users of the legacy root would not be able to resolve any DNS names. But, people that use other root servers would be immune to the demise of the legacy roots (modulo one of Swedens 7
Do I think ORSC should be the next ICANN as the ICANNWATCH poll suggests? No and hell no! Nobody should be in charge, and given that the net and the DNS itself is edge controlled - that is, whoever has the root password to a nameserver determines what dns names exist and what don't - any model that asserts a central authority is doomed to fail. There is need for coordination, but not authority.
Vote with your nameserver; vote early and vote often.
Richard Sexton
March 19, 2002
Ask the ICANN board member who uses alternative roots and has for four years if he's had any problems.
The answer is to help the alternative root community: ORSC, OpenNIC, PacROOT, not to support ICANN over FUD like this.
They're "reaching out", as an international, uh, thing. The host is on the hook for the vast majority of the expenses.
They are paying roughtly $13K US for first class tickets to get to Ghana for each of the board members from the US; the Yurrupeans presumably pay less.
The thing is spearheded in Ghana by Nii Quaynar who is a great guy but has been sucked in, IMO by ISOC to toe the party line. Remember Sean Dorans great screeds in the 80's: ISOC = "It seeks Overall Control" - same poeple, different I* organization.
I have never, in 2 years, recieved a piece of spam...
I run my own e-mail server...
Are you sure it's working?
I've had tagged domain addresses since '94 and get spam both postal and email to addresses on whois records that were deleted up to 5 years ago. IME the mean time between registering a domain and getting spam to that address is in days, not months. I'm pretty sure I'm not selling addresses from my mailserver too.
It really isn't tough to generate lists of email addresses to newly registered domains.
I've had tagged whois entries since 1994 and get snail-spam from big companies and e-spam from small ones. Consider the possability that companies who claim they need access to it also harvest it.
.dk registry might get busier than they want to be, and, what is the latency in getting a response on average and over time?) I'd love to hear it. I've never been able to figure out one.
As for the issue of privacy vs. the need to contact domain owners... if anybody has a workable solution (sounds like the
At the end of the day perhaps what's needed is anti-spam policies and or legislation with teeth; and that whois mining is not the real issue.
You mean like net ? I dunno Brad, I'm one of the dwindling few that still believes what's written in rfc1591, especially the bit about ``it is inappropriate to talk of "ownership" and more appropriate to talk of "service to the community"''. I really don't care who runs
For some definition of "ordinary word". If your last name is "Kodak" (these people do exist), because it's a "famous mark" you're not going to use that word in any business, ever. But, you can take a word, stick a dot in it and you sure can get monopoly rights to it. "stre.am" for example. That's very much a generic word and the USPTO will grant you a trademark on that domain.
What about words that are generic in one langauge but not in another?
"Apple" is generic, and I'm doing my best to understand here, are you saying that if some company with Apple in it's name wanted that TLD then it's no longer generic? If so, then wouldn't this open the doot for any generic work to aquire secondary meaning and no longer be generic?
"Delicious apple" taken by itself is generic. If I start, say "delicious apple comics" them it's now aquired secondary meaning and for the specific class of goods and services it's registered in as a tradmark, it's no longer generic. So how would you decide what's generic or not when it can be both depending on context?
You havn't eliminated the problem, with this ontology, you've merely shifted it because of the dot! If somebody registers a name you see fit and they subdelegate a thousand third level subdomains and one of them turns out to be generic do you cancel that SLD and put 999 people offline because of it? How would you find the re$ources to be constantly checking for this?
The DNS is a system of uniquely nameing computers on a network. The trademark system allows multiple parties to register thesame name (delta faucets, delta airlins, who arbitrate the squabbble over
There are laws to protect trademarks. I don't see the marginal utility of recapitulaing them in the DNS - what do you gain by this. Net is generic, com isn't, both have millions of names under them and experience has shown there id no unique problem set to either one despite that.
So Carl Oppedahl has patents.com. Woopie. Where's the harm?
Brad that makes no sense - if you allow for anybody's vision then you can't exclude generic tlds.
Generic in what language, btw?
Lame-D
.info name in name.space's dns servers (FCFS!) and if you don't find it look it up in the icann dns servers.
If cen be set up to do things like "look up a
It's a bit leading edge, but it does work. I agree you should't have to know or care what root server cluster you use.
It's no secret the whole net cannot resolve alternative tlds. The important thing to note here is that the percentage of that net that can is increasing. Get an alternative name - for free, don't pay for God's sake. Use it with your friends that can, and use it. If you don't you're stuck with what ICANN gives you. In other words, yeah it's not great but the alternative is worse.
.BIZ tld that was dragged into court and found to be an illegal lottery (pay a fee get a "chance" to get a domain) - THAT was a scam.
Scammy? If it's really a scam it's illegal and will be shut down. The alt roots have been aorund for years. Maybe you're thinking of the ICANN approved
40+ companies paid $50,000.00 USD to ICANN for as "TLD application fees" and only 7 of them actually got tlds. The losers money was used to scrutinize the winners applications. THAT's not a lottery? What did they get besides a "chance"???
I like your vision for the DNS Brad, but the problem with your vision of it... and ICANN's vision of it is that it's well, one persons vision of it. The DNS is big enough such that a subset of it can contain one mans vision of what it should be. That it, throw all the ideas of what it should d be together. I don't believe any one person - or organizatin should decide what the namespace should be (I don't see anything partitularly wrong with generic tlds, YMM indeed V), it should be allowed to grow organically like, say, usenet namespace did. Despite it's many flaws, usenet, and particularly it's namespace is still the worlds largest cooperative collaboratin.
The actual mechanics of how this is done is not terribly difficult (and yes, golly yo uhave some good ideas there, thanks) but is not as important as "you respect my ideas and suppoert them and I'll reciprocate" much in the same was as the UUCP paradigm of "I'll pass your packets if you pass mine".
RS
Jon used to run the IANA as a part time task. Think about it. One guy... part time. If you're familiar with the organizational structre of the ICANN that replaces it, it's a little mind boggling.
The only mistake he ever made was accepting government funding. That gave the USG the crack it needed to claim owbership of it: "we paid for it".
...as the elected North American at-large representative.
So don't use any root servers. Secondary the root zone of your choice and cut out that intermedate step in name resolution, and you'll be diminishing the load of those poor overworked legacy root servers, and you'll be resolving names as fast if not faster than what you're doing now.
Remember hosts.txt? Think of your own copy of the root zone as that on steroids. You can even do this with old Windoze with a really nifty program called "Simple DNS+".
It may interest you to know there is a mailing list where alt.root coordinators talk to slowly but surely work towards the goal of a unified alternative namespace. It's slow, dull and boring work but the endgame is no matter what alt.root you choose, the same names work no matter what root server cluster you use. So, as the coordinator of the ORSC root I say go use PACROOT - hit their servers :-)
The tlds born in the ORSC root work just fine there. And vice versa.
Stay tuned...
It's difficult to imagine why you think we're a scam Bill, when it's the ICANN franchiees that were dragged into court for running an illegal lottery after ICANN staff ("lawyers") had spent the losing applicants money to review the winners proposals and bless them.
:-)
Perhaps you have a bad taste in your mouth from some of the 1996/7 bad craziness that went on. That didn't do anybody any good, no argument there, but those people have, uh, "retired" mercifully. And hey, if it's good enough for an ICANN baord member to use the ORSC root, it's good enough for you
If you don't want to be scammed, don't spend any money. You can still have an non-ICANN domain name , honest.