Can we pay the Wikipedia editors to stop editing articles? Having some moron keep changing verifiable factual information back to something that's flat out wrong over and over gets really tiresome after several years. IMO half those people shouldn't be allowed near the thing.
Paul's doing fine, he and Brian Reid are working together at ISC these days. Brian, if you recall, is the guy who originally funded Paul to take the Berkely B-tree stuff and turn it in to usable software (*) while they were at Digital. They also do some load testing stiff on dns servers for the nsf. You can poke around and find their papers if you look.
(*) for some definition of "usable". I use djb which annoys them both no end.
"NSI may have been packed with technical skills, but when it comes to actually sending a renewal notice to the correct address, keeping the whois information uncorrupted, and actually processing payments (as opposed to cashing the check and expiring the domain anyway), they leave a LOT to be desired. Without fail, in all matters administrative NetSol is the MOST painful to deal with."
First, NSI the.com/net registry is a separate company from the retail people that renew domains. Guess which ones has a majority of the clues? Guess which one doesn't run.com/.net?
Second - I'll agree with you. But, I've found everyone else is worse. While I can't say I've had the problems you have, Iv'e always been able to document the problem and get them to fix it. I even got them to take a domain back from some guy when I showed them my receipt was dated before the guy they gave it too. This was back in the email template years, 95 96 or so.
I've tried the top 10 leading registrars. I moved my 4 domains back to NSI. I used to think they were sleezy but holy crap the others have nothing on them.
Relax. As a former Fiat onwned (one of the cool ones with half a ferarri engine) rest assured that if you could get the motherfucker to start, it'll get you home.
The smart Italian car owner has more than one. That's why airlines have more than one plane.
"Yep. I reckon an American pilot in a Boeing could have just flipped a switch and fixed all that. They'd all be relaxing with cold ones as we speak."
Airbus have a rep for not letting the pilot control the plane or giving back control at the last and worst possible moment. But we don't know if the Brazilian crash has anything to do with this.
I'd like to see a computer know to, and successfully land in the Hudson though!
I post verifiable fact and observations and you guys think I'm a troll? Wow. Ya know, I was there and you may not like it, but I'm telling you what I saw happen.
Here's the deal..cc did it first and lots of people complained. Then other cctlds began doing it, more poeple complained. ICANN was asked to do something and said it didn't think it was appropriate they do that.
So NSI began doing it, citing a clause in their agreement that they couldn't be treated differently from any other registry.
ICANN got them to shut it down, in violation of their own contract with NSI and they didn't shut the other ones down.
There's so much misinformation about this it's not funny. I was there, here's a few things that wern't made public.
First of all, in the day there was great pressure for NSI to "sign with ICANN" and become subject to its aegis. NSI had keept the root and tld servers running since their inception and still had the lions share of cluefull people like Mark Kosters. Granted the marketing department were sometimes idiots, but if you tour every major DNS shop on the planet you had to gridgingly admit the NSI boys knew their stuff better than anybody. By a large margin.
NSI didn't want to sign with ICANN because they knew ICANN were gunning for them. There was a publid hatred of NSI (for being successful) and this had come to a head in ICANN "management".
ICANN and NSI wern't getting along. ICANN had rules it wished to apply to.com that wouldnt be applied to any other tld registry and NSI jsut dug its feet it. This was becoming an embarasment to ICANN.
Finally Roger Cochetti of IBM, who'd been running around in background with Ira Magaziner for ages, lying to poeple about what was gong to happen (In public: this is your internet, you define the newcorp and staff it, in private: we have the thing in the bag, meet your new overlords, you can't elect your own, and to this day there are still not free ICANN board elections!) and one day NSI got a call and were locked in to a room with ICANN and couldn't come out till they'd settled. The came from IBM who for reasons not known to me had that kind of power.
Now, nobody talked about "competative bidding" when it came to the other 250 tld registie that served up country code tlds (who were also resitant to signing with ICANN) but, in a sense, NSI signed with a gun pointed to it's head. NSI staffers told tales of phone calls saying that the root and tld servers would be declared a national security resource if they didn't knock it off and they should do what they're told.
There's a reason this wasn't accomplished in a transparent manner: it was done illegally with government complicity.
As for this lawsuit, guess whose paying for it? You know those "what you need when you need it" guys? ("domainers") Them. When you have a million domains and somebody sugegsts you might save a buck a reg. if this goes though, 7 guys times a mil each and Brett Faussett gets to send his kid to college. I know and like Brett, but this is a stinker.
If.com is moved some place besides NSI expect nothing to work. Or work well. The idea that scumbags one step above spammers dictate key infrastructural components of the net based on their economic needs and not any objective criteria wrankles a bit.
ICANN is due for an anti-trust bitch slapping alright, but not about.com.
The internet, when faced with a problem of scarcity creates new resources, it does not regulate existing ones. The problem is lawyers prevented the implementation of new top level domains. Postels original plan in 97 was 300 new tlds (250+ domains already existed then) with 150 in the first year. The trademark lawyers took over ICANN, prevented any new tlds from being implemented and Postel died. IBM alone admitted in secret that they'd spent $60M lobbying DC for no new tlds and every major three letter computer company had done the same. So, the solution all along was to make NSI "jsut another company" by having another 100 of them dong the same thing.
But intellectual property lawyers nixed that, you may never know how powerful these guys are, and now they're going after.com.
"I think the solution is pretty simple; you can sell a domain name to someone else for at most the time-adjusted value of all the dollars you've paid the registration company. Anything extra goes to that registration company, who gets to keep reasonable operating costs. The rest goes into a fund for internet development or research or somesuch."
The last thing you want to do is encourage the regiastration companies. They do this kind of crap already in many cases. As for a developmenet find, tried that, anybody who paid into the Intellectual Infrastructure Fund in the first two or three years when.com became pay for watches the US congree steal it and give to Mike Roberts as payback for ICANN which he promptly wasted on Internet II to upgrade the net connection of some US universities. Given Canada alone put $4M into that fund this is not an idea anybody with a memory about such things is gonna endorse heartily.
The other thign is too there are some people that buy domains for $6 each - lots of them then try to make them make more than $7/yr. I don't think it's a very good business but it is a legal business and I'm not sure we want to go down the slippery slope of letting somebody decide what a legitimate use of a domain is.
What if someday somebody decides I don't have a shopping cart and am not doing e-commerce so it's not really a legitimate business and somebody is trying to do e-commerce should have my domain because that's more legitimate. That way be dragons.
You can run T1 over 4 wire copper up to 11km with pairgain campus t1 HDSL units that must be all of $4 by now on fleabay. You can probably find t1 an maybe even t3 csu/dsu's too but they may have a weird serial connector that my cost more than the dsu you foujd cheap.
T1 used to be a big deal. I realize this is pretty snivvely today. But it might be better than nothing.
Maybe there's other boxes that do more over 4 wire by now, I dunno.
Previous to V10 slashdot titles got messed up in the last "style upgrade" and were black on dark green and unreadable. And slower than the first version of netscape navigator on a current ebay page.
I did talk to somebody at/. about it and was told "most of out people use IE, then firefox, nobody we know uses Opera full time. Submit a patch if you want it fixed".
I've used nothing but Opera for 5 years.
Facebook pages now have subsecond response time when you scroll them instead of the horrific mess of wasted time they were in previous versions of (all browsers) after FB's last "update" in early spring.
Thank you, once again, Opera team.
---
Postscipt. I originally typed this as an AC, oops, logged in and then - every heading for every message went away and is a white box instead. Lovely. No I don't have time to sort out the css mess and submit a patch. Could somebody please fix this fucking thing, its an embarassment.
"The IANA exists because to have an Internet, you need an Authority to Assign Numbers. Without that, the meaning of "slashdot.org" or "216.34.181.45" depends on the whim of your friendly neighborhood routing table.
Feel free to debate who the authority is, but acknowledge that we need some authority"
By whose authority was I able to create comp.fonts? or rec.ponds? "Authority" is a bit of a strong word here. Cooperation is the key. Those that do't want to cooperate can make iana.org or slashdot.org point wherever they like. But in the cooperative internet we agree on things, rather than subvert outselves to authority
There can be more that one authority! As long as they agree there are no issues. Again, the spirit and willingness to cooperate is the key here.
I'd like to see some impartial figures to see how disk subsystem performance (regular and raided) compares with FreeBSD. You can even use FreeBSD 2.2.1 if you want.
And them again under heavy load. Not just "oooh, lets try a million database reads".
From 1986 to 1999 it was run autonomously. Sure the US paid for it (15K/yr as a part time project) but whatever Jon Postel decided was fine. Jon would measure the consensus of the net and implement it. During this time the DNS went from 0 to 250+ TLDS.
When the US government assumed oversight in the period 2000 to now 10 new tlds were created at a cost of nearly a billion dollars. And the registration process for.com became the most inept sleezy shit ever seen on the net.
"The US" or "another country" or group of countries is not the answer.
The dns should be administered by the poeple that know what they're doing in terms os techical, legal and social policies and governments of the world has zero say in this.
The internet is not some "thing" that needs to be administered. It is not a public resource!
There are millions of private networks and we all agree to use TCP/IP and DNS to interoperate. Not one bit of it is a puboic resource. It's all privatly owned. You own your bit, I own my bit. Do we really want some government telling us how we use our computers and what we can do and can't do?
The USG and ICANN are the worst things that ever happebed to the net. They stagnated it as a single point of failure by having a choke hold on the A-ROOT of the legacy DNS.
Exactly. But if you post cryptographically signed data to usenet it'll both be available quickly and will be stored forever (through google).
Or use TXT records in the dns to do the decentralized db part. Of course I'd suggest using a new tld for this but of course this sort of thing is blocked by the government and scientologists.
Either way it's easy to store cryptographically signed data in "archived public streams".
But isn't this what makes the net cool. If you're blocked you can find a way around it. You don't *have* to use MSN. Or Facebook. There's other ways to talk.
"Do you turn your back on NYCL so quickly just because some real-life Doogey Houser thinks he can take on an establishment that has been bought and paid for?"
I know Charles Neeson. Comparing him to Doogey Houser indicates you don't know a thing about him. He's educated some of the finest legal minds day, off the top of my head: Larry Lessig, Jon Zittrain and Ben Edelman.
There's a reason the RIAA never moved against Harvard students. This is the one battle they didn't want and they may be assholes but they're not stupid.
Charlie may not win. But something is gonna happen here that will change the landscape forever, mark my words.
Read everything you can about Billion dollar Charlie then see if you still have the same opinion of the man and thr RIAA's chances.
Slashdot Mirror
Can we pay the Wikipedia editors to stop editing articles? Having some moron keep changing verifiable factual information back to something that's flat out wrong over and over gets really tiresome after several years. IMO half those people shouldn't be allowed near the thing.
Paul's doing fine, he and Brian Reid are working together at ISC these days. Brian, if you recall, is the guy who originally funded Paul to take the Berkely B-tree stuff and turn it in to usable software (*) while they were at Digital. They also do some load testing stiff on dns servers for the nsf. You can poke around and find their papers if you look.
(*) for some definition of "usable". I use djb which annoys them both no end.
I assumed they were doing this with packets without the AUTH bit set. If you ask for an authoritatiove answer from .com you can't get it from comcast.
But it appears now they either aren't doing it or have stopped doing it.
"NSI may have been packed with technical skills, but when it comes to actually sending a renewal notice to the correct address, keeping the whois information uncorrupted, and actually processing payments (as opposed to cashing the check and expiring the domain anyway), they leave a LOT to be desired. Without fail, in all matters administrative NetSol is the MOST painful to deal with."
First, NSI the .com/net registry is a separate company from the retail people that renew domains. Guess which ones has a majority of the clues? Guess which one doesn't run .com/.net?
Second - I'll agree with you. But, I've found everyone else is worse. While I can't say I've had the problems you have, Iv'e always been able to document the problem and get them to fix it. I even got them to take a domain back from some guy when I showed them my receipt was dated before the guy they gave it too. This was back in the email template years, 95 96 or so.
I've tried the top 10 leading registrars. I moved my 4 domains back to NSI. I used to think they were sleezy but holy crap the others have nothing on them.
"how do you get a reasonable level of respect from your users while not being a jerk?"
Delete their files. Steal their photos and email and cc numbers. Blackmail them.
If you don't, they'll do it to you.
"Microsoft praised on the altar of Slashdot!? Blasphemy!"
That's ok, it's wrong.
Ozz is full of shit and barely makes sense. His points are self contradictory for one thing.
So primary the root zone for yourself and don't use their DNS. They can't intercept DNS requests to 127.0.0.1
The root zone is just a bunch of pointers to the TLD servers that have all the big files and the root zone is tiny.
Just declare yourself authoritative for . and use the root zone of your choice. The legacy one is at : ftp://rs.internic.net/domain/
"Engines by . . . God help us . . . Fiat"
Relax. As a former Fiat onwned (one of the cool ones with half a ferarri engine) rest assured that if you could get the motherfucker to start, it'll get you home.
The smart Italian car owner has more than one. That's why airlines have more than one plane.
"Yep. I reckon an American pilot in a Boeing could have just flipped a switch and fixed all that. They'd all be relaxing with cold ones as we speak."
Airbus have a rep for not letting the pilot control the plane or giving back control at the last and worst possible moment. But we don't know if the Brazilian crash has anything to do with this.
I'd like to see a computer know to, and successfully land in the Hudson though!
"There are other organizations that have a "monopoly" on various TLDs"
Yeah. You should see what the guys that run .arpa get to charge.
I post verifiable fact and observations and you guys think I'm a troll? Wow. Ya know, I was there and you may not like it, but I'm telling you what I saw happen.
"But ICANN doesn't have much money."
They have a $60M/yr budget that you pay for with each domain registration or renewal. They skim something off the top of every domain name.
This replaces what Jon Postel used to do as a part time job for $15K/yr.
Here's the deal. .cc did it first and lots of people complained. Then other cctlds began doing it, more poeple complained. ICANN was asked to do something and said it didn't think it was appropriate they do that.
So NSI began doing it, citing a clause in their agreement that they couldn't be treated differently from any other registry.
ICANN got them to shut it down, in violation of their own contract with NSI and they didn't shut the other ones down.
There's so much misinformation about this it's not funny. I was there, here's a few things that wern't made public.
First of all, in the day there was great pressure for NSI to "sign with ICANN" and become subject to its aegis. NSI had keept the root and tld servers running since their inception and still had the lions share of cluefull people like Mark Kosters. Granted the marketing department were sometimes idiots, but if you tour every major DNS shop on the planet you had to gridgingly admit the NSI boys knew their stuff better than anybody. By a large margin.
NSI didn't want to sign with ICANN because they knew ICANN were gunning for them. There was a publid hatred of NSI (for being successful) and this had come to a head in ICANN "management".
ICANN and NSI wern't getting along. ICANN had rules it wished to apply to .com that wouldnt be applied to any other tld registry and NSI jsut dug its feet it. This was becoming an embarasment to ICANN.
Finally Roger Cochetti of IBM, who'd been running around in background with Ira Magaziner for ages, lying to poeple about what was gong to happen (In public: this is your internet, you define the newcorp and staff it, in private: we have the thing in the bag, meet your new overlords, you can't elect your own, and to this day there are still not free ICANN board elections!) and one day NSI got a call and were locked in to a room with ICANN and couldn't come out till they'd settled. The came from IBM who for reasons not known to me had that kind of power.
Now, nobody talked about "competative bidding" when it came to the other 250 tld registie that served up country code tlds (who were also resitant to signing with ICANN) but, in a sense, NSI signed with a gun pointed to it's head. NSI staffers told tales of phone calls saying that the root and tld servers would be declared a national security resource if they didn't knock it off and they should do what they're told.
There's a reason this wasn't accomplished in a transparent manner: it was done illegally with government complicity.
As for this lawsuit, guess whose paying for it? You know those "what you need when you need it" guys? ("domainers") Them. When you have a million domains and somebody sugegsts you might save a buck a reg. if this goes though, 7 guys times a mil each and Brett Faussett gets to send his kid to college. I know and like Brett, but this is a stinker.
If .com is moved some place besides NSI expect nothing to work. Or work well. The idea that scumbags one step above spammers dictate key infrastructural components of the net based on their economic needs and not any objective criteria wrankles a bit.
ICANN is due for an anti-trust bitch slapping alright, but not about .com.
The internet, when faced with a problem of scarcity creates new resources, it does not regulate existing ones. The problem is lawyers prevented the implementation of new top level domains. Postels original plan in 97 was 300 new tlds (250+ domains already existed then) with 150 in the first year. The trademark lawyers took over ICANN, prevented any new tlds from being implemented and Postel died. IBM alone admitted in secret that they'd spent $60M lobbying DC for no new tlds and every major three letter computer company had done the same. So, the solution all along was to make NSI "jsut another company" by having another 100 of them dong the same thing.
But intellectual property lawyers nixed that, you may never know how powerful these guys are, and now they're going after .com.
"I think the solution is pretty simple; you can sell a domain name to someone else for at most the time-adjusted value of all the dollars you've paid the registration company. Anything extra goes to that registration company, who gets to keep reasonable operating costs. The rest goes into a fund for internet development or research or somesuch."
The last thing you want to do is encourage the regiastration companies. They do this kind of crap already in many cases. As for a developmenet find, tried that, anybody who paid into the Intellectual Infrastructure Fund in the first two or three years when .com became pay for watches the US congree steal it and give to Mike Roberts as payback for ICANN which he promptly wasted on Internet II to upgrade the net connection of some US universities. Given Canada alone put $4M into that fund this is not an idea anybody with a memory about such things is gonna endorse heartily.
The other thign is too there are some people that buy domains for $6 each - lots of them then try to make them make more than $7/yr. I don't think it's a very good business but it is a legal business and I'm not sure we want to go down the slippery slope of letting somebody decide what a legitimate use of a domain is.
What if someday somebody decides I don't have a shopping cart and am not doing e-commerce so it's not really a legitimate business and somebody is trying to do e-commerce should have my domain because that's more legitimate. That way be dragons.
You can run T1 over 4 wire copper up to 11km with pairgain campus t1 HDSL units that must be all of $4 by now on fleabay. You can probably find t1 an maybe even t3 csu/dsu's too but they may have a weird serial connector that my cost more than the dsu you foujd cheap.
T1 used to be a big deal. I realize this is pretty snivvely today. But it might be better than nothing.
Maybe there's other boxes that do more over 4 wire by now, I dunno.
Previous to V10 slashdot titles got messed up in the last "style upgrade" and were black on dark green and unreadable. And slower than the first version of netscape navigator on a current ebay page.
I did talk to somebody at /. about it and was told "most of out people use IE, then firefox, nobody we know uses Opera full time. Submit a patch if you want it fixed".
I've used nothing but Opera for 5 years.
Facebook pages now have subsecond response time when you scroll them instead of the horrific mess of wasted time they were in previous versions of (all browsers) after FB's last "update" in early spring.
Thank you, once again, Opera team.
---
Postscipt. I originally typed this as an AC, oops, logged in and then - every heading for every message went away and is a white box instead. Lovely. No I don't have time to sort out the css mess and submit a patch. Could somebody please fix this fucking thing, its an embarassment.
You should have struck with string jokes, Brad. Look at the trouble you've caused. ...gryphon!richard
This might explain the 25 sinks, 40 doors and 200 windows in my barn.
Doesn't exactly help though.
Anyone near Kingston ont need a Pepsi cooler? Or a clawfoot bathtub? Or a 3 sink stainless restaurant counter? Or a half ton of glass panes?
"The IANA exists because to have an Internet, you need an Authority to Assign Numbers. Without that, the meaning of "slashdot.org" or "216.34.181.45" depends on the whim of your friendly neighborhood routing table.
Feel free to debate who the authority is, but acknowledge that we need some authority"
By whose authority was I able to create comp.fonts? or rec.ponds? "Authority" is a bit of a strong word here. Cooperation is the key. Those that do't want to cooperate can make iana.org or slashdot.org point wherever they like. But in the cooperative internet we agree on things, rather than subvert outselves to authority
There can be more that one authority! As long as they agree there are no issues. Again, the spirit and willingness to cooperate is the key here.
I'd like to see some impartial figures to see how disk subsystem performance (regular and raided) compares with FreeBSD. You can even use FreeBSD 2.2.1 if you want.
And them again under heavy load. Not just "oooh, lets try a million database reads".
I'll wait. I use windows. I'm used to it.
From 1986 to 1999 it was run autonomously. Sure the US paid for it (15K/yr as a part time project) but whatever Jon Postel decided was fine. Jon would measure the consensus of the net and implement it. During this time the DNS went from 0 to 250+ TLDS.
When the US government assumed oversight in the period 2000 to now 10 new tlds were created at a cost of nearly a billion dollars. And the registration process for .com became the most inept sleezy shit ever seen on the net.
"The US" or "another country" or group of countries is not the answer.
The dns should be administered by the poeple that know what they're doing in terms os techical, legal and social policies and governments of the world has zero say in this.
The internet is not some "thing" that needs to be administered. It is not a public resource!
There are millions of private networks and we all agree to use TCP/IP and DNS to interoperate. Not one bit of it is a puboic resource. It's all privatly owned. You own your bit, I own my bit. Do we really want some government telling us how we use our computers and what we can do and can't do?
The USG and ICANN are the worst things that ever happebed to the net. They stagnated it as a single point of failure by having a choke hold on the A-ROOT of the legacy DNS.
There are better and more appropriate ways.
Exactly. But if you post cryptographically signed data to usenet it'll both be available quickly and will be stored forever (through google).
Or use TXT records in the dns to do the decentralized db part. Of course I'd suggest using a new tld for this but of course this sort of thing is blocked by the government and scientologists.
Either way it's easy to store cryptographically signed data in "archived public streams".
"Cryptographically signed" is the key though.
And yes I worked damn hard to get that pun in.
But isn't this what makes the net cool. If you're blocked you can find a way around it. You don't *have* to use MSN. Or Facebook. There's other ways to talk.
Maybe they'll create pariah-net or something.
"Do you turn your back on NYCL so quickly just because some real-life Doogey Houser thinks he can take on an establishment that has been bought and paid for?"
I know Charles Neeson. Comparing him to Doogey Houser indicates you don't know a thing about him. He's educated some of the finest legal minds day, off the top of my head: Larry Lessig, Jon Zittrain and Ben Edelman.
There's a reason the RIAA never moved against Harvard students. This is the one battle they didn't want and they may be assholes but they're not stupid.
Charlie may not win. But something is gonna happen here that will change the landscape forever, mark my words.
Read everything you can about Billion dollar Charlie then see if you still have the same opinion of the man and thr RIAA's chances.