ICANN went through three stages of evolution. At first it was bunch of - by their own admission - clueless board members picked in secret by the US government, specifically Ira Magaziner, Clintons senior science advisor, and Roger Cochetti from IBM.
Next they were taken over by intellectual property attornies from multinational corporations. Once they'd had their way with internet law and policy came...... the "domainers" and registration people. That's who goes to ICANN meetings and populate the various ICANN committees.
Is it any wonder they didn't find anything wrong with the practice they invented and make money from?
The US Government mandate ICANN operates under says they must be "open and transparent" and are not to create policy, but to determine the consensus of the Internet community and implement policy based on this. I have personally watched them chnage their bylaws retroactively to prevent the "wrong" poeple from being a part of the organizatin. I've personally watched them kick people out of meeings advertised beforehand as "open to anyone". I've personally wathced them adopt policies where only 13 out ot 1000 people agreed with the policy. I can go on for hours about things like this.
They are one of the most secretive Internet organizations to ever exist. Does anybody else remember Karl Aurbach, when elected to the board had to sue just to see the books? How many organizations do you get to be a board member off but the corporate books are kept secret from you? Why would you need to keep those books secret in the first place.
ICANN was supposed to be a "membership organization". A decade has gone by. Can you find any way to become a voting member of ICANN? Nope. Doesn't exist. You know why? They're scared they'd be voted out of office and for damn good reason.
ICANN runs on a $60M a year budget and it a beurocraic nightmare more complex than the UN in terms of its org chart. (cf. Rutkoswki's brilliant diagram of same. It does NOT fit on a regular sized piece of paper). Now keep in mind the job it does used to be done by Jon Postel as a part time task ("IANA") for $15,000. a year.
When Jon announced there would be new tlds coming ("300 at least, 75 in the first year") the intellectual property attornies made his life a living hell and he sought a legal entitiy as IANA had no legal personality and he himself did not want to assume personal legal liability for adding.web or whatever. His employer, USC/ISI would not back him up. Jon died of heart failure 3 years later.
If you think ICANN is the best and the brightest of the internet you're sadly mistaken, and if we, as the internet community cannot do better than this, then shame on us all, squared.
Scrap ICANN. Make something useful.
A good starting point would be the consensus points from the last IFWP conference - this was to have been ICANN before thart effort, and a years work to reach that consensus, was scuttled by the actors operating in the shadows who have controlled it ever since in a regime where only they benefit.
Or roll your own root. The only reason ICANN is on power is because they control the legacy root zone. If nobody used it any more, they would fade into the sunset where they belong.
If Linux computers used a different set of root servers, who cares what Microsoft and ICANN did.
Can somebody actually show me a "rogue" DNS server?
What constitutes a "rogue" dns server? One that doesn't track exactly the US Government root or one that has incorrect addresses for sites for commercial gain (ie paypal, banks etc).
About a decade ago a guy went to prison for redirecting the internic by DNS cache poisoning. It was a big deal. Now I'm suppoed to believe 60,000 people are doing it and it's not in the news?
The half dozen or so ISP's around here, and Hughes sat use a "transparent" web cache proxy. Doesn't matter what dns servers you tell your computer to use, you get the dns your ISP wants you to see, at least for web. Other protocols are unaffected. My understanding it this is quite widespread.
"I was pointing out that your scenario was just a naive and simple-minded as expecting people to stop looking for it. Sorry if that went over your head. "
It didn't go over my head and it's rediculous to assume people will stop searching for it. Porn is what drove the internet to the length, depth and bredth is it today. Half the.com zone are porn names - or were last time I looked at around the 30 million name mark.
Of course it's a simple plan. Very simple. You then have to ask yourself what returns you get for such a tiny amount of effort and it appears to be substantial.
The.com namespace is overloaded. There has been widespread consensus on this for almsot 15 years. It was supposed to be split up according to Jon Postel's plan a decade ago but big bussiness in the form of their intellectual property attornies colluded with the US government behind the scenes to block the introduction of new tlds. These (mostly 3-letter companies) spent tens of millions of dollars that I know of to lobby in DC to block new tlds that I know of, and dollars to donuts it was way more than that. It was never part of the "open and transparent" process the government insisted was the mandate. The inflection point should you care to look, was when Mike Robbers scuttled the 4th IFWP meeting in Boston; by then the fix was in and it was clear Ira Magaziner had lied to us.
"None of which are content classification. Tell me, should a pornography museum be under.xxx or.museum? DNS is not a content classification system and is totally unsuited for such (mis-)use."
This is not a subtantive argument demonstrating the idea will not work. Just an edge-case that probably nobody cares about.
"Um, yeah, and if 13-year-olds stopped looking for dirty pictures on the web, that'd solve the problem too. That's not going to happen either."
Of course not. Nothing will stop a determined 13 year old. But an 8 year old that types "pussy" into google? That's different.
The key here I think is "progess not perfection".
I don't have a dog in this fight, I jsut think it's funny a solution is sought to what some perceive is a problem and a fairly elegant tehnical solution almost made the light of day but was squashed by the Bush administration; the net effect of which keeps porn in "the mainstream".
I see it took slashdotters about 3 postings to figure this out. Rocket science it aint.
"No they wouldn't. Repeat after me, "DNS is not a content classification system"."
Inherently, not, you're right. But it can be used as one. Look at.museum which is only for museums, or.arpa or.coop or.mil or.aero for example(s) which all have specific uses. New DNS names are what we define them to be and have no intrinsic semantic property that precludes using them in this or any other way.
So, if porn slowly migrated over to.xxx and google "safe search" filter ignored.xxx sites it would be possible by fairly simple technical means to do exacly what TFA wants.
You'll note that.xxx passed ICANN approval at one point and went up to the Department of Commerce, ICANN's overlord, for rubber stamp approval, the last stop before being put in the legacy root zone. Insiders tell me Karl Rove himself nixed it as a political favour to the Southern Baptist convention who demanded it never see the light of day.
1) Move the thing closer to earth. 2) Teleport the fuel here 3) Live on a space station orbiting Titan
I really don't know how much crazier these ideas are than "walking on the moon" was in 1900.
Although my first reaction upon reading the headline was "isn't burning that much fuel on earth gonna make a big mess?"
Maybe what needs to happen is to convery it to electrons and shoot them at the earth, but once you get to this extreme you end up, I suppose, realizing the sun does this already for us; perhps the whole thing is just a damn distraction and what really needs to happen is to find a way to make that feasable.
Of course those in the position to do the most good these have the least incentive.
I had a client back in the mid 90s whose last name was watson and he grabbed watson.com; I ran the email for him. I handled the postmaster account, he didn't want to.
I got a bounced mail from somebody at ibm. Every other address on the line was to "watson.ibm.com". Just not this one.
Long story short after about five of these over a few months I finally got a thing about secret nucular testing. I called them and explained what they did.
Never saw another one, ever.
I'm guessing somebody didn't get their xmas bonus that year.
The month this article hit the newsstands Internic registration turnaround went from three days to eleven weeks because of the volume. It took a year to normalize but never got down to 3 days again.
The NSF was subsidizing the Internic for US post secondary educational institutions and after this, gave up. They asked the FNCIC to decide what to do, they told the NSF to direct NSI to begin charging for domain names.
But, by this time pissed off companies worldwide who began rattling sabres at IANA because "somebody has stolen their domain; IANA not having any legal personality Postel was scared shitless and began to look for institutionalization. He did but lost all authority - when he tried to get the root servers to point to him and not NSI's A root but the feds were so in the loop he was literally threatened with guys in black suits in black cars.
He had now been made redundent, died shortly after leaving is with the multimillion dollar per year atrocity known as ICANN.
No other single article in the history of the internet changed the landscape as much as this one did. It probably would have happened eventually anyway, but for you chaos theory fans, this is one hell of an example.
For historical completeness I'd be remiss if I didn't point out there was a day when the "million name COM zone" was a fear so seemingly legitimate Postel himseld was gravely concerned. It wae felt the servrs wuould simpy fall over.
Don't forget the "Intellectual Infrastructure Fund" that NSF staffer Don Mitchell tacked on to domain prices when he told his contractor Network Solutions to begin charging for domains (much to their shock and chegrin; staffers at NSI would post checks to the wall and throw darts at them).
Don was a bit believer in the IETF process and the money was supposed to be used to keep that process alive - workshops, grants for airfare etc. People from all over the worls paid into it, Canada alone put $2M into it.
The US congress gave it to Mike Robers as a reward for going along with their secret plan to erect ICANN and scuttling the plans in place built up over the previous year by the community for the new company to administer domains.
Google for the wrapup meeting of the Boston Working Group to see th shock and horror as this unfolded.
I know of one organization that has two class B's. They use about 150 addresses in one and none on the other. I know of another class B thas was bought for 100K frm a private party about 7 years ago. It's about 3% used.
I'll all for V6 addressing but will never use V6 addresses. There are other schemes besides V6 that work as long as hosts can process V6 addresses. They've worked for a couple of years now. So, hurry up and adopt V6 so we can bypass ARIN/RIPE etc.
The Iranian explanation that it was a routine inspection just trying to get the numbers on the side of the boat made more sense than the pentgons explanatin with audio from here and video from there.
If I was on that ship and somebody said "look - terrorists, they're going to blow us up" I'd have responsed with "they why are they wearing lifejackets?"
Keep in mind the day after 9/11 one million Iranians demonstrated in Tehran in a candellight vigil in support of the US.
Since then the US has done nothing but antagnize them.
In any war "the people" get the blame for being swine, but in all cases it's a very small number of dangerous lunatics that are the ones that are truly evil. Of course it's the people that suffer the most, the evil swine themselves always seem to survive to fight another war.
Keep in mind the day after 9/11 one million Iranians demonstrated in Tehran in a candellight vigil in support of the US.
Since then the US has done nothing but antagnize them.
In any war "the people" get the blame for being swine, but in all cases it's a very small number of dangerous lunatics that are the ones that are truly evil. Of course it's the people that suffer the most, the evil swine themselves allways seem to survive to fight another war.
1) That he taunted the tiger doesn't strike me as relevant. The assumption is the tiger can't get out. Otherwise where's the "these animals will hop out and eat you if you piss them off" sign? Would he have taunted the tiger if his expectation of the cage was anything less than 100%?
2) Are his potential damages at all mitigated by the fact that what he was doing was a criminal activity? Tigers actually are on the US federal endangered species list despite being non-native and there is a law against harassing endangered species.
There used to be a little site in LA called gryphon.com that pulled a feed from decwrl and NASA JPL and spread news and mail all around LA. It also had a BBS thing Bill Blue wrote called "Pnet" or "PoepleNet". People who had no idea what the internet was or even that is existed used pnet. The rest of us had shell access.
The guy that ran it, predictably, read all the mail going through that system.
One conversation, he relarted, was some kid who was talking to some other kid about videogames.
The timing of when uucp polled was somtimes pretty good.
So these two kids were talking back and forth in near real time. At one point the converstaion apparantly went like this:
"Sounds like a cool game. Maybe you should come over some time and we can play"
Slashdot Mirror
ICANN went through three stages of evolution. At first it was bunch of - by their own admission - clueless board members picked in secret by the US government, specifically Ira Magaziner, Clintons senior science advisor, and Roger Cochetti from IBM.
... the "domainers" and registration people. That's who goes to ICANN meetings and populate the various ICANN committees.
.web or whatever. His employer, USC/ISI would not back him up. Jon died of heart failure 3 years later.
Next they were taken over by intellectual property attornies from multinational corporations. Once they'd had their way with internet law and policy came...
Is it any wonder they didn't find anything wrong with the practice they invented and make money from?
The US Government mandate ICANN operates under says they must be "open and transparent" and are not to create policy, but to determine the consensus of the Internet community and implement policy based on this. I have personally watched them chnage their bylaws retroactively to prevent the "wrong" poeple from being a part of the organizatin. I've personally watched them kick people out of meeings advertised beforehand as "open to anyone". I've personally wathced them adopt policies where only 13 out ot 1000 people agreed with the policy. I can go on for hours about things like this.
They are one of the most secretive Internet organizations to ever exist. Does anybody else remember Karl Aurbach, when elected to the board had to sue just to see the books? How many organizations do you get to be a board member off but the corporate books are kept secret from you? Why would you need to keep those books secret in the first place.
ICANN was supposed to be a "membership organization". A decade has gone by. Can you find any way to become a voting member of ICANN? Nope. Doesn't exist. You know why? They're scared they'd be voted out of office and for damn good reason.
ICANN runs on a $60M a year budget and it a beurocraic nightmare more complex than the UN in terms of its org chart. (cf. Rutkoswki's brilliant diagram of same. It does NOT fit on a regular sized piece of paper). Now keep in mind the job it does used to be done by Jon Postel as a part time task ("IANA") for $15,000. a year.
When Jon announced there would be new tlds coming ("300 at least, 75 in the first year") the intellectual property attornies made his life a living hell and he sought a legal entitiy as IANA had no legal personality and he himself did not want to assume personal legal liability for adding
If you think ICANN is the best and the brightest of the internet you're sadly mistaken, and if we, as the internet community cannot do better than this, then shame on us all, squared.
Scrap ICANN. Make something useful.
A good starting point would be the consensus points from the last IFWP conference - this was to have been ICANN before thart effort, and a years work to reach that consensus, was scuttled by the actors operating in the shadows who have controlled it ever since in a regime where only they benefit.
Or roll your own root. The only reason ICANN is on power is because they control the legacy root zone. If nobody used it any more, they would fade into the sunset where they belong.
If Linux computers used a different set of root servers, who cares what Microsoft and ICANN did.
Read this: http://iconia.com/before_the_dns.txt
I've read TFA and every comment on this page.
Can somebody actually show me a "rogue" DNS server?
What constitutes a "rogue" dns server? One that doesn't track exactly the US Government root or one that has incorrect addresses for sites for commercial gain (ie paypal, banks etc).
About a decade ago a guy went to prison for redirecting the internic by DNS cache poisoning. It was a big deal. Now I'm suppoed to believe 60,000 people are doing it and it's not in the news?
The half dozen or so ISP's around here, and Hughes sat use a "transparent" web cache proxy. Doesn't matter what dns servers you tell your computer to use, you get the dns your ISP wants you to see, at least for web. Other protocols are unaffected. My understanding it this is quite widespread.
"That's stupid. If you must do something with domain names, then create '.kids' and make it kiddy safe. "
.kids.
.xxx guys also proposed to run .kids as well figureing every litle bit helped.
.kids.us which nobody uses.
That's backwards. Why deny kids access to, say Wikipedia. You can't move all the non-porn content to
But, FWIW the
This begat
"I was pointing out that your scenario was just a naive and simple-minded as expecting people to stop looking for it. Sorry if that went over your head. "
.com zone are porn names - or were last time I looked at around the 30 million name mark.
.com namespace is overloaded. There has been widespread consensus on this for almsot 15 years. It was supposed to be split up according to Jon Postel's plan a decade ago but big bussiness in the form of their intellectual property attornies colluded with the US government behind the scenes to block the introduction of new tlds. These (mostly 3-letter companies) spent tens of millions of dollars that I know of to lobby in DC to block new tlds that I know of, and dollars to donuts it was way more than that. It was never part of the "open and transparent" process the government insisted was the mandate. The inflection point should you care to look, was when Mike Robbers scuttled the 4th IFWP meeting in Boston; by then the fix was in and it was clear Ira Magaziner had lied to us.
It didn't go over my head and it's rediculous to assume people will stop searching for it. Porn is what drove the internet to the length, depth and bredth is it today. Half the
Of course it's a simple plan. Very simple. You then have to ask yourself what returns you get for such a tiny amount of effort and it appears to be substantial.
The
"None of which are content classification. Tell me, should a pornography museum be under .xxx or .museum? DNS is not a content classification system and is totally unsuited for such (mis-)use."
This is not a subtantive argument demonstrating the idea will not work. Just an edge-case that probably nobody cares about.
"Um, yeah, and if 13-year-olds stopped looking for dirty pictures on the web, that'd solve the problem too. That's not going to happen either."
Of course not. Nothing will stop a determined 13 year old. But an 8 year old that types "pussy" into google? That's different.
The key here I think is "progess not perfection".
I don't have a dog in this fight, I jsut think it's funny a solution is sought to what some perceive is a problem and a fairly elegant tehnical solution almost made the light of day but was squashed by the Bush administration; the net effect of which keeps porn in "the mainstream".
I love irony like this. I live for it.
I see it took slashdotters about 3 postings to figure this out. Rocket science it aint.
.museum which is only for museums, or .arpa or .coop or .mil or .aero for example(s) which all have specific uses. New DNS names are what we define them to be and have no intrinsic semantic property that precludes using them in this or any other way.
.xxx and google "safe search" filter ignored .xxx sites it would be possible by fairly simple technical means to do exacly what TFA wants.
.xxx passed ICANN approval at one point and went up to the Department of Commerce, ICANN's overlord, for rubber stamp approval, the last stop before being put in the legacy root zone. Insiders tell me Karl Rove himself nixed it as a political favour to the Southern Baptist convention who demanded it never see the light of day.
" No they wouldn't. Repeat after me, "DNS is not a content classification system". "
Inherently, not, you're right. But it can be used as one. Look at
So, if porn slowly migrated over to
You'll note that
1) Move the thing closer to earth.
2) Teleport the fuel here
3) Live on a space station orbiting Titan
I really don't know how much crazier these ideas are than "walking on the moon" was in 1900.
Although my first reaction upon reading the headline was "isn't burning that much fuel on earth gonna make a big mess?"
Maybe what needs to happen is to convery it to electrons and shoot them at the earth, but once you get to this extreme you end up, I suppose, realizing the sun does this already for us; perhps the whole thing is just a damn distraction and what really needs to happen is to find a way to make that feasable.
Of course those in the position to do the most good these have the least incentive.
So, nothing to see here, move along etc etc
It seems to me practical solid state lighting is 10 years off from whenever you ask and has been this way for almost 40 years.
Here's the latest (albeit dismal) report from the field:
http://fins.actwin.com/aquatic-plants/month.200801/msg00059.html
I had a client back in the mid 90s whose last name was watson and he grabbed watson.com; I ran the email for him. I handled the postmaster account, he didn't want to.
I got a bounced mail from somebody at ibm. Every other address on the line was to "watson.ibm.com". Just not this one.
Long story short after about five of these over a few months I finally got a thing about secret nucular testing. I called them and explained what they did.
Never saw another one, ever.
I'm guessing somebody didn't get their xmas bonus that year.
"If domain names were to cost $100 to register "
Oh sweet Jesus. Hundreds of people spent nearly a decade in "the domain wars" because the price was too high. Now you want it to go back?
Pardon me while I go beat my head into a bloody pulp against a brick wall.
"So who has the link to the post with this in 1998?
...
1) Buy millions of domain names that have typos in them
2)
3) Profit "
You thought you were kidding wern't you? But it wasn't in the form you thought. It was this:
http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/2.10/mcdonalds_pr.html
The month this article hit the newsstands Internic registration turnaround went from three days to eleven weeks because of the volume. It took a year to normalize but never got down to 3 days again.
The NSF was subsidizing the Internic for US post secondary educational institutions and after this, gave up. They asked the FNCIC to decide what to do, they told the NSF to direct NSI to begin charging for domain names.
But, by this time pissed off companies worldwide who began rattling sabres at IANA because "somebody has stolen their domain; IANA not having any legal personality Postel was scared shitless and began to look for institutionalization. He did but lost all authority - when he tried to get the root servers to point to him and not NSI's A root but the feds were so in the loop he was literally threatened with guys in black suits in black cars.
He had now been made redundent, died shortly after leaving is with the multimillion dollar per year atrocity known as ICANN.
No other single article in the history of the internet changed the landscape as much as this one did. It probably would have happened eventually anyway, but for you chaos theory fans, this is one hell of an example.
For historical completeness I'd be remiss if I didn't point out there was a day when the "million name COM zone" was a fear so seemingly legitimate Postel himseld was gravely concerned. It wae felt the servrs wuould simpy fall over.
Thre are about 60M com names presently.
[quote]What ICANN is doing here is actually something incredible laudable.[/quote]
Um, yeah. Never mind it took the 8 years to do this. And that the V6 addy for F *changed*.
Never confuse "laudable" for "competant".
Don't forget the "Intellectual Infrastructure Fund" that NSF staffer Don Mitchell tacked on to domain prices when he told his contractor Network Solutions to begin charging for domains (much to their shock and chegrin; staffers at NSI would post checks to the wall and throw darts at them).
Don was a bit believer in the IETF process and the money was supposed to be used to keep that process alive - workshops, grants for airfare etc. People from all over the worls paid into it, Canada alone put $2M into it.
The US congress gave it to Mike Robers as a reward for going along with their secret plan to erect ICANN and scuttling the plans in place built up over the previous year by the community for the new company to administer domains.
Google for the wrapup meeting of the Boston Working Group to see th shock and horror as this unfolded.
I know of one organization that has two class B's. They use about 150 addresses in one and none on the other. I know of another class B thas was bought for 100K frm a private party about 7 years ago. It's about 3% used.
I'll all for V6 addressing but will never use V6 addresses. There are other schemes besides V6 that work as long as hosts can process V6 addresses. They've worked for a couple of years now. So, hurry up and adopt V6 so we can bypass ARIN/RIPE etc.
The Iranian explanation that it was a routine inspection just trying to get the numbers on the side of the boat made more sense than the pentgons explanatin with audio from here and video from there.
If I was on that ship and somebody said "look - terrorists, they're going to blow us up" I'd have responsed with "they why are they wearing lifejackets?"
Keep in mind the day after 9/11 one million Iranians demonstrated in Tehran in a candellight vigil in support of the US.
Since then the US has done nothing but antagnize them.
In any war "the people" get the blame for being swine, but in all cases it's a very small number of dangerous lunatics that are the ones that are truly evil. Of course it's the people that suffer the most, the evil swine themselves always seem to survive to fight another war.
And so it goes.
Keep in mind the day after 9/11 one million Iranians demonstrated in Tehran in a candellight vigil in support of the US.
Since then the US has done nothing but antagnize them.
In any war "the people" get the blame for being swine, but in all cases it's a very small number of dangerous lunatics that are the ones that are truly evil. Of course it's the people that suffer the most, the evil swine themselves allways seem to survive to fight another war.
And so it goes.
1) That he taunted the tiger doesn't strike me as relevant. The assumption is the tiger can't get out. Otherwise where's the "these animals will hop out and eat you if you piss them off" sign? Would he have taunted the tiger if his expectation of the cage was anything less than 100%?
2) Are his potential damages at all mitigated by the fact that what he was doing was a criminal activity? Tigers actually are on the US federal endangered species list despite being non-native and there is a law against harassing endangered species.
"http://www.dhs.gov/xlibrary/assets/prep_cyberstormreport_sep06.pdf
From the report, it looks like everything was simulated. "
Oooooooook, which of you jerks put goatse boy there?
"Actually, even more - think Lisa + Xenix "
And if you start now you should be done by next week.
Jesus those things were slooooooow.
There used to be a little site in LA called gryphon.com that pulled a feed from decwrl and NASA JPL and spread news and mail all around LA. It also had a BBS thing Bill Blue wrote called "Pnet" or "PoepleNet". People who had no idea what the internet was or even that is existed used pnet. The rest of us had shell access.
The guy that ran it, predictably, read all the mail going through that system.
One conversation, he relarted, was some kid who was talking to some other kid about videogames.
The timing of when uucp polled was somtimes pretty good.
So these two kids were talking back and forth in near real time. At one point the converstaion apparantly went like this:
"Sounds like a cool game. Maybe you should come over some time and we can play"
"That might be difficult as I'm in France"
"France? Is that in Orange county"
"No, France as in Paris France, in Europe"
"Huh?"
"And everything went through either decwrl or ucbvax "
You clazy.
decwrl (west coast) or ihnpss (which replaced ihnp4 on the east coast)
You had to be nuts to send mail to udbvax, the Brahms gang would read it and send you back major flamage.
At least with decwrl the worst that would happen is you'd get a snippy note from Brian about spelling.
Only if her first name is "Esther".
" What exactly is ICANN to do if AT&T decides to let the NSA splice into some fiber? "
.XXX because Karl Rove promised this as a poltical favour to the Southern Baptist Convention. You know, stuff like that.
Exactly.
" Are you going to blame the ITU for wiretapping of the POTS network?
Yeah, actually I'd expect Bob Shaw to be right there with a pair of side cutters.
" Let's assume the US did try and assert authority over the internet. How would it do that exactly? "
They'd do things like veto