"Her dad once chastised her for wasting his tuition money by not going to her classes. With typical Esther aplomb, she countered, "Daddy, you don't understand. You don't come to Harvard to study. You come to Harvard to get to know the right people."
"The day I can use Mickey Mouse in my own work is the day I give a damn about the RIAA's "losses"."
Nice. Kudos.
I'd be happy if in this lifetime I was able to download all the music I had but lost because they wore out or lost in the past 3 and a half deacdes of paying for the same music sometimes up to 4 or 5 times over for the same work.
Chances are if he only has dialup chances are pretty good ISDN isn't available. I know that's the case here.
(Looks up at my shelf full of old Ascend) P50s
Yeah. ISDN. That would have been nice. I used it a decade ago before dsl and cable were out and it's not so bad. After 26.4K thee 128K from 2 bonded B channels is pretty sweet.
26.4 is the maginc number isn't it? They SAY 28.8 but you don't seem to actually be able to get it.
I live in a fairly remote area, no cable or dsl. I used 26.4 for a decade and was finally able to get sat last xmas and now wireless is available and I'll probably switch to that - faster and cheaper.
But, if I was still stuck in dialupland I'd get a, 2, or 3 more phone lines and bond them together. The latency will be no better but the throuput is better.
I checked the (competant) ISPs around here support this. Yours might.
If you're in Canada look at a "4 wire unloaded circuit" - it's about half the price of a regular phone line. Bell might say they don't have it, but it's a tarrifed item. They do, and must sell it by CRTC regulations.
If any stupid net.neutrality laws get passed it gives the goog bargining power. "oh hello data pipe operator. Want to peer with us? We have Asia. We'll trade you for unfettered access to the americas"
Of course this all started when Misrosoft decided HTML in email was a good idea. This was around the time Netscape was hot shit and t othe average user it seemed like a cool idea "ooooh, red text".
Which if course is the moral equivalent of a crow going "oh, a shiny thing".
It means that eevry time an (l)user types in http://ai/ the A recors is fetched from the root servers. Not the TLD servers, the root zone servers. This is a really bad idea.
Course, if you ever saw the traffic to the root servers you'd know they're 75% retarded hits from misconfigured windows systems trying to update the root zone (rolls eyes).
That's because, windows 2K was the first (Microsoft) usable operating system intended for desktops. (Windows NT was targeted at servers) Its predecessor Win9X is perhaps responsible for the majority of Microsofts notorious reputation regarding stability and security"
I call bullshit. Set up two boxes, one xp and one 98 then put them on the net. See which one gets pwnded first.
While I work with FreeBSD I have some windows boxen at home. Reinstalling fucked up or pwned XP is just rohutine. My 98 box runs for weeks without rebooting and has zero anti malware crap and has never in 9 years ever caught a virus or anyting similar ever.
It really was flakey drivers that made 98 look bad. XP walks around going "I'm here, infect me, I'm wide open baby".
Gordon Cook was there too. You can ask him: cookreport.com
The USG only needs to contriol the A root. Which they do.
The UN can make a treaty (takes years) and try to get countries to ratify it as local law (takes years) but there's no impetus to do so. Something as mundane as this wouldn't do it.
There are quite a few one and two letter domains that were grandfathered in before it quit being allowed. (hp.com and x.org for example)
I would very much like to know the story of how x.com goes to paypal.com ?"
Two letter domains were never an issue. They're all taken from aa to zz.
The single letter ones are a special case. It went like this:
Nobody ever registered one. At some point a few leaked out. q, s and x I think. At this time there were about 800,000.com names and people had the same irrational fear of the "million name com zone" that some people had of Y2K.
So, Postel put a hold on single letter domains. They appear as "reserved by the IANA" (never mind IANA didn't actually exist then, that is it had no legal personality, it was just an acronym Postel liked to use).
The theory was, if the root or tld servers melted down under the load of a million com named then there were these 26 one letter domains that could rescue is. I'm sure yahoo woudn't mind changing everything to yahoo.y.com.
There are about 40 million or so names in the com zone now. Yet still the single letter domains are reserved by ICANN ("because they always have been and Jons dead and we don't really know what we're doing") and any tld string must be three or more letters.
x.com was a papypal competitor. It was actually the good one and I was pretty pissed when paypal bought or consumed x.com. x.com gave me a card and a check book. Paypal just gave me grief.
x.com bought the domain off the guy who registered it originally. q.net is probably still for sale.
There are some perfectly valid reasons to be suspicious of any one country administering the TLD list. Retiring zombie TLDs isn't one of them. Just set up a grace period. After 3 years don't process any more new domain applications. After 5 years no domain renewals. After 15 years no TLD.
If you look up ICANN's mandate it's #1 reason d'etre is "to insure the stability of the intnernet".
Never muind when any dictator takes over it's to preserve the "stability of the country". Look it up, that's really what they say.
At any rate summarily wiping out a huge number of domain names just because some twerp drew a different line on a map is not my idea of "stability".
Hell I don't care if.babylon still has a domain in it for the hanging gardens from 4000 years ago.
ICANN has no legal ability to force them to do what it says."
Uhm well, true. But the USG does.
There was a time, before NSI and ICANN kissed and made up, when NSI actually had a couple of secret alternative root servers deployed (although they will deny this any anybody who knows about it isn't there any more). The then CTO was told that if the USG was pissed off they'd simply declare it a miliary resource and the army would run it. DNS history is full of things like this. Like when Postel diverted the A root. Ira Magaziner went on record as saying he supported Jon. In reality he told him to "fucking fix it NOW or a black car would show up" and Jon would either then do what he's told or would disappear". I was in the room and heard this.
In theory you're right. In practice, you haven't spent much time in DC have you?
But you are right that any DNS servers you plug in to your computer decide what root servers you consider authoritative. You can primary the root for yourself if you want and you don't even need root servers.
I mean *cough* it's not like things get added to the root zone real often.
As such it's entitled under international law to Olympic Team, TLD"
There are no such laws concerning tlds.
A qiock history lesson. About 87 or so Postel and Klensin were wrangling with the new dns system..com,.net, et al were in the can, but the brits were awfully fond of the.uk they'd been using prior to dns and insisted.uk be in there, too.
Postel was worried now. He absolutely did not want IANA (ie, Jon, IANA never had any legal personality) to have to decide what's a country or not. Tibet?
So he poked around and found the ISO codes. It's now an ISO/DIN problem as to what a country is. That's why we use them.
BUT! The ISO country codes are not what defines a country. And there are codes that have nothing to do with country-ness, like.fx for "Metropolitan France" which is not a TLD but is an ISO code.
Now if you kids are real good I'll tell you the.nato story at bedtime.
Easy solution - de-politicize the internet by getting rid of TLD domains. I don't know squat about the technical particulars, but why can't we set up the internet such that TLDs are unnecessary? If I type "yahoo" into my address bar, it should just resolve to some IP address setup by ya
It doesn't matter if you strip the.com off of www.yahoo.com.
If you had www.yahoo then.yahoo is now your tld. That's just sorta the way DNS works.
A better question is why there are no single letter tlds. Or for that matter, single letter second level domains (other than one or two, q.net which seems to no longer work, but do try x.com This one might surprise you.
"And it convinces me of the need to reevaluate the existence of the US Dept of Commerce-backed non-profit organisation that is ICANN. The current squabbles are petty compared to the diplomatic arguments that TLDs could cause. An international body like the UN would be a more appropriate overseer, surely?'"
Absolutely not.
You want to take it away from the silly US Department of COMmerce and give it to the UN?
Isn't that kind of like saying "I don't like this splinter in my foot so I'll drive a bloody big nail into it instead"?
USG = bad. UN = worse.
Ponder for a moment what the poor misguided internet did for the first decade or so of the DNS when there was no ICANN. Rate of growth: 0 to 250 tlds in 15 years. Under ICANN, in 10 years there have been 7 (albeit really lame) new tlds.
The technical administration of internet identifiers is, or should be, a boring and mundane job. It can be done by the proper technical poeple, or person. There are any number of people I'd gladly put in charge of the legacy A root in a hearbeat: Brian Reid, Paul Vixie and others. Letting anyuthing political be in charge of the A root means it's stagnent.
Insider secret: the USG will never, and I mean never, give up control of it. Their view, and I mean anybody in congress who can spell "TLD" knows the USG paid for its development and operation for 20 years and they fucking own it. Period. They are unshakable in this belief. This ripples down to pond scum like the DoC.
At the end of the day I don't care about.su or.yu. These are arbitrary strings forming internet identifiers for the convenience of humans. Nothing on the internet changed when the Soviet Union became Russia or Yorgoslavia split up. And it's not like there's a 1:1 match bewteen the ISO 2 letter codes and tld space. There's an ISO two letter code for metropolitan France that isn't a tld. The Brits have two:.gb and.uk. Somehow peoples emails, web pages and IM's still work despite this terrible taxonomical tld travesty.
There was life before ICANN and there will be life after it. Just let the the usless thing die.
Whoever suggested the UN I'm guessing has no experience in international internet policymaking with government actors. Or they're from the UN.
Nobody I know with any experience in this area thinks this is even remotely a good idea.
Slashdot Mirror
" I saw far too many kids there for the party myself "
http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m4422/is_n6_v15/ai_20860361
"Her dad once chastised her for wasting his tuition money by not going to her classes. With typical Esther aplomb, she countered, "Daddy, you don't understand. You don't come to Harvard to study. You come to Harvard to get to know the right people."
You can use Pairgain (sp?) Campus T1 units to shoot a T1 signal over a 4 wire unloaded circuit for about 11-14 kilometers. Works fine.
"The day I can use Mickey Mouse in my own work is the day I give a damn about the RIAA's "losses"."
Nice. Kudos.
I'd be happy if in this lifetime I was able to download all the music I had but lost because they wore out or lost in the past 3 and a half deacdes of paying for the same music sometimes up to 4 or 5 times over for the same work.
Chances are if he only has dialup chances are pretty good ISDN isn't available. I know that's the case here.
(Looks up at my shelf full of old Ascend) P50s
Yeah. ISDN. That would have been nice. I used it a decade ago before dsl and cable were out and it's not so bad. After 26.4K thee 128K from 2 bonded B channels is pretty sweet.
26.4 is the maginc number isn't it? They SAY 28.8 but you don't seem to actually be able to get it.
I live in a fairly remote area, no cable or dsl. I used 26.4 for a decade and was finally able to get sat last xmas and now wireless is available and I'll probably switch to that - faster and cheaper.
But, if I was still stuck in dialupland I'd get a, 2, or 3 more phone lines and bond them together. The latency will be no better but the throuput is better.
I checked the (competant) ISPs around here support this. Yours might.
If you're in Canada look at a "4 wire unloaded circuit" - it's about half the price of a regular phone line. Bell might say they don't have it, but it's a tarrifed item. They do, and must sell it by CRTC regulations.
"This new program is tasking the NSA to also guard important public networks" "
Let me translate from Washington-ese for you:
"we now have 2000 poeple to make sure all government windows servers are patched".
If they even do that much I'll be impressed.
If any stupid net.neutrality laws get passed it gives the goog bargining power. "oh hello data pipe operator. Want to peer with us? We have Asia. We'll trade you for unfettered access to the americas"
fibre is currency in this century.
"Unless they thought her boobs were filled with plastic explosives there's really not much there."
I thought she had nice boobs.
Good point.
Of course this all started when Misrosoft decided HTML in email was a good idea. This was around the time Netscape was hot shit and t othe average user it seemed like a cool idea "ooooh, red text".
Which if course is the moral equivalent of a crow going "oh, a shiny thing".
Bad juju.
It means that eevry time an (l)user types in http://ai/ the A recors is fetched from the root servers. Not the TLD servers, the root zone servers. This is a really bad idea.
Course, if you ever saw the traffic to the root servers you'd know they're 75% retarded hits from misconfigured windows systems trying to update the root zone (rolls eyes).
If two root server systems disagree the one that's wrong doesn't get used much and goes away.
Nobody with half a brain deploys infrastructure that breaks things. The idea is to have a more effective tool.
The alternative roots have been around for a decade. In practive this idea of tld namespace collisions doesn't come up.
Oh, it did once, ICANN duplicated a TLD that had been in use for ages, on purpose. Other than that it's just never happened.
agree.
Form follows function.
At least all the information isn't in the Subject: line with "nc" in the body.
That's because, windows 2K was the first (Microsoft) usable operating system intended for desktops. (Windows NT was targeted at servers) Its predecessor Win9X is perhaps responsible for the majority of Microsofts notorious reputation regarding stability and security"
I call bullshit. Set up two boxes, one xp and one 98 then put them on the net. See which one gets pwnded first.
While I work with FreeBSD I have some windows boxen at home. Reinstalling fucked up or pwned XP is just rohutine. My 98 box runs for weeks without rebooting and has zero anti malware crap and has never in 9 years ever caught a virus or anyting similar ever.
It really was flakey drivers that made 98 look bad. XP walks around going "I'm here, infect me, I'm wide open baby".
Gordon Cook was there too. You can ask him: cookreport.com
The USG only needs to contriol the A root. Which they do.
The UN can make a treaty (takes years) and try to get countries to ratify it as local law (takes years) but there's no impetus to do so. Something as mundane as this wouldn't do it.
Yeah well. Never taken fiscal advice from a "nerd" and never take technology advice from Forbes. Deal?
There are quite a few one and two letter domains that were grandfathered in before it quit being allowed. (hp.com and x.org for example)
.com names and people had the same irrational fear of the "million name com zone" that some people had of Y2K.
I would very much like to know the story of how x.com goes to paypal.com ?"
Two letter domains were never an issue. They're all taken from aa to zz.
The single letter ones are a special case. It went like this:
Nobody ever registered one. At some point a few leaked out. q, s and x I think. At this time there were about 800,000
So, Postel put a hold on single letter domains. They appear as "reserved by the IANA" (never mind IANA didn't actually exist then, that is it had no legal personality, it was just an acronym Postel liked to use).
The theory was, if the root or tld servers melted down under the load of a million com named then there were these 26 one letter domains that could rescue is. I'm sure yahoo woudn't mind changing everything to yahoo.y.com.
There are about 40 million or so names in the com zone now. Yet still the single letter domains are reserved by ICANN ("because they always have been and Jons dead and we don't really know what we're doing") and any tld string must be three or more letters.
x.com was a papypal competitor. It was actually the good one and I was pretty pissed when paypal bought or consumed x.com. x.com gave me a card and a check book. Paypal just gave me grief.
x.com bought the domain off the guy who registered it originally. q.net is probably still for sale.
Ooops, I meant to type russia.yahoo, us.yahoo, and france.yahoo"
.yahoo tld then. You haven't removed tlds (hint: you can't) you've just moved the problem one dot to the right.
So you have a
There was a day when http://ai/ worked.
Why this is a really stupid idea is left as an exercise to the reader.
It's days like today, that I really miss Jon Postel."
Jon didn't. He hated this kind of thing the most. And while I liked Jon this whole DNS mess occured on his watch. He made a lot of stupid mistakes.
There are some perfectly valid reasons to be suspicious of any one country administering the TLD list. Retiring zombie TLDs isn't one of them. Just set up a grace period. After 3 years don't process any more new domain applications. After 5 years no domain renewals. After 15 years no TLD.
.babylon still has a domain in it for the hanging gardens from 4000 years ago.
If you look up ICANN's mandate it's #1 reason d'etre is "to insure the stability of the intnernet".
Never muind when any dictator takes over it's to preserve the "stability of the country". Look it up, that's really what they say.
At any rate summarily wiping out a huge number of domain names just because some twerp drew a different line on a map is not my idea of "stability".
Hell I don't care if
ICANN has no legal ability to force them to do what it says."
Uhm well, true. But the USG does.
There was a time, before NSI and ICANN kissed and made up, when NSI actually had a couple of secret alternative root servers deployed (although they will deny this any anybody who knows about it isn't there any more). The then CTO was told that if the USG was pissed off they'd simply declare it a miliary resource and the army would run it. DNS history is full of things like this. Like when Postel diverted the A root. Ira Magaziner went on record as saying he supported Jon. In reality he told him to "fucking fix it NOW or a black car would show up" and Jon would either then do what he's told or would disappear". I was in the room and heard this.
In theory you're right. In practice, you haven't spent much time in DC have you?
But you are right that any DNS servers you plug in to your computer decide what root servers you consider authoritative. You can primary the root for yourself if you want and you don't even need root servers.
I mean *cough* it's not like things get added to the root zone real often.
As such it's entitled under international law to Olympic Team, TLD"
.com, .net, et al were in the can, but the brits were awfully fond of the .uk they'd been using prior to dns and insisted .uk be in there, too.
.fx for "Metropolitan France" which is not a TLD but is an ISO code.
.nato story at bedtime.
There are no such laws concerning tlds.
A qiock history lesson. About 87 or so Postel and Klensin were wrangling with the new dns system.
Postel was worried now. He absolutely did not want IANA (ie, Jon, IANA never had any legal personality) to have to decide what's a country or not. Tibet?
So he poked around and found the ISO codes. It's now an ISO/DIN problem as to what a country is. That's why we use them.
BUT! The ISO country codes are not what defines a country. And there are codes that have nothing to do with country-ness, like
Now if you kids are real good I'll tell you the
Easy solution - de-politicize the internet by getting rid of TLD domains. I don't know squat about the technical particulars, but why can't we set up the internet such that TLDs are unnecessary? If I type "yahoo" into my address bar, it should just resolve to some IP address setup by ya
.com off of www.yahoo.com.
.yahoo is now your tld. That's just sorta the way DNS works.
It doesn't matter if you strip the
If you had www.yahoo then
A better question is why there are no single letter tlds. Or for that matter, single letter second level domains (other than one or two, q.net which seems to no longer work, but do try x.com This one might surprise you.
Generally the U.N. is pretty good with standards (english for pilots) and lists (like ISO country codes)"
The ISO country codes are done by a private company in Germany and have nothing to do with the UN.
"And it convinces me of the need to reevaluate the existence of the US Dept of Commerce-backed non-profit organisation that is ICANN. The current squabbles are petty compared to the diplomatic arguments that TLDs could cause. An international body like the UN would be a more appropriate overseer, surely?'"
.su or .yu. These are arbitrary strings forming internet identifiers for the convenience of humans. Nothing on the internet changed when the Soviet Union became Russia or Yorgoslavia split up. And it's not like there's a 1:1 match bewteen the ISO 2 letter codes and tld space. There's an ISO two letter code for metropolitan France that isn't a tld. The Brits have two: .gb and .uk. Somehow peoples emails, web pages and IM's still work despite this terrible taxonomical tld travesty.
Absolutely not.
You want to take it away from the silly US Department of COMmerce and give it to the UN?
Isn't that kind of like saying "I don't like this splinter in my foot so I'll drive a bloody big nail into it instead"?
USG = bad. UN = worse.
Ponder for a moment what the poor misguided internet did for the first decade or so of the DNS when there was no ICANN. Rate of growth: 0 to 250 tlds in 15 years. Under ICANN, in 10 years there have been 7 (albeit really lame) new tlds.
The technical administration of internet identifiers is, or should be, a boring and mundane job. It can be done by the proper technical poeple, or person. There are any number of people I'd gladly put in charge of the legacy A root in a hearbeat: Brian Reid, Paul Vixie and others. Letting anyuthing political be in charge of the A root means it's stagnent.
Insider secret: the USG will never, and I mean never, give up control of it. Their view, and I mean anybody in congress who can spell "TLD" knows the USG paid for its development and operation for 20 years and they fucking own it. Period. They are unshakable in this belief. This ripples down to pond scum like the DoC.
At the end of the day I don't care about
There was life before ICANN and there will be life after it. Just let the the usless thing die.
Whoever suggested the UN I'm guessing has no experience in international internet policymaking with government actors. Or they're from the UN.
Nobody I know with any experience in this area thinks this is even remotely a good idea.
(I do and I don't)
You might be interested in this piece of history
" I am so sick of everyone one being oh so concerned about identity theft"
No shit. I'd PAY somebody to be me.