A friend of mine who moved here from the US called yesterday to say he finally has landed immigrant status. It's taken him 3 years. It's like that, it really is.
"For the same reason that the military loves defectors during war; tbey can tell you how the other side operates, and therefore how to prevent their attacks."
Other than the fact if he has a low enough moral barometer to do what he did it's doubtfull he should be doing what he's doing.
Try googling the Latin name and you'll find the abstract of the type species description - the description of this new (uh, to scince) species published online before print publication in a peer reviewed journal.
It goes into a fair bit of detail. Or you can believe some random asshole on slashdot. Your call.
a time when real workstations and servers stomped the earth with fire and fury... SGI Indigos, DEC Alphastations, HP Superdomes, Siemens Pyramid, Fujitsu 64's."
Excuse me I have to change my shorts now.
"Now it's all gone. Just x86 forever and ever, Amen"
"I wouldn't want Red Hat or Suse or Gentoo on a production server, but I'd be happy with FreeBSD or Debian.
But I'd also be happy to run Solaris though. It has features that Linux and the BSDs don't have. Doesn't make it better for everything, but it's certainly worth looking at."
What he said. I find Debian annoying compared to BSD or Solaris but that may be personal preference.
ersonally I think the government would be well suited to do this sort of thing.
The government doesn't do anything well. They're the first to admit it. Let me qualify that.
In the pre-icann era when the government (department of commerce really, the government is far from monolithic) was fishing around trying to figure out what the hell to do with the dns it suddenly fond itself with somebody, Becky Burr I think, told me "We can't do it. The government can't do anything well. What we're good at is is facilitating collaberation, them empowering an entitiy to do the actual privisioning based on stakeholder consensus".
It sounded great at the time and I suppose is good in theory but then look how icann turned out.
by refusing connections from servers know to resolve.co.us mapped to.com thus preventing anyone using one of those servers getting accurate and up-to-date DNS lookups for the vast majority of the internet.
As long as there is one "friendly" that can redistribute the.us zone abroad this can not be made to work.
And there's LOTS.
The nice thing about the Internet is it's edge controlled. With no central authority there is no choke point for operations (DNS policy is another matter, ICANN is a choke point) but rather everybody with a root password controls a small piece of it.
(http://seegras.discordia.ch/) The ITU???? While I really think the UN would not do a bad job in managing the Internet, the ITU specifically would do a horrible job.
The ITU consists mostly of Telcos who would have done everything to stop "packet-oriented" (as opposed to "connection-oriented") networking back in the 80ies, if they hadn't underestimated it.
The ITU is als _the_ body for enacting patent-ridden so-called standards. All "design by commitee", so every company can bring in their patents.
The ITU _is_ Evil.
And this coming from a Swiss national.
The only reason we even have TCP/IP right now is because an American - Tony Rutkowski - was legal counsel for the ITU back wen Pekka ran the ITU; Tony is one of the most skilled technolayer geeks on the planet. He quietly snuck through the treaty that makes the internet *legal*. This could have been a right mess.
Tony and Carl Malamud were good friends and both participated in "project bruno", an attempt to put all the (normally very expensive, paper) CCIT standards online way back before dialip ISP's existed.
The ITU ignored them until they got is working and then the ITU shut it down.
They're worse than evil, they're stupid and evil. And that's being kind. They're almost as dumb as ICANN.
They are the last organization on earth you want anywhere near the Internet.
"Personally, I couldn't care less who controls passing out domains, as long as two factors are in place:
Any one can register any domain, trademarks not withstanding. Along with this, if I get there before you have a trademark, you lose. Nothing is censored, period. Once I have a domain, I can do whatever I damn well please with it. If I want to put up a page which repeats "Kill the President, heil Hitler!" a thousand times, with images of the Goatse guy interspersed, no one is allowed to force me to take it down. Local laws may mean you get arrested for it, but the domain registry doesn't get involved."
Have a look at the.com zone file sometime. It reads like a dirty novel. WTF are you talking abuot?
Does anyone know what about ICANN's administration the plaintiffs don't like?
It's a corrupt secretive organization.
It is supposed to measure consensus and enact policy. Anybody who watched on real video (you still can at the Berkman centre) them pick the new 7 TLDS knows what a joke that is..coop? Deny.web despite Jon Postel giving the initial go ahead for it?
It was supposed to be a mebership organization immune from capture. It was captured right out of the box. Got your membership card yet?
The initial board (Picked by Ira Magaziner, Clintons do-nothing-right senior science advisor, and I liked Clinton) and Roger Cochetti (then IBM, now Verisign) was supposed to last 6 months and do nothing more than oversee the election of a new boars and methog of signig up members lasted 2+ years and got right down to the task of... enforcing intellectual properly rights in domain name space, never mind there's already laws protecting IP while domain name owners have no such laws and are screwed every day.
The arrogance and clulessness of the ICANN board is legend and unparalelled in Internet history. It's like putting a random AOL user in charge of all routing. Actually that would have a greater chance of success.
Recently Marily Cade, AT&T IP wonk managed to get her way and not require losing registrar's to ACK a transfer. She has never owned or mansaged a domain in her life. Yet she can get policy driven through and the net effect was things like Panix losing their domain. They were just the big one everybnody had heard of. Every domain attorney in the country racked up huge billable hours unfucking that stupid policy created mess for hundreds if not thousands of people.
The list is nearly endless. Forget "what have the done wrong" ask "what have they done right". Nothing. Don't say deregulate.com, that was the Deparetment of Commerce; those plans were in ink before ICANN was created.
CCITT/ITU has some good points. The X.500 standard for labelling directory information has become a fairly established standard. Or, at least, some of it. X.25 for slow serial is actually pretty decent. And their older modem standards for Europe were very acceptable.
X.500 is one. But. The ITU fought long and had against TCP/IP. Guess what was the first thing that went over the fist transatlantic X.25 link? TCP/IP packets. Where there's a geek there's a way.
The difference? TCP/IP is actually usefull.
I'd let you run it. Hell my aunt Nellie could do as better job than the morons currently runing it.
(How much bandwidth do you need, when changes can take days to get anywhere? And how fast does the top-level domain change, anyway? I didn't know they added TLD extensions on a daily basis. Most of the actual domain names registered are registered with registrars lower down the heirarchy.)
The root zone changes 4-7 times a month. Usually just nameserver changes. Usually French terriroties for some odd reason.
"I remember attending the Politics of Code conference in the UK in 2003 and hearing Richard Hill from International Telecommunication Union giving a very odd speech about the ITU and international regulation of the Internet etc. At the time I thought it was a coded land-grab for the transfer of control of ICANN to the ITU.
ICANN was also still in a confusing semi-democratic phase at the time (this seems to be steadily decreasing) and also weirdly self-imploding. Ester Dyson also gave the most contentless speech I think I have ever heard - no doubt to ensure minimum offense to anyone in the audience.
As with all these things wheels within wheels... but I do wish the call for some form of ICANN democracy would renew rather than lose it to a not very democratic body (i.e. the ITU) or to the corporations (kinda where it is now)."
Bing-go.
Twice in one night I have seen the crystal clear truth ring out and resonate on slashdot. Somebody call Guiness.
There was a cnference in DC in 1997 discussing the ill fated prededcessor to ICANN, namely IAHC. The purpose was to "introduce the concept of IAHC to people" The Architects of IACH (Bob Shaw, ITU; Albert Tramposch, WIPO; Don Heath, ISOC, the I* boys) were on stage and things were going great those those smug bastards as they continued to pull the wool over the sheep-like eyes of the poor unsuspecting members of corporate Dumbfuckistan until a luminary from the State department, Richard *cough*forgothislastname*cough* gave a passionate articulate tremendously driven speech about how the US had just spent years getting control of it's phone number back from the ITU as a Clinton policy initiative and how the ITU (as an instument of the small number of families than control the Euro phone systems) was about the worst thing you could ever have the within any distance of the Internet. Bob Shaw turned red with anger and looked like somebody had beamed a dead rat into his mouth. He was pissed somebody knew the truth. Tramposch lost his job over this as an embarrasment to WIPO (which is tough to imagine) while Shaw and Heath went on to work behind the scenes to found the ICANN we despise today. They are always in the shadows.
Good call on Estie. Vapid is the term I was thinking of. But, she made her $$$ by investing in the first registrar.
I was a contract whore for NSI at the time, I worked on the diagnostics for the shared registry system (then quit in disgust) and I can tell you that registrar went live before their system was even finished let alone working.
All the time while the public ICANN mantra of "stability of the Internet" was being bleated probably todistract people from noticing they'd hands repeatedly stuffing large wads of cash into their pockets. And you wonder why port 43 whois is broken...
Whenever a county is taken over by a dictator they always say they're doing it for "the stability". Check it out, that really is what they say.
Interesting question. In theory the NTIA/Department of.COMmerce, who is accountable to the US congress.
In practice, the intellectual property lobby of large multinational (but mostlky US 3 letter name) corporations. I realise I sound a bit starkers saying this but if you don't believe me ask the only honest man (and geek) to ever (briefly) serve on the ICANN board, Karl Audbach.
On the other hand, ICANN has found it appropriate to give MIT more IP addresses than all of China. There is room for improvement
Uh, no. This old chesnut was amusing 10 years ago when I first heard it, but, MIT's allocation predates ICANN; there was zero demand in China for IP addresses at that time.
There is no shotage of IP addresses. There are all sorts of unused bits in the V4 header than can be used to expand the V4 space without even having to think about the broken V6 nightmare.
I'm a BSD guy but I know the Linux guys are hip to this bit twiddling and lead the way. Get with the program already.
So after 30 years of never tansmitting a bit they found uses for some small bit and pieces while the TCP/IP ptotocol suite that the ITU fought hard against has changed the world?
Helluva track record.
Couldn't we let the ITU practice on, oh, Microsoft or Yahoo first? Something expendible?
Slashdot Mirror
"Time to move to Canada."
A friend of mine who moved here from the US called yesterday to say he finally has landed immigrant status. It's taken him 3 years. It's like that, it really is.
Better get started.
"For the same reason that the military loves defectors during war; tbey can tell you how the other side operates, and therefore how to prevent their attacks."
Other than the fact if he has a low enough moral barometer to do what he did it's doubtfull he should be doing what he's doing.
"Why'd you ask this guy"
"Everybody else just laughed at us and said no"
Try googling the Latin name and you'll find the abstract of the type species description - the description of this new (uh, to scince) species published online before print publication in a peer reviewed journal.
It goes into a fair bit of detail. Or you can believe some random asshole on slashdot. Your call.
"Hasn't anyone ever read Andromeda?"
/ 55 /1/473
http://ijs.sgmjournals.org/cgi/content/abstract
"Growth occurred within the pH range 6595 with optimum growth at pH 7375"
Uh-oh. Tell me they're not triangular and green.
"Hasn't anyone ever read Andromeda?"
Or seen John Carpenter's _The Thing_.
Let sleeping procaryotes lie, I say.
a time when real workstations and servers stomped the earth with fire and fury... SGI Indigos, DEC Alphastations, HP Superdomes, Siemens Pyramid, Fujitsu 64's."
Excuse me I have to change my shorts now.
"Now it's all gone. Just x86 forever and ever, Amen"
Segments are for worms.
That's what you say if you want slashdot to pay attention. I'm old fashioned and I benchmark servers with the application I intend to run.
Yes please. You know the drill. If it has a power cord it needs more RAM.
"I wouldn't want Red Hat or Suse or Gentoo on a production server, but I'd be happy with FreeBSD or Debian.
But I'd also be happy to run Solaris though. It has features that Linux and the BSDs don't have. Doesn't make it better for everything, but it's certainly worth looking at."
What he said. I find Debian annoying compared to BSD or Solaris but that may be personal preference.
ersonally I think the government would be well suited to do this sort of thing.
The government doesn't do anything well. They're the first to admit it. Let me qualify that.
In the pre-icann era when the government (department of commerce really, the government is far from monolithic) was fishing around trying to figure out what the hell to do with the dns it suddenly fond itself with somebody, Becky Burr I think, told me "We can't do it. The government can't do anything well. What we're good at is is facilitating collaberation, them empowering an entitiy to do the actual privisioning based on stakeholder consensus".
It sounded great at the time and I suppose is good in theory but then look how icann turned out.
That's what I love about HDTV. For 20 years it's been 2 years away from widespead deploytment. And still is. And will be in two years.
Finally when it is ready people will have long given up television in favour of their computer screen.
"It's the same with black holes. Invisibility doesn't mean it doesn't affect it's surroundings."
ICANN for example...
root DNS server... you keep using that term, but I don't think it means what you think it means
A root server is authoritative for the "." or root zone which is a collection of all the NS records for the TLD servers.
by refusing connections from servers know to resolve .co.us mapped to .com thus preventing anyone using one of those servers getting accurate and up-to-date DNS lookups for the vast majority of the internet.
.us zone abroad this can not be made to work.
As long as there is one "friendly" that can redistribute the
And there's LOTS.
The nice thing about the Internet is it's edge controlled. With no central authority there is no choke point for operations (DNS policy is another matter, ICANN is a choke point) but rather everybody with a root password controls a small piece of it.
And this coming from a Swiss national.
The only reason we even have TCP/IP right now is because an American - Tony Rutkowski - was legal counsel for the ITU back wen Pekka ran the ITU; Tony is one of the most skilled technolayer geeks on the planet. He quietly snuck through the treaty that makes the internet *legal*. This could have been a right mess.
Tony and Carl Malamud were good friends and both participated in "project bruno", an attempt to put all the (normally very expensive, paper) CCIT standards online way back before dialip ISP's existed.
The ITU ignored them until they got is working and then the ITU shut it down.
They're worse than evil, they're stupid and evil. And that's being kind. They're almost as dumb as ICANN.
They are the last organization on earth you want anywhere near the Internet.
"Personally, I couldn't care less who controls passing out domains, as long as two factors are in place:
.com zone file sometime. It reads like a dirty novel. WTF are you talking abuot?
Any one can register any domain, trademarks not withstanding. Along with this, if I get there before you have a trademark, you lose.
Nothing is censored, period. Once I have a domain, I can do whatever I damn well please with it. If I want to put up a page which repeats "Kill the President, heil Hitler!" a thousand times, with images of the Goatse guy interspersed, no one is allowed to force me to take it down. Local laws may mean you get arrested for it, but the domain registry doesn't get involved."
Have a look at the
ICANN will block resolution of all addresses from servers found to be translating .com to .co.us
How?
Does anyone know what about ICANN's administration the plaintiffs don't like?
.coop? Deny .web despite Jon Postel giving the initial go ahead for it?
.com, that was the Deparetment of Commerce; those plans were in ink before ICANN was created.
It's a corrupt secretive organization.
It is supposed to measure consensus and enact policy. Anybody who watched on real video (you still can at the Berkman centre) them pick the new 7 TLDS knows what a joke that is.
It was supposed to be a mebership organization immune from capture. It was captured right out of the box. Got your membership card yet?
The initial board (Picked by Ira Magaziner, Clintons do-nothing-right senior science advisor, and I liked Clinton) and Roger Cochetti (then IBM, now Verisign) was supposed to last 6 months and do nothing more than oversee the election of a new boars and methog of signig up members lasted 2+ years and got right down to the task of... enforcing intellectual properly rights in domain name space, never mind there's already laws protecting IP while domain name owners have no such laws and are screwed every day.
The arrogance and clulessness of the ICANN board is legend and unparalelled in Internet history. It's like putting a random AOL user in charge of all routing. Actually that would have a greater chance of success.
Recently Marily Cade, AT&T IP wonk managed to get her way and not require losing registrar's to ACK a transfer. She has never owned or mansaged a domain in her life. Yet she can get policy driven through and the net effect was things like Panix losing their domain. They were just the big one everybnody had heard of. Every domain attorney in the country racked up huge billable hours unfucking that stupid policy created mess for hundreds if not thousands of people.
The list is nearly endless. Forget "what have the done wrong" ask "what have they done right". Nothing. Don't say deregulate
You'll see Bill Gates post all the source code to all Microsoft propducts to Usenet before that happens.
Both are good ideas. Neither will happen, ever.
Second, the main candidate is the ITU, which has a pretty damn good track record of making communications systems interoperable
They made analog voltages work, Big woop.
When the ITU takes your domain name away from you keep in mind you said this.
CCITT/ITU has some good points. The X.500 standard for labelling directory information has become a fairly established standard. Or, at least, some of it. X.25 for slow serial is actually pretty decent. And their older modem standards for Europe were very acceptable.
X.500 is one. But. The ITU fought long and had against TCP/IP. Guess what was the first thing that went over the fist transatlantic X.25 link? TCP/IP packets. Where there's a geek there's a way.
The difference? TCP/IP is actually usefull.
I'd let you run it. Hell my aunt Nellie could do as better job than the morons currently runing it.
(How much bandwidth do you need, when changes can take days to get anywhere? And how fast does the top-level domain change, anyway? I didn't know they added TLD extensions on a daily basis. Most of the actual domain names registered are registered with registrars lower down the heirarchy.)
The root zone changes 4-7 times a month. Usually just nameserver changes. Usually French terriroties for some odd reason.
We diff the root zone every day.
"I remember attending the Politics of Code conference in the UK in 2003 and hearing Richard Hill from International Telecommunication Union giving a very odd speech about the ITU and international regulation of the Internet etc. At the time I thought it was a coded land-grab for the transfer of control of ICANN to the ITU.
ICANN was also still in a confusing semi-democratic phase at the time (this seems to be steadily decreasing) and also weirdly self-imploding. Ester Dyson also gave the most contentless speech I think I have ever heard - no doubt to ensure minimum offense to anyone in the audience.
As with all these things wheels within wheels... but I do wish the call for some form of ICANN democracy would renew rather than lose it to a not very democratic body (i.e. the ITU) or to the corporations (kinda where it is now)."
Bing-go.
Twice in one night I have seen the crystal clear truth ring out and resonate on slashdot. Somebody call Guiness.
There was a cnference in DC in 1997 discussing the ill fated prededcessor to ICANN, namely IAHC. The purpose was to "introduce the concept of IAHC to people" The Architects of IACH (Bob Shaw, ITU; Albert Tramposch, WIPO; Don Heath, ISOC, the I* boys) were on stage and things were going great those those smug bastards as they continued to pull the wool over the sheep-like eyes of the poor unsuspecting members of corporate Dumbfuckistan until a luminary from the State department, Richard *cough*forgothislastname*cough* gave a passionate articulate tremendously driven speech about how the US had just spent years getting control of it's phone number back from the ITU as a Clinton policy initiative and how the ITU (as an instument of the small number of families than control the Euro phone systems) was about the worst thing you could ever have the within any distance of the Internet. Bob Shaw turned red with anger and looked like somebody had beamed a dead rat into his mouth. He was pissed somebody knew the truth. Tramposch lost his job over this as an embarrasment to WIPO (which is tough to imagine) while Shaw and Heath went on to work behind the scenes to found the ICANN we despise today. They are always in the shadows.
Good call on Estie. Vapid is the term I was thinking of. But, she made her $$$ by investing in the first registrar.
I was a contract whore for NSI at the time, I worked on the diagnostics for the shared registry system (then quit in disgust) and I can tell you that registrar went live before their system was even finished let alone working.
All the time while the public ICANN mantra of "stability of the Internet" was being bleated probably todistract people from noticing they'd hands repeatedly stuffing large wads of cash into their pockets. And you wonder why port 43 whois is broken...
Whenever a county is taken over by a dictator they always say they're doing it for "the stability". Check it out, that really is what they say.
I wonder if they would come out with useless new TLD's like .Microsoft
Think how easy that would be to filter out.
May I ask you to reconsider the word "useless" ?
Who is ICANN accountable to?
.COMmerce, who is accountable to the US congress.
Interesting question. In theory the NTIA/Department of
In practice, the intellectual property lobby of large multinational (but mostlky US 3 letter name) corporations. I realise I sound a bit starkers saying this but if you don't believe me ask the only honest man (and geek) to ever (briefly) serve on the ICANN board, Karl Audbach.
On the other hand, ICANN has found it appropriate to give MIT more IP addresses than all of China. There is room for improvement
Uh, no. This old chesnut was amusing 10 years ago when I first heard it, but, MIT's allocation predates ICANN; there was zero demand in China for IP addresses at that time.
There is no shotage of IP addresses. There are all sorts of unused bits in the V4 header than can be used to expand the V4 space without even having to think about the broken V6 nightmare.
I'm a BSD guy but I know the Linux guys are hip to this bit twiddling and lead the way. Get with the program already.
What version of Windows did you say you ran?
So after 30 years of never tansmitting a bit they found uses for some small bit and pieces while the TCP/IP ptotocol suite that the ITU fought hard against has changed the world?
Helluva track record.
Couldn't we let the ITU practice on, oh, Microsoft or Yahoo first? Something expendible?