Cracking the Verisign Monopoly 140
ag writes: "Paul Garrin is on a crusade to break the U.S. stranglehold on the Web. Access to the "root zone," the master file listing the so-called top-level domains--.com, .org, .net, .gov, .edu, .mil--and some 244 country-code domains, is currently in the hands of the privileged few. Through Name.Space, his own root server, Garrin is hoping to 'reterritorialize the Net, bringing it back to its original ideal of virtual space without borders or hierarchies.'" The article brings out the conflicts between Name.Space and the Open Root Server Confederation.
Search Engines and alternate DNS (Score:1)
Actually, search engines could be the bridge that makes alternative DNS catch on.
Consider: a major search engine decides to also parse through sites listed via the alternate DNS server in addition to the traditional ones. Search results would then link to the site by IP instead of name (and maybe display a teeny icon indicating its presence on the other DNS system). Thus, the sites would still be searchable and useable, while at the same time spreading word of the new DNS system's existance.
The only catch is that there'd have to be enough sites on the new system to make it worthwhile for the search engine. But that threshold is a lot easier to reach than the one for a major ISP.
Seems (Score:1)
Additionally, if I was a business, I would have to register a ton of new domain names because of the lack of intuitivness. It just seems like a way for this guy to make tons of money at everyone's expense.
What we need is a few more TLD's, not hundreds more!
Original idea? (Score:2)
Most US users see
Would you name this theorem? (Score:3)
Unfortunately, a google search for "all systems" and "single point of failure" did not lead me to such a theorem; simply to a bunch of marketing guys contradicting it.
And since I can think of dozens of mechanical and electrical systems without a single point of failure, I'd appreciate a link to more information about why this is impossible in computer science.
Re:all very well, but... (Score:1)
Re:Cool shtuff. (Score:1)
I just got this spam... (Score:2)
Subject: Important Information: .BIZ .INFO Domain Extensions
The new top level domain names with extensions .BIZ, .INFO, .PRO,
and .NAME have just been approved by global internet authorities
and will be released soon, but don't wait until then to register.
These domains are available NOW for pre-registration at:
http://www.[deleted].net on a first come, first serve
basis.
Yeah, so now I have a dilemma. Do I throw some money at these people and get a groovy .biz URL, or do I give it to this hippie guy who wants to heal the world with domain names? Or do I just think how lame and petty the net is getting and go back to publishing stuff on paper...
Baz
Re:Possible Solution: The British Way of Doing Thi (Score:1)
http://www.freeparking.co.uk/
" Nominet Domains (.co.uk,
So how come registering a
Re:Right after Alternic (Score:2)
Re:Right after Alternic (Score:2)
That's simply not true (with the possible exception of ".us"). The local CCTLD is the number one choice in most places I know.
I disagree. Why shouldn't a domain name like "slash.dot" be valuable? In a system with 'free' gTLDs we could move to a situation where you wouldn't have to add ".com" to a company's name to find it, but simply type its name into the Location:-bar. I don't see why that couldn't work.
Did you know that there are companies who specialize in registering your name in as many of the approx. 250 existing gTLD's as possible? This is happening on a big scale, and is quickly rendering gTLDs useless as they no longer satisfy their goal of data distribution.
So why not just get rid of them?
Time for an overhaul (Score:3)
Too many "alternative" root providers (Score:4)
An observation by Douglas Adams:
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Re:DNS is toss anyhow!! (Score:2)
As for the second paragraph of your rant, if you want to be able to immediately edit your domain files, then get a dedicated line or lease a dedicated server and host them yourself. Noone's stopping you. As long as the world can get to your domain through the TLD system, you can do whatever you like within it.
Re:Right after Alternic (Score:2)
Fortunately, I was able to get a .org (et al.) for only $11 there [gandi.net].
I still miss my country code, just because the .com (et al.) really
needlessly obfuscates the Internet beyond reason.
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Re:Possible Solution: The British Way of Doing Thi (Score:2)
Possible Solution: The British Way of Doing Things (Score:5)
Re:Search Engines and alternate DNS (Score:1)
http://server.aol.newtlds.com/index.html
Where newtlds.com is the "oldspace" root - yes
it means that each vhost needs a line:
ServerAlias server.aol server.aol.newtlds.com
But that's probably the safest compatibility hack. In fact combine this with a
search newtlds.com
on your squid proxy box, and you don't even need to fix the clients for pure web stuff - just point them through the proxy!
Re:Fascism != Communism (Score:2)
Politics: Democracy, Fascism
Economics: Communism, Capitalism.
To be honest, Capitalism more closely aligns with Fascism.
Right up to there, you had a pretty good analysis. Mr. Garrin's motivations do seem to be to collect a chuck of the pie for himself, using something he built and can get other people to pay for. That's pretty capitalist.
Your two lines about the differing systems in politics and economics is very simplistic, but generally correct (there are *lots* of shades of gray in-between, but that doesn't really matter).
However, when you say that capitalism better lines up with fascist politics, you're wrong. The choices in econimics are between political control of the economy (communism, socialism, etc.) and private control of the economy, with political action limited to enforcing basic rules and adjudicating contract disputes (capitalism). Political control of the economy requires a police state, because otherwise most people won't cooperate enough for it to work. Democratic politics doesn't require people voting money and control out of each others hands.
Re:DNS versus search engines (Score:1)
That's also a good reason that I hadn't thought of and that didn't come through in the article. The given reason of "to support domain names with Chinese characters" would still be reason enough, I would think.
Re:DNS versus search engines (Score:1)
I use that one every day. In fact, if you just click on the Netscape Search button, on the page that this takes you to you can pick which search engine to use for this feature. So I always have a Google search built into my NS 4.x browser.
The only problem is that if I search for words that end with "com" or "net", Netscape thinks it's an actual domain name and tries to go to that site rather than searching. Or at least it used to, when I tried it just now with 4.75 it searched correctly.
Now we just need search engines to index enough and rank things appropriately enough for me to find what I want quickly. Google's the best of a bad lot, so far.
DNS versus search engines (Score:2)
I agree that search engines are the key - if you can get search engines to start returning results from alternate DNS, and if there's something there that people want to see, and if it can be made easy enough for people to update their network settings to do so (on the order of "lynx -source http://go-gnome.com/ | sh" for example, or maybe just "click here and then select OK when Windows asks if you want to update your settings") then there will be a mass movement to alternate DNS. In the long run I don't see DNS being that useful for finding things on the 'net anyway, though. It's never been a foolproof plan to just type in widget.com and get WidgetCo, and it's getting tougher and tougher as more similar domain names are registered (two that I find difficult to get right: Loki games and Mandrake Linux).
It would be far better to use a collaborative net of search engines to query for stuff, like a combination of hopped-up Google rankings and those ghastly "AOL keywords". Really, just finding the right domain doesn't help you find stuff anyway, as anyone who's tried to find technical documentation on a product's web site and instead found marketing crap can tell you. Since we'll have to depend on search engines anyway, why not just cut out the DNS middleman? This would require a vast advance in search engine ability, but I think that might be possible in the fairly near future.
Plus, then you could have a neat feature in a web browser where you select some words, right click, and select "search for this" (or "I feel lucky!").
Come to think of it, to really make this work a search engine would almost have to be run distributed.net style. No single big search engine comes close to indexing the web, but if I've got a great collection of Linux USB links (just for example), maybe my computer could share those with Google from time to time. If my machine had a semi-autonomous agent or spider that was constantly searching for my interests on the web, and I sync this info with Google from time to time, then Google stays up to date better, more of the web gets indexed, and anyone else can benefit from my contribution to the whole. The more I think about this the more I think it's a good idea.
I also found it interesting that China has broken free of ICANN too. That may have the biggest long-term effect - once all of those people are online there will have to be a way to access their part of the network, or else the world's networks will be effectively partitioned in half (at least from a DNS standpoint). With all of the U.S. business interest in China, this may have been the unkindest cut that ICANN's received yet.
Re:Original idea? (Score:1)
I'm tempted to do it because it's free, but I'd never want it as a replacement for my existing
Re:Original idea? (Score:1)
So is the problem that you lack resources to run a mailserver on your familyname domain or is the problem that you can't think of another name or variant? Like detroitzapfs or michzapfs or whatever.
On the same note, notice that I don't have my own domain for my website. I don't need my own stinking domain. What's wrong with being identified as a member of some larger organization?
It's about control and identity. I don't want to be known as or controlled like a subidentity. The other major flaw with regional designations (or should I say the
Say my root domain name is foo.minneapolis.mn.us and I move the grand total of 1 block it would take to put me in another city? Do I have to screw around with the known-as-slow
I'd go for being foo.org.us or something else, but the librarian-esque level of specificity in US is rather idiotic. Why not just use X.500 then?
Re:Couldn't big ISP's use this? (Score:2)
Getting ISPs in on it, is the one and only way to overthrow ICANN.
The current root monopoly is not due to millions of internet users pointing to ICANN's servers. 99.99% of those millions don't run any resolver (e.g. dnscache, bind) at all, and never directly talk to the root servers. They just use their ISP's recursive resolver, and the people at the ISP are the ones who decide which root to use.
Change the ISPs, and you change the users.
I think your idea is great. Getting someone like AOL interested in their own tld would be a good thing. They would want to add it, ICANN would not let them, so they'de join OpenNic or something. Then, suddenly, a few million internet users would be using a new root.
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What about purpose? (Score:2)
If I order something, Cheapbytes is one day away by mail, but LinuxCentral is 5 days. That counts. And if the merchandise were coming from Europe or Japan, time delays would be longer still (though I am usually warned of this by currency conversions).
*.com is nice for pure information exchanges, but for other things, localization would be better.
Caution: Now approaching the (technological) singularity.
Re:Time for an overhaul (Score:2)
The thing is, this would require agreed upon standards. Perhaps one of the existing standards could be modified to fit, but it would need to be fitted into place and then agreed upon. Possibly not by everybody, but by enough.
Perhaps there could be a system allowing local caching of name-tcp/ip address pairs. Then no centralized dns would need to decode them. The top-level servers could mainly keep track of whether or not somebody had claimed some particular address (with some provision to keep horders from being successful...probably an aging cache system). This would allow each local net to operate independantly of the main net, though it would be important to resync periodically so that address collisions could be avoided
It seems to me that this would provide a locally structured net that would hierarchicly adapt to name clashes via resyncs and cache aging. Lots of details are vague, but the idea is that there is no central point of control needed. The top-level nodes can assign addresses via a CSMACD like protocol. It might take a few minutes, but that's certainly no problem. It would, however, limit the total size of the net. Anything much larger than the earth-moon system would probably induce undesireable time delays in the address assignment process. So some technique would need to be developed to allow temporary addresses to be allocated while the permanent address was being negotiated. And THAT should be no big problem.
Caution: Now approaching the (technological) singularity.
Re:Might not be a bad idea (Score:2)
--
Re:Would you name this theorem? (Score:2)
--
Re:I can see the point though.. (Score:2)
It currently does not, and is primarily used as a 'web lookup service' and as a flat database (yes it's heirarchial, but few use it).
I'm a proponent of independent lookup systems for filing information/websites, and leave DNS to do what it's good at.
Should all those companies that have paid registration fees have their domains taken away? No... not immediately, but no new registrations should be handed out, and none should be allowed to renew. It should be phased out. They didn't buy domains; they paid registration fees for someone to put an entry in a database.
Whether it's geographic, or some new system, I maintain it has to stay heirarchial, that's how it was designed.
Re:problems with using .us ccTLD (Score:2)
Web URL's should be using a lookup service other than DNS, if simplicity is what we're after.
slashdot.andover.ma.us is *perfect*. It tells me where a machine is.... it's great. That's what dns was designed for...
I can see the point though.. (Score:3)
It used to be that all the ccTLD's and such were not paying 'fees' to have their domains, they just had them. THey administered them as they saw fit.
Yes, this is because the root servers were sponsored by the american taxpayers.
Now.. the thing is, in this world, if you control something, you can make money off it. As long as this system is privatised, it will be run as a cash cow, period. What wee need is an international taxpayer-funded coop, so that big business can't get involved. We need to do away with *all* generic TLD's, and get back to ccTLD's.
Re:Fascism != Communism (Score:2)
-henrik
Re:Sour Grapes (Score:1)
Another view... (Score:2)
Platform dependent (Score:1)
At this point I won't be converting. In order to access a Name.Space server, you have to download an app to use it.
What platforms is it available for you might ask?
Windows and Mac only.
--
Give a man a match, you keep him warm for an evening.
Re:Alphabetical name servers (Score:2)
-russ
Adding name.space under Linux (Score:3)
Now, you just restart your named and try pinging name.space!
Re:Right after Alternic (Score:2)
More to the point any company selling something has an identity in the real world. Customers want companies they can contact other ways without such things as international phone calls or issues of legal jurisdiction if things go wrong.
Re:Possible Solution: The British Way of Doing Thi (Score:2)
There is also a set of second level domains for US states. Doing this would also eliminate
Re:Original idea? (Score:2)
So how do you change it in such a way that say some company which only trades in Manhatten can't get mom-pop.us, instead of mom-pop.ny.ny.us, nationally known company isn't forced to have big-co.ny.ny.us just because they happen to have their head office there.
The US has the concept of hierachical government, does it also have the concept of hierachical incorporation?
Re:cartman says, "stop your bitching!" (Score:2)
No they where created at CERN an international organisation based in the highly independant Switzerland.
Re:Right after Alternic (Score:1)
>I don't see why that couldn't work
It wouldn't work because how many companies all over the world have the same name? Granted it could be handled the same was as now (companyname.com is taking by 1 company and the rest are screwed) - or we go on to use the CCTLD's so that at least 1 company per country could have the name.
Re:Original idea? (Score:3)
If you want a different model, look at freenet, where there is an essentially flat namespace, and required information gets cached near to folk who request it (much as DNS caches do). However, being fully distributed means that there is no longer an 'authority' to ensure this 'freeDNS' hasn't been poisoned. You then end up looking at scalable trust management architectures (SPKI, SDSI?) to ensure that you can still trust the DNS info.
Theres some discussion of systems like this here: http://www.advogato.org/article/188.html
I can't see distributed DNS getting anywhere now as Verisign would be able to claim IETF were preventing them from doing business.
-Baz
six of one, half dozen of the other (Score:2)
Re:Possible Solution: The British Way of Doing Thi (Score:1)
Re: (Score:2)
Re:Original idea? (Score:3)
Well, that's at least in part because the
Plus, the
Plus, the Internet began in the U.S., so people have grown accustomed to it being an American network. Our federal government uses
But as long as name.city.state.us is enforced as the only legit use of t he
- - - - -
IPv6 Will Change Everything (Score:1)
Such a limited namespace as provided by IPv4 allows control of the few domains (.com,
With the greatly expanded namespace provided by IPv6 (2^128 IP addressse, IIRC) the door is opened for the Ideal Solution. My Ideal Solution is to have a lookup file (propagated across all routeters, of course) which will connect any alphanumeric string with the IPv6 internet address for which it will be an identifier.
The lookup file will be infinitely expandable (by certain parties, no scr1pt k1dd13z registering names) so that any IPv6 address can be given any identifier. Just think, you could register your ice maker as joe.palotnik.frigidair.ice.maker.
You could enter "joe palotnik ice" into Google (don't U use it?) and find the listing for joe.palotnik.frigidaire.ice.maker. Then you could click on the link, enter your authorization, and read about how your ice maker is functioning.
Re:Alphabetical name servers (Score:1)
Alphabetical name servers (Score:2)
I shouldn't matter what your root is if all domains starting with 'x' go on the 'x' server, all domains starting with 'y' go on the 'y' server, and letters that are used more often just go a few characters deeper (instead of just 's', we have 'sa'-'sd' on one server, 'se-sg' on another, etc.).
We'd have to rewrite the lookup routines on everything, but it seems it wouldn't be all that hard to transition to this.
Re:I can see the point though.. (Score:2)
Not to mention that there is no way that all the
Spyky
Re:Alphabetical name servers (Score:1)
At the time, lookups were getting rather slow due to the explosive growth of the internet. By using the letters as an index, the load could be spread across multiple servers. Less used letters could be combined, while extremely popular ones could be broken down even further, exactly as you suggest. It's a fairly simple bit of coding, but would require a universal change to the internet - not an easy thing to get done.
Re:first fist (Score:1)
Car salesman? (Score:1)
I'm not sure I want to stake the future of the net on even new-car salesman.
Re:Fascism != Communism (Score:1)
>require nor desire Fascism.
What a load of crap.
Please supply evidence of a single real-world implementation of Communism that promotes Democracy.
For bonus points, supply evidence of a Communist state that respects any form of individual rights or freedom.
Until you can do so, please stick your head back up your ass and stop promoting a system that has proven to be a dismal, destructive failure everywhere it has been tried.
Re:DNS versus search engines (Score:1)
It has nothing to do with ICANN's policy of protecting IP holders and domain registrars.
Re:Adding name.space under Linux (Score:1)
nameserver 209.48.2.11
nameserver 206.86.247.30
http://namespace.org/switch/unix.html?
here are instructions for other operating systems:
http://namespace.org/switch/
Re:DNS versus search engines (Score:1)
Re:cartman says, "stop your bitching!" (Score:1)
for profit dns (Score:1)
LAMBDA
We have the bandwidth. We have the capacity with optical fiber to give each user on Earth his or her own lambda, a distinct color of light. That's right, there's enough bandwidth in the spectrum to give everybody, 5 billion people, a little slice of light each. And on the edges, you can connect your slice of light with whatever device you use and suck in the information you want. And in this way it will be exactly like the real world, which is inundated with air and light.
http://www.zdnet.com/intweek/stories/news/0,4164,
Cool shtuff. (Score:2)
I did, however, find it silly that there is a
Re:Possible Solution: The British Way of Doing Thi (Score:2)
Pax,
White Rabbit +++ Divide by Cucumber Error ++
Re:.us Solution: Colorado, Nebraska, and Oregon (Score:1)
Re:Sounds quite expensive art (Score:1)
Why spend $2 million on a super bowl ad at all?
Re:cartman says, "stop your bitching!" (Score:2)
Correct me if I'm wrong, but don't HTML and HTTP (and most other internet technologies) predate the EU?
I can see it now, TBL back in the 80's thinking to himself "What can I do to screw the nonexistant EU? I know! HTML and HTTP! And furthur, I'll use DNS to pile an unfair domain system on top of that!"
Re:Possible Solution: The British Way of Doing Thi (Score:1)
Rubbish!
I pay well under £10 per year (10gbp ~= $15), which is less than I have ever seen "real"
Thus the need for democratic namespace governance. (Score:2)
Well, we don't need another Vint Cerf. We need a way of operating our namespace which is accountable and cannot be held hostage by monied interests - as has certainly been the case with ICANN, and would probably be the case with name.space and others as well. Hell, new.net IS a monied interest.
For this reason, I am a member of OpenNIC. Membership and full voting rights are available to anyone with an interest and internet access.
Claim your namespace.
Re:Search Engines and alternate DNS (Score:1)
Again, it's a nice idea, but bear in mind that most websites are hosted virtually - many sites to 1 IP. They rely on the browser passing the hostname as part of the HTTP headers. If you just provide an IP to link, the browsers don't have this information to send, so will just be fed the default site for that IP.
all very well, but... (Score:3)
It's a nice idea - just a shame it's unworkable until it's accepted by the current top level authorities, which of course it never will unless they can screw money out of it...
Peer to Peer DNS (Score:1)
A zone file is distributed into this "dns network" in a similar fashion the information flows through Freenet or Gnutella - perhaps even utilize Freenet for this. If a host recevies multiple copies of a zone, it would need a mechanism to verify which is the authentic version. Certanly many ways can be devised to do this. One way could be longevity. The longer a "zone" (file) has been in this network (transit) the more hosts will trust it. Naturally if someone registers www.slashdot.org before anyone else, this zone will have been in the system longer than anybody else's. Quite simple - zero squatting. Perhaps implement a rule whereby trademark owners in the "real world" have first claim on names within the cyber world (who would want to associate themselves with something stupid like marlboro.com or mcdonalds.com anyway, I'm sure we all have more important code to write). One more variable could be introduced with each zone sent and that is a host trust value.
Each host would have a trust value for itself (separate from it's zone). This would indicate how trustworthy that host is. The same principle would apply as to the zone - the longer the host is on the network, the longer it's trusted - hence the first node will be god.
This is a problem obviously, so a mechanism should be devised around it. Perhaps trustworthiness is decided in months as units, therefore MANY nodes could have a value of 1 to begin with. The nodes used initially would be terminated the moment the system goes online, therefore preventing the developers from being masters. This is a good thing in the long run as nobody should really have control.
I think I'm just ranting at this point so I'll stop, but there are ways to make DNS better.
One alternative to all of this could be to assign each domain name a unique number, and distribute these amongst all "servers" with some protocol - this is vague, but it's sorta the way various ASs know how to reach each other via BGP - same concept, different purpose.
If anyone thinks this is a good idea, feel FREE to use it, bash it to a pulp, fine tune the ideas, and write the RFCs, as I have no idea how to do so.
Just my suggestions,
Bojan
Right after Alternic (Score:5)
This crashed and burned fabulously, but that may have been influenced by hack attempts on root servers, etc.
Still, this seems unlikely. People want
When $100 was the registration fee and nobody was doing business online, people cared about cheap alternatives. Now that the costs of doing business on the Internet are huge, nobody is not going to shell out $70 (or $30/2 years with some of the cheaper services) while maintaining a presence.
Additionally, people want a good domain name or a generic one. As nobody is going to try to guess these random TLDs and assume that their ISP supports it, this names provide no value.
Give it up, "The Man" 0wns DNS and won't let go.
Alex
Re:snake oil story (Score:1)
What should happen is that we need one centralized database that is Free (Free as in free of monopolistic control) and open to any company (or single individual) for registration. A non-profit world-wide organization to handle the centralized database for all domains would need to be in place.
The registration companies will then need to compete as service companies, giving value added service to those who wish to pay for the markup. Just look at RedHat. The operating system is Free, but RedHat makes money by making it easy for people that are willing to pay for the added service. (I'm trying not to use that overused buzzword Open******)
Re:Time for an overhaul (Score:1)
Nowadays, everything works with hostnames. If you can't resolve them, being able to access the hosts they point to doesn't help you one bit because you don't know which hosts those are.
Re:While I see Garrin's point... (Score:1)
Sure? I for one don't have any problems with it. The root servers are numerous and widespread enough to be disaster-resistant, and having more of them sure as hell won't make the system more hax0r-resistant. As for the TLD issue, that's something companies gripe about, not users.
.aol domain -- don't give 'em ideas!!! (Score:1)
Good going. As soon as somebody faxes your post to the AOL execs, they'll use your idea and create their own splinter TLD. The net is doomed and it's your fault.
problems with using .us ccTLD (Score:1)
In order to phase out generic TLDs, you'd have to give the .com owners a way to migrate to .us (where the majority of domain holders are). Unfortunately the .us domain [www.nic.us] is based on geographical hierarchy -- Slashdot would have to become slashdot.andover.ma.us -- and that system isn't as user-friendly as a .com.
Here's who to contact [nic.us] if you're interested in lobbying.
Re:all very well, but... (Score:1)
Clients who host their DNS with Name.Space are mirrored in the domain ".XS2.NET" for compatibility with legacy domains. (i.e. name.space = name.space.xs2.net)
Availability... (Score:3)
Their web server (http://name.space.xs2.net/) is already slashdotted... Are we sure that their root DNS will be available all the time?
.us Solution: Colorado, Nebraska, and Oregon (Score:2)
But as long as name.city.state.us is enforced as the only legit use of the .us domain, it's probably remain that way.
If somehow Colorado, Nebraska, Oregon, and Alaska would give up the "city" requirement, you would get .co.us, .ne.us, .or.us, and .ak.us as alternatives to .com, .net, .org, and .edu (patterned after .ac.uk).
no, that's Unisys (Score:2)
They own the patent for that stupid GIF image format
No, that's Unisys [burnallgifs.org]. Verisign owns a monopoly (not court-enforced but MS-enforced) on trusted SSL and Authenticode certificates (having bought Thawte [thawte.com]), even though VeriSign isn't doing a good job of checking its facts [slashdot.org].
Not if you use resolv.conf (Score:2)
At this point I won't be converting. In order to access a Name.Space server, you have to download an app to use it.
Not necessarily. If you're running Linux, you can always add their root server to resolv.conf. There are also ways of doing this in BSD, BeOS, and pretty much any other OS that can access DNS.
I strongly agree (Score:2)
Nathaniel P. Wilkerson
Domain Names for $13
Re:Right after Alternic (Score:2)
This is totally untrue:
When i go online to buy the latest number of "Creamy Banana Erotic Magazine" i don't want to end up buying it from a US store (i live in Europe).
Just imagine the thing getting stuck in customs because they happened to open it in the page where "Anita Big Melons" grabs an overgrown banana and a goat cheese and proceeds to ......
Might not be a bad idea (Score:4)
I'm not sure what the answer IS, but it cannot be to have the entirety of the internet dependant on a relative handful of base servers.
It's like the 'Jesus nut' on a helicopter. Single point of failure means catastrophic failure for the machine. The difference is that the 'net has the capability of double/triple redundancy.
The more spread out the base servers, and the more there are, the better off we are even with the increased work load of maintaining the new rash of servers required.
DanH
Cav Pilot's Reference Page [cavalrypilot.com]
Re:cartman says, "stop your bitching!" (Score:2)
Re:cartman says, "stop your bitching!" (Score:2)
Re:cartman says, "stop your bitching!" (Score:2)
Fascism != Communism (Score:3)
This is slightly off topic - but the quote from the article above needs clarity, and it passes very close by my personal politics and a gripping pet peeve.
Chris Ambler: In this regard Mr. Garrin may be interpreted as acting as a capitalist and NOT a Socialist or Communist
He is refuting to be interested in a shared, libre and community owned/operated system - but instead he is trying to take a "piece of every new registry" for himself; you would really be accusing him of trying to REPLICATE Verisign. This is clearly a CAPITALIST motivation.
Mr. Ambler, you seem to know nothing of Communism or Socialism outside of the McCarthy inspired dogma and disinformation rampant in the United States. Please before you attempt to slight someone for being a "Communist", as if it is a naturally 'bad' thing to be avoided (which betrays your bigoted pre-disposition), you may want to understand what the hell your talking about. Further, it is almost amusing when describing an anti-social, selfish, introverted and greedy act it is labeled 'Communist' when really it is the exact antithesis. The act you accuse Mr.Garrin of committing would perfectly exemplify Capitalist principles.
Communism is NOT about control - that is Fascism - and usually Americans confuse the two. Communism promotes Democracy. Communism does not require nor desire Fascism.
Politics: Democracy, Fascism
Economics: Communism, Capitalism.
To be honest, Capitalism more closely aligns with Fascism. Communism more closely aligns with Democracy. One set of principles rely on Control (Fascism) and Ownership (Capitalism), while Democracy (Equal Right to Participation in Governance) and Communism (Community ownership of capital, controlled by consensus) are really a more natural pair. American political discourse is so perverted by propaganda that a real understanding of the contradiction of their community - the epithaths and principles - is outside the scope of the normal person.
Start by reading this: Fascism @ Dictionary.com [dictionary.com], Democracy @ Dictionary.com [dictionary.com], Communism @ Dictionary.com [dictionary.com]* and Capitalism @ Dictionary.com [dictionary.com]. You are also invited to read: The Manifesto of the Communist Party. [colorado.edu] written in 1848 by Karl Marx and Frederick Engels.
You will find that Communism is NOT about oppression and control - but freedom from the Ruling Class and true democratic principles. You will find that most people who would be opposed to corporate control also have some maintain some ideas that could may rightly be labeled as Communist - but the collective political mind in America is so polluted by Capitalist Dogma against even the simple word that Communism's many merits cannot even be rightly discussed.
*Its very interesting to see that dictionary describes Communism with words like "scheme, authoritarian, claiming, theoretical" which are themselves charged and purposefully chosen to berate the idea.
McCarthyism set back American Culture by 300 years.
Picking some nits... (Score:2)
This statement irks me - Consider that the Internet is over 30? years old, originally a creation of the United States Department of Defense... Yes... That's right, the US DOD. Therefore, the entire premise of this guy's statement is blatantly false. How can this system, a creation of the US Military, which was originally built to support the US military's computing needs in a nuclear war, have as its original ideal of "virtual space without borders or hierarchies"??? It didn't. Yes - the current domain naming system needs to be reevaluated, and possibly scrapped. But do you really think that will happen? At the very least what we need is a Fair naming arbitration system, and a limit on domain holdings.
Re:Availability... (Score:2)
I can't be karma whoring - I've already hit 50!
Couldn't big ISP's use this? (Score:3)
In exchange, Name.Space or whoever could give, say AOL their own TLD. Rather than give out http://hometown.aol.com/Bob27484947, they could give out http://Bob27484947.aol.
Just a thought ... dunno if its feasible or not.
New domains are fine but...... (Score:3)
A prime example: a kid in grade school wants to look up the whitehouse for a school project. There's all ready too many domain names, he doesn't know..... he types in http://www.whitehouse.com [whitehouse.com] and WHOA... What do we have here? Little did he/she know that you were supposed to type in http://www.whitehouse.gov [whitehouse.gov]. To me, I think that this is wrong. Domains should remain easy and simple to remember.
If they plan on having 118 new domains, then someone out there better find a better way to search then yahoo and google... The web is getting to big to cataloge.
By creating a better searching method, new domains are possible. Until then, keep
And then police them. Just because McDonalds is a business and has the rights to a
My $.02
DNS is toss anyhow!! (Score:2)
Maybe a new protocol is needed. This proposed new protocol (Based arround P2P networking probably) will allow searches on not only IP address or Name, but other attributes -the type of server (Web, Email, Telnet, Etc) , locality (UK,US,Etc), Interest (&0001=Computing,&0002=TV,&0004=Porn, etc), and return not just an IP address(as DNS does), but if requested to, the Email address of the host owner, a brief description of what the host does, etc etc..
Also, you shouldn't have to pay loadsass for the privilige, or having to contact some party to update their servers. Just adding a name in a configuration file in your PC should be enough enable people to start doing lookup's on your server. There should be a way of getting rid of unwanted sites - Maybe using a distributed moderation, whereby somtimes, while browsing a particular host, another host which was queried during lookup might at random send a request to you to give the site a rateing. - Hosts with a rating less than a certain value would be purged from the framework,
And maybe, it would be possible to have a demon running in the background that will function as a fake DNS server, and reroute DNS lookup requests through this new framework.
Sounds quite expensive art (Score:2)
Not a bad rate of pay eh?
So ICANN killed the business by refusing to give the guy 115 root level domains. And so in time honored US fashion he goes crying his eyes out to a senator or two to ask for a handout.
The quote from Ambler is somewhat amusing, he is the guy who has been trying to sell .web names for a few years now.
The Internet's is the first revolution whose pioneers believed they could create a better world while making themselves rich.
Absolutely nobody got into the Internet in the early years thinking they would get rich. Even MarcA didn't work out that he could make a lot of money claiming credit for other's work until 1995 or so. And to be brutally honest most dotcom millionaires got rich persuading the great american public to invest their retirement savings in companies that will never show a profit rather than building companies that were intended to last. And the folk doing that tended to be opportunists rather than 'Internet Pioneers'.
The only value to a domain name is if anyone anywhere can use it to send you an email. Vanity domain names are just that if you can't use them reliably. If you have the email address master@timelord.galifrey, that is real cool but if only 1% of the world recognise it, much less usefull than 48129@ieorhw.net.
There is a commercial advantage to having a generic business name, however if only 10% of the buying public can see a particular name the interest in marketing it is likely to be small. Why spend $2 million on a superbowl advert for a domain name that only 10% of the population can go to? Why deal with lost business because people can't find the site?
The domain name system is only fought over because it is massively usefull, it only has that utility because it is a single coherent system. Balkanize the root and you remove the incentive for people to bid up the prices of domain names.
Re:Fascism != Communism (Score:2)
Right, Ambler is just calling names. In fact Ambler tried to do exactly the same sort of thing with no success so far so I guess he is a communist too by his logic.
You will find that Communism is NOT about oppression and control - but freedom from the Ruling Class and true democratic principles.
Those 'true democratic principles' not including elections which are merely 'borgeois devices' according to Lenin. One can argue that Lenin, Trotsky, Stalin, Mao et. al. all failled to implement 'real communism'. However the dictatorial line is pretty clear in Karl Marx. If you want to throw out Marx you haven't got a communist movement.
Complaining about the association between Communism and Stalin's police state is a bit like trying to separate Facism and Hitler. OK so Mussolini invented Facism and not Hitler and Mussolini's political murders were in the low tens of thousands rather than the millions. The Italian Facist party tries to do this today but it is still a murderous creed.
Given the times of 1848 when the Communist manifesto was written Marx and Engels were relatively liberal for the time, most continental European countries were authoritarian dictatorships, Britain was at best a qualified democracy - only those with wealth got the vote. The US was not a major power and was largely identified with slave plantations rather than the rights of man. The idea that a doctrine of resistance to the miserable political and ecconomic conditions of that time is the all encompassing solution to the problems of our own is somewhat wierd.
European socialism on the other hand is completely different. At present all but one of the European democracies has a left wing government that started as a socialist movement. Socialists have long known the dangers of communists - Lenin gained power in Russia by overturning a democratic socialist regime and having most of the delegates shot. Communism is to socialism what Facism is to conservatism. The European socialist movement is essentially what the US calls Liberals and was the political movement that gained universal sufferage, female suffrage, free trades unions, the welfare state etc.
The 'Capitalism' that Marx talks about is a concentration of capital in the hands of the very few. The 'Capitalism' we have today is much more broadly distributed. Capital is no longer the means of control it was in 1850. Marx might not approve but he certainly would not make the same argument against it.
snake oil story (Score:5)
So are we to leave one for profit company, and jump to another? I could see if this was a non profit complaining and campaigning, but you have a domain registrar bringing this up, which begs questioning about the true intentions. So this company would stand to profit from a break up, which doesn't impress me, so his gripes are bascially he can't make any money with Verisign in the picture, hardly worth My Rights Online.
Why should an aspiring artist have to scrap to be www.sculptor.com when she could just as easily be www.erotic.sculptor or www.heavenly.form?
I noticed how this turd is obfuscating politicians knowledge about technology with some of his gripes such as the above. For one its not up to any "root" servers to determine these naming convetions its up to ICANN, so why doesn't he gripe to them. The article to me is sort of a bit of snake oil written to beg for sympathy, by an author trying to get a nice sized bite of what he calls the enemy (Verisign).
Should Verisign be the sole holder of root name servers, probably not, but at least aside from occassional issues of domain squatting, the net isn't out of control with fights from domain registrars attempting to introduce tons of new names daily, simply because they're registrars. Here's a solution, create a body to handle it, but make those in charge professors at the most prestigous universities around. This way there can be no commercial control of the domain naming system, nor root servers. Maybe things will be handled ethically instead of morons bringing out suit after suit claiming infringements, unfair play, etc.,.
Ghost in the Shell [antioffline.com]
Re:Time for an overhaul (Score:2)
The only reason the allocation of IP addresses doesn't really matter is that nobody care if their IP address is easy to remember. Well, almost noone.
Re:Alphabetical name servers (Score:2)
Doubting Name.Space's intentions (Score:5)
"We're reterritorializing the Net," Garrin boasted, "bringing it back to its original ideal of virtual space without borders or hierarchies."
When in reality Name.Space has by far the most to gain in this movement. What they've been doing for years is selling alternative tld's, with the idea that they would have to be grandfather'd in once the world was ready to use nearly unlimited tld's. All Name.Space is selling to it's customers is a risky bet that Name.Space will get the domains because ICANN feels that there is enough adoption that the conflicts will cause real problems. From the looks of things, ICANN doesn't buy it.
In my book, Paul Garrin is essentially participating in massive domain speculation, with the idea that he can hold ICANN and the roots hostage on the day they decide to open them up to the public. How is this different than domain name squatting?
Someone should tell him that the boom is over and everyone is moving on to new get rich quick schemes.
Re:Doubting Name.Space's intentions (Score:2)