Acidus wrote:
A co-worker got a call from these guys today. Who did you contact in 1988 to even register? The US Commerce department?

Thats an interesting question. I didn't get to a point where I had a need for a domain name until after Network Solutions started in the early 90's (from an NSF grant, the domains where free until 1995).

I did some digging and found some interesting data but there seems to be little information from that time period. It might have been the University of Southern California.

These guys are in VA and seem to scream Feds...

Well, it was called DARPANET.

RE: WHOIS: Holy Crap!

The U.S. is making apocalyptic predictions of what the U.N. would do if given control. Those predictions are probably optimistic; U.N. control would be a disaster. But there is a third way, as Mr. Gore might say. That alternative doesn't serve the interests of either the U.S. government, which enjoys the control it currently exercises, or its critics, who would much prefer to do their censoring under a multilateral umbrella. But if the U.S. continues its Internet brinkmanship, the third way will become not only likely, but inevitable.

That alternative is a fragmented Internet, without a single "root file" that describes the locations of everything on the Net. The U.S. government has led many to believe that this is equivalent to dismantling the Internet itself. But it is bluffing.

Would it be better if countries that want to muck around with the Net just didn't? Sure. But they do want to, and they will, and it would be far better, in the long run, if they did so on their own, without a U.N. agency to corrupt or give them shelter. It's time to drop the apocalyptic rhetoric about a split root file and start looking beyond the age of a U.S.-dominated Internet. Breaking up is hard to do, but in this case, the alternative would be worse.

WSJ.com - Breaking Up Is Hard to Do

From the beginning, people have talked about building an Internet that wouldn’t depend upon the TLD hierarchy. It doesn’t mean there would be two or three Internets, but that you would have a domain name system that wouldn’t depend upon hierarchical naming. As long as there’s coordination across hierarchies about ownership of domain names, you wouldn’t necessarily produce any destructive results.

Lessig on UN on ICANN: Fragment it!

I actually don't think this sort of technical design is as simple as Lessig thinks. This would involve rewriting DNS and it would result in far slower queries. Furthermore, it wouldn't really eliminate the need for central authorities, as there would need to be some system that determines who gets to be a root and what rules they need to follow in order to claim domains. They aren't going to let just anyone do that. So we're back to where we started, with a bunch of technical bloat to add to our policy bloat.

However, much of what Lessig says about ICANN is down to earth.

Foreign Policy: Seven Questions: Battling for Control of the Internet

So let's set aside fears of U.N. "designs" on the Internet. Much as some would like to open up another front of attack on the United Nations, this dog of an argument won't bark.

This editorial by Kofi Annan is notable if meandering. I think he is making assurances that don't jive with whats going on.

The U.N. Isn't a Threat to the Net

To be sure, the Internet's openness begets big headaches:
it is difficult to track spammers, and the system is tremendously vulnerable to hacking.
But the open network is like the open society -- crime thrives, but so does creativity.
We take for granted that the Internet we enjoy today will continue to have these
characteristics, but this is hardly certain. It all depends on who controls the
domain name system and what priorities they choose to set....

I'm trying to reconcile this source with how wildly inaccurate some of this peice is. No DNS policy is going to fix computer security problems. DNS policies can only control what law abiding people do.

Foreign Affairs - Who Will Control the Internet? - Kenneth Neil Cukier

TinyDisk is a program from saving and retrieving files from TinyURL and TinyURL-like services such as Nanourl. It overlays a write-once-read-many anonymous, persistent and globally shared filesystem. Once something is uploaded, only the database admin can delete it. Everyone can read it. No one can know who created it. Think of it as a magical CD-R that gets burned and placed on a network.

This is a file system I demoed at Phreaknic that runs on top of the link shortening service TinyURL. Its the perfect case study of how to write meaningful extensions on top of existing web applications, which was the topic of my presentation.

I've already uploaded some fun stuff into TinyURL, like The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, and even TinyDisk itself. Thats right, the program to read and write to TinyURL is stored inside TinyURL! It was also very cool to see other people starting to use it.

TinyDisk is a good hack.

TinyDisk - An anonymous shared file system on top of TinyURL.

If a tug of war develops, whoever holds the keys wins, since without the keys, you can’t publish a new version of the root with changed or added records unless you publish your own competing set of keys and can persuade people to use them. (Take that, ORSC.)

DNSSec may break the present attempt to demonstrate to Iran that US control of ICANN is not a threat to their national security. Do we really need the root signed? Apparently this is done to prohibit cache poisoning, but it has the additional advantage of solidifying ICANN's control of internet addressing. If you can't install an alternate key in your computer DNS may only work with officially recognized providers. This would be bad.

ICANN Gets the Root Zone, Too

VeriSign has dropped all its lawsuits against internet overseeing organisation ICANN, agreed to hand over ownership of the root zone, and in return been awarded control of all dotcoms until 2012.

This is almost as obtuse as the strategic situation in Iraq.

Sitefinder dead

Acidus wrote:

Wikipedia founder admits to serious quality problems

Tom will be talking about some enhancements he is working on for Wikipedia at Phreaknic. Looks like this issue is only growing.

Ironically, the original poster suffers from having looked at a particular article at a particularly bad timeslice and gotten an ugly result. The present text of the Bill Gates article is greatly improved. Interestingly, this is exactly the sort of problem that my wikipedia talk looks toward addressing.

Furthermore, its important to understand what wikipedia is and what it is not. Wikipedia is not a replacement for a traditional encyclopedia. This does not mean it isn't useful. A famous engineer's cynicism is: Cost, Speed, or Quality, pick one. An Encyclopedia is a model that picks Quality. Encyclopedias are slow and expensive, but the results are good. Wikipedias are fast and cheap, and the results are not as good.

If you want to teach 11 year olds about the history of Greece, you don't want wikipedia. They may get bad information, they can't easily reference a particular revision (most people don't understand how to do that with wikipedia), and they are going to be exposed to poor grammar and poor structure at a time when you are trying to teach them how to communicate effectively.

If you want to learn about a terrorist incident that occured two months ago, an encyclopedia is of no use. You could turn to the press, but old press articles are hard to find, and Wikipedia is often a vastly more useful resource, because it presents information in a matter of fact way and often draws from a wider array of resources (including press reports which form a primary source material).

Wikipedia fills the gap between the bleeding edge of the headlines and the cast in stone of dusty reference materials in a way that no other resource can. The sooner people realise that every tool doesn't have to solve every problem the better they'll be at figuring out how to make their tools really succeed at the particular things they are well suited for.

RE: Wikipedia founder admits to serious quality problems | The Register

Mologogo is a free GPS friend-tracking service that works on Nextel phones with Java and GPS, including a $60 Boost Mobile pre-paid handset.

Boing Boing: Cheap GPS friend-finding