I've never been a fan of ICANN. They're a ludicrously costly organsisation whose "authority" stems from administrative stewardship for some of the internet's universal namespaces. As I used to point out: ICANN costs millions to run every year and their job is to make very occasional changes to small text files - a job I'd happily do for a fraction of the cost.
As someone with some background in net-ops I've always understood that the most elegant bootstrap for a distributed, de-centralized, system is a conservative and tightly controlled hierarchical namespace with a minimally small root. Authority for the DNS namespace isn't granted by governments (with the exception of the US Dept of Commerce) or international treaty. There's no real "root" to the authority ICANN that claims, it's “a consensual hallucination experienced daily by billions” (to use a phrase that others have borrowed from William Gibson).
The authority for management of the DNS namespace is granted by whoever runs the root servers. The root servers are determined by whatever resolvers think they are. The resolvers are usually informed by "root.hints" (a file distributed with Bind) that bootstraps the chain of authority when a nameserver is started.
Who's the kingmaker here? It's just as much the ISC (makers of Bind), as it is the ops staff configuring the nameservers, as it is the company determining their policy of which root to use, as it is the customer complaining he can't send email.
The prevailing attitude is, for the sake of operational sanity, keep using the ICANN root.
Limited experiments in increasing the number of gTLDs (generic top-level domains, as opposed to country-based domains) have been shown to benefit two groups - name registrars and international trademark lawyers - an insignificant number of people as a percentage of Internet users, but whose interests are hugely over-represented at ICANN. I'd argue that, at best, new gTLDs such as .biz have provided no benefit to the public - and are dominated by registrations by either spammers and scammers (hopping from one blacklisted domain to the next) to purely trademark protection registrations. And each new gTLD pulls us further from de-centralization, which (in theory) impacts internet stability.
The theory of "bigger root = less stability" is one I personally subscribe to. Others point to the successful management of ".com", a huge flat namespace, as proof that DNS is robust enough to have a root namespace of millions. They may well be right, but increasing the root of an authoritative namespace like DNS isn't something we can retract. If they're wrong, we're screwed - simple technical clarity that only years of being a grumpy sysadmin can provide.
I've been online on two occasions when the .com servers have failed. My observations at the time were that this did have some knock-on effect to .uk domains - but largely .uk stuff was working fine. Smart hostmasters have authoritative nameservers under at least two different TLDs precisely for this reason. Localization of failure is the benefit of distribution and de-centralization.
With the recent decision by ICANN to flatten the namespace they've shown themselves (in my eyes) to be unsuitable stewards of the root. In my mind (and perhaps others) they're shifting from "de facto root" to merely the "dominant alt-root" - no more legitimate than any other. It's clear that if any authority is going to be claimed, it's going to come from somewhere like the ITU or UN. International bodies like this are, by their nature, slow moving and conservative - exactly what namespace management needs.
And for alt-roots - now is your time. Set up new alt-root servers, grandfather the ICANN root as of this date, then charge hefty administrative fees to include any of the new ICANN-approved domains (registrants can clearly afford it). If you're a large ISP already running a good few resolvers this is a potential new revenue stream - it's practically free money.
In fact I've always suspected it was the secret business plan for OpenDNS.
]]>"The phone companies are effectively saying: 'No, that's commercially sensitive and extraordinarily valuable data, and we're not giving it away on principle, so we'll just make up a justification.' What you got back was a pretty thin excuse, but given the history of these things, it doesn't surprise me."
"I've just been reading an advanced copy of the government's Byron Review on videogame ratings."
I saw No Country for Old Men last night. It's a good movie, certainly, but since it followed many of the rules of a typical genre action/chase/thriller. In that context, which you'll understand if you've seen it, it's ultimately unsatisfying.
One of the classic action genre moments is where character of Anton Chigurh performs self surgery using supplies he recently stole from a pharmacy. I love these scenes. I'm normally so squeamish about blood, all aspects of our organic machinery, but I'm fascinated watching someone who can suture their own wounds as if they were wiring a plug. Like the wetware equivalent of recompiling a kernel.
It's Hollywood shorthand for badass. Assassin, outlaw, good guy who for some reason is on the run from the authorities. It says "I don't need anyone's help". Full respect for the expression of self-sufficiency, yet uneasy distrust at someone who consciously prepares themselves to survive outside of society's protections.
It seems clichéd, yet when I check the imdb for movies with the keyword 'self-surgery' I only get five results, none of them the aforementioned. Fail. Come on internets, there has to be more than that. A Bourne at least?
]]>It's a new year, I've got a new empty inbox, and I'm turning up the sensitivity dial on the spam filter.
Email, for me, falls into three broad categories - lists I've subscribed to, mail from people I know, mail from strangers.
Lists can be identified by checking the "List-Id" header. "People I know" is determined by checking the mail against the contents of my addressbook. Whitelisting. (Which is fine - until someone uses a new email address, then they drift back into the stranger category.)
"Strangers" consists of 99.5% spammers, and that's where the filtering effort is spent - extracting the 0.5% of wheat from the chaff. Spam filters aren't perfect, but you either end up trusting your settings or commit yourself to visually scanning through low-scoring spam. Not as bad as drinking from the full fire-hose, but still a stupid email admin task I end up putting off. For days. For weeks. Sorry about the delay.
One solution to this is to implement challenge-response systems, or to require some sort of password be included in the mail. Personally I never jump through the challenge-response hoops. I've decided to implement something similar to the password.
If you want to bypass my spam filter, include a vCard attachment containing (at least) your first name, last name, and email address.
I've set up a filter that checks for mails containing MIME attachments of the type "text/directory" (or "text/x-vcard") and copies them into a directory where they can be easily checked and whitelisted with a single click. Anyone I've mailed in the last couple of years is already in the whitelist.
Of course this only speeds up my reading of mail - speeding up my replies is a different problem...
On my way to work today I was thinking about "Foutaises", a seven minute Jean-Pierre Jeunet film which illustrates a character's various likes and dislikes. Thoughts, experiences, a sort of observational nostalgia. Similar to the observations of the angels in "Wings of Desire" who, since they cannot experience them themselves, find insignificance and poetry in things that would go otherwise unkremarked. If "Foutaises" seems familiar, it's probably because the same approach was used again a decade later for the character introductions in "Amélie".
I'm starting to think of my own whimsical list. The first entry might be "I like inserting and removing Nintendo cartridges". U.S./Euro-size gamepaks on the N.E.S. to be specific.
Back in the early 80s the first "video games crash" had meant U.S. retailers were reticent towards stocking new video game consoles, so Nintendo redesigned their console to look like something different. Grey, boxy, and a bit of a non-nonsense industrial feel. At the time most homes didn't have computers in them, and (to 1985) this plausibly was what they'd be looking like.
Instead of the top loading approach of almost every cartridge console ever it had a unique front loading system. You'd open the flap, slide the cartridge down a slightly angled tray into a metal cradle and then push down the cartridge down against a spring until it the cradle locked into place. Press down on the cartridge for it to spring out of the lock, pull back to remove.
Outside of the intentionally entertaining, it was one of the most satisfying physical interaction experiences I can remember (although it's a memory approaching two decades old now - I've been playing Super Mario Galaxy and am feeling a little nostalgic). It wasn't perfect, the connections became more prone to mis-aligned pin connections and occasional complications from dust which also led to the kid-logic "remove the cartridge and blow on the pins" fix-all solution. But with time this is forgiven.
As Alan Partridge would put it, "Nice action".
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