CaveBear Blog

The .travel lobby lumbers on

A week ago I wrote about the intense lobbying by advocates of .travel.

That lobbying has continued.

Every e-mail letter follows the same pattern, making the same assertions. It appears that a standard outline was created with each writter simply putting his or her own words into the pre-agreed upon structure.

Other similarities are that each letter is sent by a clerical person on behalf of a principal and each e-mail is packed with large attachments. One of these e-mails contained over 12 megabytes of attachments.

This kind of mindless lobbying, based on really nothing more than an assertion of self-importance, and packaged in obese e-mails that display not merely a lack of technical understanding but also a disdain for the resources of others on the net, does not sway me in favor of .travel. Indeed, I am swayed to the contrary.

Locus ab auctoritate est infirmissimus  ("The argument from authority is the weakest.") - Thomas Aquinas

Perhaps you noticed the quote in the header in my blog - Locus ab auctoritate est infirmissimus  ("The argument from authority is the weakest.") by Thomas Aquinas.

There is a bit of fun and irony, not to mention more than a bit of circular logic, to use the authority of a Saint of the Catholic Church to confront a claim that one should concede a point on nothing more than a bald assertion of authority.

It seems to me that we in the United States have fallen under the spell of asserted authority.

Why, for example, should we believe that ICANN has any power over the internet whatsoever?  Where did ICANN get its power?  From the US Department of Commerce?  Where did they get that power?  Because they say they have it?  Where's the proof?

Nearly three years ago Professor A. Michael Froomkin asked for proof.  His questions have never been answered.  Is it perhaps because there is no proof?

We deserve more from ICANN and the US Department of Commerce than hand waving and statements that amount to nothing more than paper-thin assertions that contend that ICANN has its powers simply because ICANN and the US Dep't of Commerce say so.

If we accept that then we are simply accepting the argument from authority.

On the departure of Louis Touton from ICANN

This is a follow-up to my comments in ICANNwatch regarding the departure of Louis Touton from ICANN.

As I wrote there, I have come to have a great deal of respect for Louis.

Many have complained that Louis created too much internet policy.  It is indeed true that much of what we see as the concrete result of ICANN has come from Louis' pen.  However, Louis stepped into a policy vacuum ... and he filled it.

If there is fault in this, it is the fault of the ICANN Board of Directors and of ICANN's past presidents who have failed to direct and channel the creative energy of Louis Touton.  This kind of institutional structural failure is likely to continue beyond Louis' departure; it is a structural failure that is likely to continue crippling ICANN.

The .travel lobby is out in force

I have received several letters from people in the travel industry indicating their support for .travel

On the great scale of things that benefit the public, I would rank the travel industry rather far below farmers, public safety workers, teachers, performing artists, and health care professionals. It seems to me that if we are going to allocate only a very few specialized new Top Level Domains then those groups have a rather stronger claim than does the travel industry.

In addition, has everyone forgotten that an arm of the travel industry already won one of the precious few new TLDs that ICANN has allocated - .aero? And can anyone articulate any specific facts about that TLD that have resulted in a cognizable benefit to the community of internet users?

I personally feel that ICANN ought to quickly and totally repudiate the Lynn doctrine and adopt something along the lines of Professor Mueller's proposal (about 40 new TLDs a year to be allocated through a modified auction process.) See http://dcc.syr.edu/miscarticles/NewTLDs-MM-LM.pdf

Under such a plan the .travel people may indeed get what they wish for. And so might the 40 others who paid a combined $2,000,000 to ICANN 30 months ago and who got ... what's the name of that fish?, ah I remember ... scrod.

How I came to enjoy opera

This note has nothing to do with ICANN, internet governance, technology, or railroads.  So if that's what you want you'll need to wait for the next turn of the wheel.  And if you are offended by comments that are perhaps less than politically correct you ought to tune out now.

This afternoon I had reason to drive over the Santa Cruz mountains - it was a most pleasant day, so I cranked down the windows and the roof and decided that it was time for some tunes.  I chanced across a CD (actually three CD's) of Norma by Bellini.  I was reminded of how I came to enjoy opera.  Here's the story; fade to a flashback...

About a decade ago I was of the firm conviction that opera was merely the vocal calisthenics of a bunch of big boned men and women.

I love doing backstage work.  And when the opportunity presented itself to work on a production of an opera, I thought "I'll give it a try, it's only a couple of weeks."

There are lots and lots of jobs to do on a show - I generally run the light board.  But on this show I lost the coin toss and ended up with the lowest job on the theatre totem pole - follow spot #2.  That means that I had the job of sitting up in the beams, above the audience, in sweltering heat, and in 75 years of accumulated dust and debris.  My job required me to point an uncomfortably hot 750 watt spotlight at roughly a 45 degree angle down onto my assigned singer.

The first night of dress rehearsals came along.  To my enjoyment I discovered something - opera divas are not "fat ladies".  No indeed.  Instead, I found that they are endowed with vast tracts of land.

OK, I admit that underneath my smooth veneer of sophistication that I've got a few latent socially recessive genes.

As it happened, our production had two Normas and two Adalgisas.  This meant that the costumers were always behind in their adjustments.  As a consequence the costumes had a tendency to suddenly concede to gravitational forces and to reveal the full extent of the landed estates of the occupants.  I cheered for gravity.

Over the years I have learned that most women would consider me most rude if I were to stare at their cleavage.  But during rehearsals and performances of the opera my job was to sit in the beams in the theatre attic and to constantly have my eye on the singers.  It didn't take long to I realize that my job was not merely stare at some very nice cleavage (and often more) but also to illuminate it with 750 watt spotlight.  And for this I was getting paid!!

This was a most  auspicious start; opera began to seem interesting.

My eyes were happy, but what about my ears and brain?

Most theatre goers do not know about headset chatter.  Fortunately, most actors don't know about it either.

During a performance a good portion of the crew wear headsets so that they can interact with the stage manager.  For shows like Sondheim musicals everybody is far too busy to do anything but deal with the hundreds of light, sound, and scene shift cues.  But for operas there is usually a lot of of spare time.  So the crew starts to play around.  (If you have not seen Sing Faster, you must do so.)  Generally on headset we talk about the show - not always in flattering ways.  Once during a production of The Secret Garden our stage manager invented a rap version of one of the childrens' songs, the actors, who could see us in the booth laughing our heads off, never found out what was so funny.  Nothing is sacred - we talk about the audience, we talk about the actors, we talk about each other.  And sometimes we can get downright lewd (such as when during a production of Le Bete a particularly pheromone laden assistant stage manager [female] and a particularly virile sound reinforcement op [male] decided to see how far past the hormonal red line they could push a very unwillingly virginal 18 year old guy we had on the sound board.)

Headset chatter is often more entertaining than the show.  And it can be educational.

Norma is a very well known opera and I know next to nothing about music and speak no Italian.  Our stage manager, as is necessary for opera, was well versed in music.  And we had the musical director of the company online as well.  So, apart from the jokes and my running commentary on the view from the beams, we were able to ask questions about what the music was doing or what was being said on stage (in Italian.)  It was like a couple of years of music courses squished into a couple of weeks.

We performed Norma umpteen times that month.  However, I never really saw it - because of my location I never was able to see very far upstage.  But I did hear it, over and over and over again.  At first I kind of was numb to the music.  But with repetition - and particularly because of the headset chatter, it finally began to sink in.  By the end of the first week, I was really rockin' out up there in the beams - I particularly fancied the duets between Normal and Adalgisa in the second act, the call of the druids to battle, and the final funeral pyre melody.

So what's my point?  I could say that even a philistine like me can gain a bit of culture if there's enough sex appeal.  But I won't.  Instead I'll point out that a lot of people wonder why we ought to have public support for the performing arts.  To me the answer is clear - our ability to think clearly about the future comes from our experience with the past.  Plays, including musical plays and opera, are a kind of emotional history - they reflect our past ways of feeling as much as formal histories reflect our past ways of thinking.  Opera is hard for most of us today.  But opera is hardly a dead art - John Adams has done contemporary works such as Nixon in China and The Death of Klinghoffer.

So my point is this: public and private support of the arts benefits us all, often in unexpected ways.

(P.S. my wife and I both contribute our time and our money to a number of performing arts organizations.)

In response to the May 1 letter to ICANN (or rather to ICANN's general counsel) from the Intellectual Property Interests Constituency

On May 1 ICANN's Intellectual Property Interests Constituency sent a letter to ICANN's general counsel.

The letter is essentially a request, or rather a demand, for ICANN to further lubricate the gross invasion of personal privacy that is euphemistically called the "whois database".

The letter claims that such measures benefit "everyday users" by enhancing "the operational stability, reliability, and security of the Internet" through the "prosecution of cybersquatters and copyright pirates".

Perhaps "everyday" internet users are benefited by the protection of trademarks and copyrights.  Then again, "everyday" internet users are also benefited numerous other kinds of protections.

It strikes me that if there is merit in having ICANN enunciate rules to protect everyday internet users from trademark and copyright abuse, then there is as at least as much merit in having ICANN enunciate rules to suppress dangerous products, promote high efficiency/low pollution vehicles, and encourage corporations to live up to their public obligations.

In other words, if ICANN has the responsibility to deny domain names to those who abuse trademarks, then ICANN has at least as much responsibility to deny domain names to those who engage in the selling of high fat foods, who sell SUVs, or who behave like Enron.

I suspect that most of you would agree with me that such actions are beyond ICANN's scope.  And I would hope that anyone who takes a moment to think would agree with me that the intellectual property community is asking, or rather demanding, that ICANN engage in actions that are equally beyond ICANN's scope.

There is absolutely nothing about intellectual property that makes intellectual property more important to internet users than the suppression of dangerous products, the promotion of high efficiency/low pollution vehicles, or full corporate responsibility.  Then why do the intellectual property people think they are on such a high horse?

The answer is simple: hubris and money.  The intellectual property industry has found ICANN to be a pliant and inexpensive tool.  Do the authors of the letter really care about the "everyday users" of the internet?  Do they even really care about the rights of those who create trademarks and copyrighted works?  Or are they more concerned with the profits of the intellectual property legal industry?

As far as I am concerned, ICANN is present solely and exclusively to handle matters of technical stability of the internet.

No one in the intellectual property industry has ever even tried to make a showing, much less made a convincing showing, that the protection of intellectual property rights has even a scintilla of relationship to the technical stability of the internet.

Until the intellectual property industry makes such a showing, I believe that ICANN should drop the UDRP and should close the whois database to intellectual property sharks.

A small review - Networld+Interop 2003

This is a small review of the Networld+Interop show held in Las Vegas April 29 through May 1, 2003.

I've been attending Interop events ever since it was the TCP/IP Interoperability Conference in 1987.  I've helped design and construct most of the networks used in those shows over the years.  Over the last few years I've moved to the iLabs, where we continue the tradition of assembling and operating impossibly complicated multi-vendor networks using the latest (and sometimes yet unreleased) technologies.

Here's a photo of one of our many equipment racks in the iLabs.  If you look closely you'll see just about every vendor of heavy duty gear.  (Photo: 186k bytes)
And yes, those are OC192 and 10Gig interfaces.  In case you are wondering, the key locks are there to keep people from accidentally frying their eyeballs.  (Photo: 163k bytes)
My main work at the show was part of the IP Storage Initiative.  Our nascent iSCSI FAQ may be found at http://www.iwl.com/iscsi/faq.htm.  We assembled a fairly broad spectrum of iSCSI, fiberchannel, and fiberchannel-over-IP products and implementations (some of which are open source or copylefted) - nearly all of which interoperated.  (As usual some folks had to spend a couple of days working on their code on the show floor to accomplish this.)  In addition to our pile of heavy-duty gear we had the world's first USB RAID 5!  We exported three USB flash memory drives on a Linux box as a JBOD of iSCSI drives.  We then went over a 54megabit wireless link to a Windows 2K box that mapped these drives into a RAID 5.  And yes, it worked, even when I used my Maxwell product to introduce some fairly significant levels of traffic impairments.  (Photo: 30k bytes)

IP Multicast - This was the first show in a decade in which we did not have full IP multicast connectivity to the outside.  It's sad to see such a useful technology fall by the wayside.

IPv6 was also missing in action.  It may be dead.  The IETF has spent far too long arguing like Lilliputians over what seem to be trivial details.  It is unclear if there remains anything pushing us towards IPv6.  The once present need to reduce the pressure on the IP address space has been diminished through the use of NATs (Network Address Translators) and CIDR.  It is my prediction that the internet will devolve into a collection of independent national, academic, and corporate networks, each with its own IPv4 address space, and interconnected through a relatively few formal points of exchange that require address translation.  In addition, IPv6 brings no solution to the internet's real problem - routing.

Wireless was everywhere.  There were many wireless vendors on the floor.  And at the iLabs we had an 802.1x interoperability test.  We had a few dozen access points in a 2m by 4m area - probably cumulatively emitting enough radiation to bake a chicken.  The folks at AirMagnet found several hundred access points on the show floor.  Overall, my sense is that the wireless landscape - security, bandwidth, coverage, reliability, reparability - will all be rapidly improving over the next year or two.  Hopefully the regulatory bodies like the FCC and NTIA don't become impediments.

iSCSI - I was a skeptic when I first encountered iSCSI a couple of months ago.  However, I've used Maxwell to stress iSCSI and I've seen people using it over transoceanic links.  iSCSI is much more robust than I had originally anticipated.  However, it will stress networks and is vulnerable to predatory implementations that don't follow the rules (such as TCP congestion avoidence).  I'll be posting some materials on this and on how to tune IP networks to support iSCSI in the developing iSCSI FAQ.

Voice over IP (VOIP) - IP based telephony has become rather routine.  We used IP phones without really caring or noticing that they were IP based phones.  They mostly worked (except when I needed to generate touch-tone tones to trigger my answering machine.)  I still have not seen any products that incorporate ENUM in any meaningful way.

Security - There were lots of folks touting security this and security that.  The tide is moving in the direction of building walls rather than enabling interconnectivity.  As I mentioned in my previous blog entry, "The death of the "Global Uniform Name Space", it seems to me that people are willing to place their internet fiefdom behind strong walls, even to the degree of making it difficult or impossible for outsiders to utter even the names of objects and resources protected by those walls.

What wasn't at the show - Few of the amazing number of open source and copylefted tools were visible in the vendor booths - but they were omnipresent on most of the computers used to manage and operate the network and on the laptops of the techies.  The just released survey of network security tools shows the vibrancy of this sector of the internet.

Judging from the show attendance it's going to be a while before the networking industry recovers - potential customers were rare.  However, it is also pretty clear that innovation continues in certain limited areas such as wireless.  One wonders whether Networld+Interop will return next year.  I hope so, although I'd recommend that it remember its roots and return to San Jose, California.

No wonder Network Solutions' market share is dropping

I am amazed at how badly Network Solutions treats its customers.  It is no wonder that its market share keeps falling.

For example, yesterday I received a request from Network Solutions to confirm my contact information - otherwise they would cancel my domain name.  The trouble is they did not bother to tell me which of my many registrations they are asking about.

I've gone through several e-mail exchanges, several password resets, a phone call - mostly trying to get bits of information that NSI doesn't bother to tell.

NSI's web based system is a model of how not to do it.  For example, there is no "confirm" button on their web pages.  So what am I supposed to do if my contact information is already correct?  And when they reset a password and send you a new one they don't bother to say what accounts were reset.  Toss in some dead links, too many attempts to see me services I don't want, creation of false information about me by their database, and default answers to questions that maximize NSI profit and harm the registrant - and the total is an experience that makes me want to run from NSI as fast as I can.

And to top it all off, there is no way I can confirm that I have managed to hit the magic trigger points that let NSI believe that my contact information is accurate and that my registrations are safe.