Why Any Competing Whois Registry Model Is Doomed 63
CowboyRobot writes "In Paul Vixie's latest essay, he argues that the alternative to the Whois registry model is flawed and that we should be learning from the mistakes of the history of proposed alternatives to the DNS. 'Any proposal for a competing Whois registry model is as doomed by design and destiny as every alternative DNS system. Even if it succeeds at first, it would fail after copycatting occurred.'"
Vixie is wrong. (Score:2, Insightful)
Paul and I have been disagreeing about this sort of thing for decades now.
OK, Vix: incorporate copycatting into the technical and economic model, then, instead of insisting that the current model is the only possible one. Solve a problem instead of institutionalizing it!
Think of where we'd be if we had insisted that DNS could never work, that we'd have to always use host tables, that the download capacity of the rs.internic.net system and the maximum file size of its filesystem was the limiting factor of the size of the internet.
Free your mind! We can distribute name services in more than one way - government & corporate bottlenecks and interceptions are not a 'feature', they are a bug.
Re:Vixie is wrong. (Score:0, Insightful)
Who the fuck is Paul Vixie.
Who the fuck are you.
Re:I dont follow (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:I dont follow (Score:4, Insightful)
Hell, IPv6 has been a standard for 15 years, and hardly anyone uses it.
But we can't deploy standards, only implementations.
Windows 7, OSX Lion, and Fedora 16 [fedoraproject.org] will all handle IPv6 properly. Previous versions all have certain problems that need workarounds, and it's probably not worthwhile for most users if there are corner cases to worry about. And if you're not on an expensive commercial Internet pipe, you can't even get IPv6, except in limited trial locations for the big ISP's.
When Windows 7 is where Windows XP is now, people will move over. But, hey, we've reached a real milestone where now it's all possible, so, yay 2011.
Article is about IP Address sales, not DNS/WHOIS (Score:4, Insightful)
I don't think many people are getting the point of this article, although I admit it is a bit confusing. While it is true that the article talks about alternative DNS systems and WHOIS; what Paul really seems concerned about is the part of the WHOIS system used to look up who is currently allowed to use a given IP address range, and is responsible for activity originating from it.
The current authorities which run this part of the WHOIS system have rules and restrictions about how and why IP address blocks on the Internet can be assigned from one party to another. Among the things cited by the article which currently are not permitted are obtaining IP address for perceived future needs when you have not already exhausted what you have, or simply buying IP addresses for no use at all speculating they can be sold for more money later.
Some parties do not like these rules, and want to establish their own system for buying and selling IP addresses which is not subject to the rules currently in place. They could kind-of do this right now, but the transfer of ownership would not be recorded in the old system.
This is potentially a bad thing, as suppose someone attacks you from IP address 1.2.3.4. And for some reason, reverse DNS on that IP address fails to work. If there is more than one system tracking ownership of who currently has the right to use this IP address, how do you find the right administrator to contact? And what if someone updated their contact information or the fact the IP block had been sold in one system, but forgot to do so in another?