ICANN Backflips Again 94
angry tapir writes "The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) has backflipped again on the process for evaluating applications for new generic top-level domains such as .bank and .lol. The proposal to evaluate applications in batches of 500 had been subject to criticism from registrars, particularly the 'digital archery' component, which would be used to determine which batch an application would be part of. Last month, ICANN scrapped digital archery altogether, and now ICANN has announced that it will seek simultaneous processing of all applications. The reason people were annoyed at the batching process was it meant that even if an application for a new domain was complete and correct, and even if a domain application was not contested by anyone else, it could end up going live years after other new TLDs did. Given it will cost over a couple of hundred grand to run a new TLD, people were upset. The whole gTLD process has been fraught with delays and security breaches."
Oh well, it was fun while it lasted. (Score:1, Interesting)
Goodbye internet!
It was fun while it lasted. I will happily await the arrival of your replacement, just as BBS/Gopher/eWorld/AOL had its time apparently you've had yours as well. It's truly sad to see your demise brought about by a bunch of fucking monkeys who couldn't care less about your well being, so long as they're making more money off stupid shit nobody wants or needs.
Who's up for a nice cryptographically secure distributed DNS system that runs over IPv6?
-AC
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Re:Oh well, it was fun while it lasted. (Score:5, Interesting)
DNS is not the Internet.
Unless you use this.
http://analogbit.com/tcp-over-dns_howto [analogbit.com]
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As part of the requirements for the new TLDs, DNS must support DNSSEC and IPv6 from day 1. It ups the standard of DNS quality across the entire Internet, and puts pressure on the TLDs which aren't up to date yet.
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When doing a backflip, you end up in the same place, generally in the same spot (if you have good technique). If they did this with a flip, it would have been an Arabian, not a backflip.
HAND.
ICANN Backflips (Score:3, Funny)
What do they want, a medal?
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What do they want, a medal?
Nah, it's just... being for the benefit of Mr. Kite.
Dumb idea (Score:5, Informative)
ICANN apparently can't solve one of the most basic object oriented programming problems: Namespace organization and integrity.
There's only a couple of organizational schemes that make sense; Geographical, topical, and organizational. Of those, the third was the first used: Separating domains on the basis of their function; educational, commercial, non-commercial, and governmental. Then we tried to launch geographical, which meant that agents within the system would need to register on both basis; You'd have, for example, usairforce.gov, and airforce.us. But then ICANN botched big-time; they tried to organize based on... er, nothing. Rather than a couple hundred nodes on the root, you now have effectively an infinite number of roots.
The results were predictable: Complete and total chaos as everyone tried to register every possible permutation of trademarks, organization names, governments -- and although the cost of running a gTLD was in the tens to hundreds of thousands of dollars (which, itself, seems rather retarded; Why does adding a name to a file containing a list cost a hundred grand?) -- there are literally hundreds of thousands of organizations and individuals with the desire and cash to do so.
And they all threw their money at the problem at the same time. Now they're stuck because there's hundreds of millions sunk into the program, and they can't go back on the process. It's a bureaucratic cluster-fuck beyond even what our most inept governmental organizations can do.
At this point, the entire DNS system should be scrapped and start over from scratch. But that won't happen for years and years. Eventually though, it'll have to happen... when it does, I hope they pick one organizational scheme and stick to it.
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At this point, the entire DNS system should be scrapped and start over from scratch. But that won't happen for years and years. Eventually though, it'll have to happen... when it does, I hope they pick one organizational scheme and stick to it.
Maybe something that roots in .bit or .p2p?
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Thanks for bringing those up, I had forgotten about them. I would have modded you up, but .bit and .p2p don't really solve the namespace problem, they just allow a different organisation (or none) to control DNS. Anyway, really cool. Here's a link to .bit, http://dot-bit.org/Main_Page [dot-bit.org] . The .p2p site seems to be down.
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But that won't happen for years and years
You accidentally misspelled "that won't happen EVER".
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Because, else, you would have bots registering domains for squatting, at the cheapest price offered. Since it is a race to the bottom without some sort of oversight, this is the way that keeps you from having to register myawesomecompany93282.com
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Exactly. .com domainname without hitting on one of those placeholder ad-ridden pages that offer the domain for sale?
So now only the registrars itself are able to effectively register for free, due to gaps in the regulation.
Ever noticed that it's practically impossible to enter a 3-4 character
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We're talking about gTLDs, so wouldn't it be com.myawesomecompany93282?
(On a related note: What is the point, anyway, of registering a gTLD unless you're going to run an absolutely massive number of domains inside it? I can sort of see this happening for MS, Apple and Google; maybe Facebook. Nobody else, really.)
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ICANN apparently can't solve one of the most basic object oriented programming problems: Namespace organization and integrity.
However, they have solved wonderfully well one of the most basic business problems: making a profit.
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There's only one root. A lot of domains under that root.
However, they should just have made this open and cheap from the get go. Trademarks and other such things could have been limited to the ccTLDs only.
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Great. Things "worth a lot of money" that one entity practically can create from thin air.
I wonder that that will do to currency stability.
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.assclown (Score:4, Funny)
I only hope that ICANN was able to register .assclown for themselves. Anyone else getting it would be unfair.
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I only hope that ICANN was able to register .assclown for themselves. Anyone else getting it would be unfair.
Not so fast. Several politicians and corporate C?O's have a vested interest in that TLD.
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It's ~200k, and what would happen is that they'd deny your application for violating the rules and keep the money (yes, the money is a fee for the review, not a payment for keeping the gTLD).
This is getting stupid. (Score:4, Insightful)
We all know the new top-level domains (and some of the existing top-level domains) are basically a money grab and a way to force people to pay as many times as possible for their name.
And the registrar system, which supposedly enables competition, is also just a money grab. For each top-level domain we have one registry, which is a simple database run by one organisation, but then we have a whole lot of commercial infrastructure and multiple companies around it which serve no purpose except to skim profits off the top.
Now the problems with the new TLD registration process are starting to make ICANN and the domain industry look incompetent as well as greedy, for those of us who hadn't decided that was the case already.
So, what can we do? I know it's been suggested and unsuccessfully tried before, but is it time someone replaced ICANN?
People keep suggesting decentralised DNS, but I'm not convinced it's a workable solution. If there's no central authority controlling the DNS, there's nobody who can give your domain back when someone breaks into your system and steals it, or when you accidentally lose your crypto keys.
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That's what I'm guessing the fear is, that some grandmother will go to coke.coke and get a virus and switch to pepsi fo
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People keep suggesting decentralised DNS, but I'm not convinced it's a workable solution.
DNS isn't strictly required to access websites on the web, except for its use in the host header which helps apache pick which virtual host to serve up to you.
HOW TO MAKE ICANN IRRELEVENT:
1. Google (or Bing, or both) begins by indexing the current system (they most likely already have)
2. Google tweakes their engine so that people can go to the google homepage (http://74.125.237.129 for example - out of many, which could easily be saved as a favourite in any browser), enter their search, and google
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you just know that it is because you trust the identifyer (mybank.com)
just as if you contacted your bank (or pinged mybank.com before abandoning the DNS) you would be able to find out a trustworthy IP address
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You know you can trust mybank.com because it's a memorable name and you've used it before. And once you know mybank.com, you know that subdomains like accounts.mybank.com or invest.mybank.com or whatever also belong to your bank.
It's not so easy to remember your bank's IP address, and it's impossible to tell whether an IP address you haven't seen before belongs to them or not.
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how many people remember all their friends phone numbers? answer is they don't. they add contacts in their phones
but hey if you don't mind relying on asscann or have a better idea, be my guest. i'm certainly not holding a gun
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So when my bank moves their web servers from one data center to another for whatever reason, every single customer has to be informed to update their shortcuts.
And when someone else gets assigned the old IP addresses and also puts up a copy of the bank web site on them it's the customers fault for clicking on an old link, right?
When I change my phone service provider I move my phone number along with me, precisely so that the people I know don't have to update their address books. But you want a bank to inf
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When I change my phone service provider I move my phone number along with me
but not automatically. you have to contact your phone service provider so they can switch it over in their system (unless you're talking about a mobile)
banks contact their customers all the time for all sorts of reasons (change to policy, bank statements, offers, etc), so mass mailing every customer regarding a change of URL would not be a big deal. there is also email, sms and various other ways to contact customers to ensure they don't mistakenly use the old IP address. also, i doubt an IP address pre
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This idea has many problems:
You can't change your ISP, or renumber your network, or move your website to a different server on your network, or switch to IPv6, without making all existing links to your site invalid.
A link can only point to a specific IP, not to a website that has multiple redundant servers with different public IPs, or a website with both IPv4 and IPv6 support.
Anyone can create a site like (for example) http://203.0.113.135//westpac.com [203.0.113.135] , and no user can distinguish it from the 'real' westp
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spelling is more important than capitalization of web forums
If you're going to be writing anything more than one sentence long, capitals are very helpful to the reader. It's just a matter of convention that helps break up the text. Personally, I tend to skip over posts that don't use caps as I find them annoying to read.
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I find them annoying to read
dammit you stumbled on the real reason why i do it :)
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if you want to pay me to be professional on slashdot, i'll start capitalizing sentences
after all, its pretty hard for someone to be considered professional if they aren't paid
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If you're not going to talk the tiny effort to press the shift key, how valuable can your contribution be? I'm lazy, but gees, too lazy to press one damned key is absurd.
I have to agree with the other respondent to your comment. You're disrespectful of those reading your comments.
As to "smelling mistaks", everyone makes mistakes, but not capitalizing is a deliberate act of willful negligence and shows an awful lot of immaturity. Grow the fuck up, boy.
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how valuable can your contribution be
if you value contribution based on capitalization, then how much can i possibly give a rats about how much you value my contribution?
signed: willfully negligent disrespectful immature boy
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> dead links wouldn't be a huge problem because the only links you would need to maintain are with the major search engines anyway
Seriously? The great innovation of hypertext was that websites can link to each other, and it's used all the time. Slashdot itself is a pretty good example. Almost every site, not just search engines and Facebook, has links to other domains on it.
If you remove the ability for websites to link to one another reliably, you kill the web. I am not exaggerating.
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If you remove the ability for websites to link to one another reliably, you kill the web
based on your assumption, the web would already be dead (it would never have come "alive" in the first place), because DNS doesn't enforce the integrity or reliability of third party hyperlinks, which is why the web is already full of dead links
there are many cases where URLs are stable within the DNS, but its not really because of the DNS itself
many external links from websites need to be regularly checked and updated, so while removing DNS from the equation wouldn't make that better, it wouldn't ma
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One doesn't need to be ICANN to think your idea is stupid. One just needs to be sane.
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Not factually incorrect, just fucking stupid. Your idea takes power away from a non-profit oriented organisation and concentrates it in the hands of several profit oriented corporations. Then, for bonus points, it introduces several inherent security vulnerabilities, a gigantic namespace collision fault, and a violation of the HTML specification. It also relies on people being able to remember the IP addresses of every site they ever visit, or to rely on a profit oriented search engine to remember it for
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i could pick apart your bullshit piece by piece, but i fear i may cause you to have an aneurysm
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concentrates it in the hands of several profit oriented corporations
last time i checked profit driven competition was kind of the back bone of western economies, so privatisation of a simple internet addressing scheme won't cause total chaos and anarchy. also, google and bing are already the primary internet addressing system for most internet users anyway. to by far most users, nothing would change.
a gigantic namespace collision fault
really!? this almost made me laugh. unfortunately your bullshit was kinda overshadowed by the fact that IP addresses and virtua
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all google would be doing is constructing valid http requests based on an index of IP addresses and virtual host names
do you even know what a http request looks like? try websniffer.net
the bit about eventually changing the URL scheme was actually a proposal to eventually revise the HTML spec. it is unlikely that browser vendors (except maybe microsoft) would ever support non-standard URL schemes
and the "inherent securi
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websniffer.net
obviously i mean web-sniffer.net
perfect example of the fallability of DNS right there
Digital archery? (Score:1)
I read about how "digital archery" was supposed to work. If I had read it out of context, I'd have assumed it was some sort of parody or April Fool's joke.
Backflips? (Score:3)
The use of "backflips" suggests they've done something wrong. Yet the summary seems to say that there were complaints about the application process, and that ICANN has responded to those complaints by improving the process -- or at least altering it so as to remove the parts that were being complained about. In fact it doesn't even have anything negative to say about the news itself, other than the headline.
They actually listened to criticism and removed the cause of it. What more do people want of them?
(Other than coming to their senses and aborting the whole thing, of course.)
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Clowns in a demollition derby? What next? (Score:2)
I think they need to change their name from ICANN to ICANNOT, ASAP!
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I checked, and your link doesn't appear to contain any truth, just some blowhard whining about his apparently 100% legal site being shut down by no less than three registrars (which, incidentally, is a sign his site is not 100% legal). Perhaps you should check your sources next time.
Why we need new TLDs again? (Score:4, Insightful)
What was the official reason from ICANN for new TLDs again? .net, .com, .de, .org anyway to secure it's trademark. For example Disney: all TLDs redirect to the domain go.com with is registered with Disney Enterprises Inc., except .gov. So the only clasification that survived is .gov, all the others are basically the same.
The current scheme don't make sense anymore anyhow, a company have to register
After the introduction of cTLDs, there was no purpose for the ICANN anymore, other then to ensure that each country gets one cTLD. With a cTLD each country can make their own DNS sub-tree, like .co.uk. So there would be no issue what-so-ever with the long discussed berlin domain: just make .berlin.de, .munich.de, etc. and if a US company wishes they can get also their own domain: pepse.us.
Mark my prediction: there will be a time in the near future where the meaning of a TLD is gone and you can choose your TLD freely. That will be the final money grab of ICANN.
Firefox already got rid of the protocol part of the URL (the http://./ [.] So why we not just get rid of the TLD part? (It's already in firefox, for http://slashdot.com/ [slashdot.com] I can just enter "slashdot" in the URL bar).
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You were with me until your stupid protocol argument. DNS and TCP/IP in general are used for many more things than just HTTP requests.
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Complain to the Firefox developers.
Sorry, you think I approve to get rid of the protocol part? Maybe I was not clear, I just stated that Firefox already not showing the protocol part in the URL bar. I am not agree to that, the very first thing was I changed it to show http:/// [http] again.
The real reason (Score:1)
The real reason ICANN is doing all applications simultaneously, is so that the folks in the later batches won't have an opportunity to ask for their money back when they realize that a gTLD is completely worthless.
Here's what's going to happen: Somebody reigsters the gTLD "apple", and sets up his website at http://apple/ [apple] and his email somebody@apple. Then he finds out he gets no web traffic, because people don't type "http://" into their browsers. They just type "apple" and get the top search engine hit (ap
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There is no A or MX record for "com", "net","org","us","uk","info","museum","biz","mobi"... I'm going to say that none of them work that way. If anyone thought they would work that way, that's their own damn fault.
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HAH! I just didn't try enough weird country codes. I stand corrected.
Why so much to run a tld? (Score:2)
Why does it cost hundreds of thousands to run a tld? Is most of that just labor/marketing costs? I would assume it would just be a matter of setting up a few replicating bind servers and a basic api for buying/adding domains that could be distributed to domain brokers (GoDaddy, Moniker, etc).
Maybe there is more involved that I think there should be?
I'm just curious where hundreds of thousands go to launch and run a tld.
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You forgot the executives golden parachute I think, that's a lot of money right there in order to have the "proper" person running the company.