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10 Reasons Why Involving Government in Spam Control is a Bad Idea

• Comment posted Jul 20, 2004 5:28 am PDT — by The Famous Brett Watson
  Counterarguments to your ten reasons. 1. Most jurisdictions lack case law demonstrating that spam is, in fact, abuse, rather than a legitimate form of speech. Adding law clarifies this situation and makes enforcement possible. Legal precedent, where available, may suffice.…

The Site Finder Reprise

• Comment posted Jul 23, 2004 4:06 pm PDT — by The Famous Brett Watson
  Keith says, "The security and stability report claims that domain names that are active, but for which many protocols are not live, break the end-to-end principle of the Internet." Based on the reference to "the end-to-end principle", I can only…

Sender Address Verification: Solving the Spam Crisis

• Comment posted Jul 27, 2004 10:27 am PDT — by The Famous Brett Watson
  Lovely. Given how many anti-spam companies there are, all claiming to possess the holy grail of anti-spam, can CircleID readers now expect to be presented with advertorials like this on a regular basis? Without studying the matter beyond this article,…

Spam and the Introduction Problem

• Comment posted Aug 08, 2004 1:15 am PDT — by The Famous Brett Watson
  Attacking the spam problem head on is simply not possible. In its most general form, spam isn't "unwanted bulk mail", but rather "unwanted mail". The most significant sources of unwanted mail operate in bulk, but the "bulkness" isn't the root…

Open Ends: Civil Society and Internet Governance - Part II

• Comment posted Aug 17, 2004 3:00 am PDT — by The Famous Brett Watson
  "In my view, the US government's power over the Internet has been to a large extent a theoretical concern." Largely theoretical, yes. But let us not forget the practical concern known as "SiteFinder". Regardless of its intrinsic merits or evils,…

What's Wrong With Spam Prosecutions

• Comment posted Aug 26, 2004 9:21 am PDT — by The Famous Brett Watson
  The point about private funding of law enforcement efforts is well made. If it takes the financial backing of the DMA to enforce the law, then who is going to enforce the law where DMA members are concerned? I don't…

Sender ID: A Tale of Open Standards and Corporate Greed? - Part I

• Comment posted Sep 02, 2004 3:49 pm PDT — by The Famous Brett Watson
  The question of whether and how sender identification is beneficial to the fight against spam is the subject of a paper I presented at the recent Conference on Email and Anti-Spam. If that question interests you, you can find the…

Can TCP/IP Survive?

• Comment posted Sep 21, 2004 1:20 pm PDT — by The Famous Brett Watson
  The marketing effort that has been invested in this report is impressive. A friend of mine who has no Internet-specific expertise (although interested in technology generally) heard about it on the radio here in Australia and asked me if I…

Languages in the Root: A TLD Launch Strategy Based on ISO 639

• Comment posted Oct 06, 2004 5:01 pm PDT — by The Famous Brett Watson
  I agree with Jothan that languages would be better as delegations under a single TLD, rather than each being a TLD in its own right. It's true that countries get slightly preferential treatment in this matter, being at the root,…

Internationalizing Top-Level Domain Names: Another Look

• Comment posted Oct 19, 2004 4:30 am PDT — by The Famous Brett Watson
  Jothan, your comment seems a little wide of the mark, given the article to which it is attached. The primary issue addressed by this article is that of allowing non-English-speakers the possibility of addressing *existing* TLDs in their own language.…

Sender-ID Back from the Dead

• Comment posted Nov 01, 2004 8:54 am PST — by The Famous Brett Watson
  Daniel, I am almost lost for words. Sender-ID may be a reasonable technology for checking email headers—I won't argue that point. I am, however, quite boggled by how lightly you dismiss the legal baggage associated with it. By your own…

Thoughts on IPv6 Day

• Comment posted Nov 19, 2004 5:38 pm PST — by The Famous Brett Watson
  Thanks, Mark, for that well-considered response. Some of the points you've raised are quite interesting. A sparsely populated address space like IPv6 will certainly have an impact on how malicious code propagates. But in response to your last point, the…

• Comment posted Nov 18, 2004 7:00 am PST — by The Famous Brett Watson
  I'd like to hear a better argument than that. Security by obscurity is where I don't tell you what my IP address is. NAT is (roughly speaking) where you can't address a packet to my host unless it contacts you…

• Comment posted Nov 18, 2004 1:21 am PST — by The Famous Brett Watson
  I don't particularly want to see the end of NAT. There is something comforting about a routing boundary between the Internet and my own private networks: the assurance that there is no theoretical way for hosts on my private network…

Cornucopia: A Radically Different Approach to TLDs

• Comment posted Dec 04, 2004 4:03 am PST — by The Famous Brett Watson
  Brad, while I have your attention, here's a request: please put dates on your essays. It makes them much easier to cite. Also, even now that you've made me aware of your prior work on this matter, I'm unable to…

• Comment posted Dec 04, 2004 2:21 am PST — by The Famous Brett Watson
  On the matter of random-letter TLDs versus meaningful generic TLDs: a meaningful TLD is very attractive if it happens to be in your language and have a relevant meaning. If it also has loose registration permissions, then it will result…

Engineers on TLDs: Do You Want Me With Fries?

• Comment posted Dec 24, 2004 4:36 am PST — by The Famous Brett Watson
  After some consideration, I am leaning toward the judgement that this is not a case of NIH syndrome, but something similar to it: traditionalism. NIH syndrome relates to technologies, and the question of which TLDs should or should not be…

Person to Person Security and Privacy Infringement

• Comment posted Jan 04, 2005 5:46 am PST — by The Famous Brett Watson
  I hate to say it, but this article is at best highly unclear, particularly to the extent that it proposes a solution. On re-reading the last two paragraphs several times, I came no closer to understanding how the solution addresses…

Protecting the Internet: Certified Attachments and Reverse Firewalls?

• Comment posted Mar 17, 2005 1:32 am PST — by The Famous Brett Watson
  The analogy with telephone equipment is limited in its utility. Telephone equipment is regulated in terms of its electrical characteristics, and most domestic modems are likewise regulated because they *are* telephone equipment. And even when the devices are not explicitly…

Shambles at the .Pro Registry

• Comment posted Mar 20, 2005 11:14 pm PST — by The Famous Brett Watson
  "I'm shocked---shocked to discover that there is gambling going on in this cafe." And I'm shocked---shocked to find registrars and registries accepting money where they should be defending the semantic integrity of the TLD, as per their contractual obligations. I'm…

Port 25 Blocking, or Fix SMTP and Leave Port 25 Alone for the Sake of Spam?

• Comment posted Apr 17, 2005 7:52 pm PDT — by The Famous Brett Watson
  A minor point of disagreement: the SPF "-all" declaration is not the same as null MX. The SPF "-all" declaration means, as you say, "this domain does not ever send mail". The null MX, on the other hand, means "this…

Study Finds Spammers Use P2P Harvesting to Spam Millions

• Comment posted Apr 19, 2005 2:04 am PDT — by The Famous Brett Watson
  Spam is odd in the sense that practices change so drastically and suddenly. A couple of years back, if you wanted to be spammed, you put an email address on a web page and let it be harvested. I put…

Phish-Proofing URLs in Email?

• Comment posted Apr 19, 2005 2:16 am PDT — by The Famous Brett Watson
  On the matter of HSBC, that would explain the tactic used in the latest HSBC-phish I received. "You did not read our internal security message that have been dispatched last week. You have received an important internal message from our…

An Infrastructure TLD: Avoiding the Side Effects of Today's .Net

• Comment posted Jun 02, 2005 2:52 pm PDT — by The Famous Brett Watson
  Karl, ".arpa" no longer refers to the original ARPA. During 2000, the abbreviation was redesignated to "Address and Routing Parameter Area". RFC 3172 documents best current practice for this domain.

Hope for Human Resources with .Jobs Domain

• Comment posted Jun 22, 2005 6:02 am PDT — by The Famous Brett Watson
  Here's a consideration. You can't prevent a phisher or other malicious party from registering "companyname.jobs", even if you already have "companyname.com". You *can* prevent them from creating "jobs.companyname.com" under the same conditions. I don't suppose the original poster's friends in…

• Comment posted Jun 21, 2005 4:22 am PDT — by The Famous Brett Watson
  I agree with Thanos on all points. Further, I note, with a cynical lack of surprise, that the sponsoring organisation has chapters all over the nation. That's "The Nation". You know, *The* nation. Nevermind. Registration in .jobs requires supporting documentation.…

We Hate Spam Except, Of Course, When It's Inconvenient to Do So

• Comment posted Jul 01, 2005 3:59 am PDT — by The Famous Brett Watson
  The only influence you need is the ability to take your business elsewhere. It's the only way to educate an ISP that wilfully accepts pink money, and it also solves your blacklist problem. But I can see that you'd rather…

• Comment posted Jun 30, 2005 7:45 pm PDT — by The Famous Brett Watson
  Paul, that's not a change of subject—I think you've misunderstood. I believe John is suggesting you should push your buddies at Yahoo to ditch the spammer in your capacity as *current customer*, rather than *ex employee*. So why don't you…

Twenty Myths and Truths About IPv6 and the US IPv6 Transition

• Comment posted Jun 22, 2005 8:04 am PDT — by The Famous Brett Watson
  You started losing me with point number two, Aside from the fact that you used "stealing" where you meant "unauthorised reproduction" (a bit of double-speak that I really hate, but can overlook), you also intimate that IPv6 vs IPv4 has…

About Those Root Servers

• Comment posted Aug 03, 2005 12:03 am PDT — by The Famous Brett Watson
  You are only partly right when you say that the root is already mirrored in all nameservers. A DNS server requires a root-hint file containing information about the root zone nameservers, but those hint records form only a rather small…

• Comment posted Aug 02, 2005 4:23 pm PDT — by The Famous Brett Watson
  I'd like to thank JFC Morfin for that comment. I'm afraid that I started to lose my grasp on what was being communicated towards the end, but the earlier part about the nature of root server traffic and the possibility…

So You Think You're Safe from DNS Cache Poisoning?

• Comment posted Aug 18, 2005 3:44 pm PDT — by The Famous Brett Watson
  Let me see if I have this straight. The BIND4 or BIND8 instance that's acting as a forwarder cleans the received response for the purposes of populating its local cache, but passes the unscrubbed response back to the original requesting…

Criticism of Trademark Owner Deemed Legitimate Interest under ICANN UDRP

• Comment posted Aug 26, 2005 2:25 am PDT — by The Famous Brett Watson
  To: Daniel, in relation to the remark, "a .com address makes no logical sense". If there were a ".critic" or some other such TLD which clearly categorised noncommercial criticism, you may have a case. While ".org" is noncommercial, it suggests…

.XXX as Proposed is Wrong for Families & Kids

• Comment posted Sep 14, 2005 4:09 pm PDT — by The Famous Brett Watson
  Joe, I composed another reply to you, but when I pressed "preview", I was informed that I'd gone twelve characters over the length limit. Furthermore, CircleID assumed my browser would cache the text-box when I clicked "back", so it discarded…

• Comment posted Sep 13, 2005 5:05 am PDT — by The Famous Brett Watson
  Q: "Why should we move forward with the creation of a program that we know will not solve a real social problem?" A: Because real social problems can not, in general, be solved by domain name policy. The "porn problem"…

Sitefinder Writ Small

• Comment posted Sep 15, 2005 3:34 am PDT — by The Famous Brett Watson
  The key difference between CentralNic and Verisign is that CentralNic is the registrant of ".uk.com", where Verisign is merely the custodian of ".com". Regardless of whether the wildcard is a wise move, CentralNic is merely exercising their prerogative, whereas Verisign…

If It's About to Break, Fix It!

• Comment posted Oct 03, 2005 11:32 pm PDT — by The Famous Brett Watson
  Politics isn't my game, so I'm not going to hazard a guess as to how soon the unity of the DNS root will break. What needs emphasis is this: unity is only maintained through mutual cooperation. There are plenty of…

Breaking the Internet HOWTO

• Comment posted Oct 20, 2005 8:58 am PDT — by The Famous Brett Watson
  The teacher (UN) comes in and says:"Don’t fight over a toy! OK, stop! Let me have it, this fight is over!” Except that in this kindergarten, there are no teachers! The UN is at best "class captain", and only gets…

• Comment posted Oct 13, 2005 1:09 am PDT — by The Famous Brett Watson
  Since sarcasm appears to be on-topic, here's my (uncharacteristically brief) satirical take on the process. (Scene: a kindergarten. "US" has the "DNS root" toy, and "EU" wants to play with it.) EU: "Share!" US: "No! Mine!" EU: "Let me play…

Forgotten Principles of Internet Governance

• Comment posted Oct 25, 2005 2:01 am PDT — by The Famous Brett Watson
  Domain names are governed by copyright, because databases are intellectual property? That's a frightfully simplistic analysis, Joe. In fact, it's such a non sequitur I'm almost at a loss as to where to start criticising it. It's like saying that…

VeriSign and ICANN Settle Lawsuit

• Comment posted Oct 25, 2005 2:56 am PDT — by The Famous Brett Watson
  "A search service for users who mistype web addresses," is VeriSign's description of SiteFinder. Here's mine. SiteFinder was, ostensibly, a search service for users who mistype web addresses. It was technically remarkable in that it relied on the addition of…

You Paid to Join; You Can Leave Anytime

• Comment posted Nov 04, 2005 6:22 pm PST — by The Famous Brett Watson
  Wayne: the main thrust of my second comment wasn't "US vs AU", but that the situation has a tendency to reinforce itself. Also, it's not really about "content" and "eyeballs"—at least not from the perspective of the tier 1 players.…

• Comment posted Nov 04, 2005 2:50 pm PST — by The Famous Brett Watson
  Suresh, you may note that there's a positive feedback situation in effect here. I'm in Australia, and our Internet access prices tend to be on the high side thanks in part to the one-way transfer of money situation described in…

• Comment posted Nov 03, 2005 3:34 am PST — by The Famous Brett Watson
  Although the technical theme of the article is a bit of a blend (tier 1 peering + DNS), the social theme is quite unified, and can be summarised thus. We are the USA. We hold all the cards and call…

Nom-Com Appoints Independent and Diverse Candidates to ICANN Leadership Positions

• Comment posted Nov 07, 2005 5:42 am PST — by The Famous Brett Watson
  Yes, to do absolutely anything at all different from what we are doing now would be new and unproven. My point is that you are using "new and unproven" with a tone of fear, uncertainty, and doubt. The opposite tone…

• Comment posted Nov 07, 2005 1:24 am PST — by The Famous Brett Watson
  "...the WSIS and UN Internet Governance debates that seem to propose new and unproven methods in lieu of the working ICANN model." (Emphasis added.) FUD will never go out of fashion, will it?

Questioning the Illusion of Internet Governance

• Comment posted Nov 10, 2005 12:05 pm PST — by The Famous Brett Watson
  Randy, for what it's worth, the Russian guy is "Dmitry Skylarov". Without going into a "cynic's digest" of this article, I'd summarise it as having two main points: first, that the argument over the DNS root is largely a side-show;…

Facing the Facts on Internet Governance

• Comment posted Nov 15, 2005 12:32 am PST — by The Famous Brett Watson
  A shift from rhetoric to reality would be a breath of fresh air indeed. The sheer quantity of propaganda surrounding this issue makes me wonder whether there is any interest in matters of fact at all, or whether it's a…

WSIS and the Splitting of the Root

• Comment posted Nov 16, 2005 11:57 am PST — by The Famous Brett Watson
  Brad, my point with regards to trademark and branding is that the differences between those ideas and the domain name system render dubious any "lessons" we might learn from them. Given the differences, are the supposed parallels actually parallel in…

• Comment posted Nov 16, 2005 5:02 am PST — by The Famous Brett Watson
  That people would cling to ".com" is evidence that we've grown somewhat dependent on names in that space. That it became so disproportionately popular in the first place is evidence that it was a mistake—perhaps. Given that the larger companies…

• Comment posted Nov 15, 2005 4:53 am PST — by The Famous Brett Watson
  A critical analysis of this article could take a very long time. I'll therefore restrict my comments to the part of your article which sets off every mental alarm bell I have: the phasing out of generics, like ".com". This…

Would the Real Network Neutrality Please Stand Up?

• Comment posted Nov 16, 2005 2:30 am PST — by The Famous Brett Watson
  [continued from previous post] There are circumstances in which I want my ISP to become rather "non-neutral" on my behalf. If some host elsewhere on the Internet has gone haywire and is flooding me, I'd like my ISP to firewall…

• Comment posted Nov 16, 2005 2:27 am PST — by The Famous Brett Watson
  There are technical issues here, and there are political issues. The OSI seven-layer model of networking isn't God's Own Truth; rather it's a useful pedagogic tool. It illustrates the usefulness of dividing the networking problem into subtasks which interact in…

VeriSign-ICANN Proposed Settlement Discussed in Vancouver

• Comment posted Dec 02, 2005 3:08 am PST — by The Famous Brett Watson
  I have a problem with all this talk of competition and letting the market sort it out. The problem is that domain name registries only compete with each other in a limited sense, while in another sense they are monopolies.…

What's Wrong with Domain Names?

• Comment posted Dec 23, 2005 11:35 am PST — by The Famous Brett Watson
  Well I suppose you could also describe spamming—sorry, bulk email deploying—in those terms if you wanted to be charitable. Not every innovative use of technology is a net social plus, even if it's profitable for the adopters.

• Comment posted Dec 23, 2005 3:55 am PST — by The Famous Brett Watson
  Adding further to Daniel's comments, I observe that if it weren't for typosquatters, there would be no need for the legitimate domain holder to register "typo" domains. The number of possible typo-domains is huge, and can place an onerous burden…

What's in a Name?

• Comment posted Jan 05, 2006 5:32 am PST — by The Famous Brett Watson
  Dave, my articles and comments here are available under one of the most relaxed Creative Commons licenses, so reprinting anything I write here should not be a problem. Your comment about the conseqences of domain names as property is interesting,…

• Comment posted Jan 05, 2006 2:23 am PST — by The Famous Brett Watson
  Christopher, thanks for the comments. I think a stronger analogy exists between telephone numbers and IP addresses than domain names, although neither analogy is perfect. As far as similarities go, I think you're more or less right: if someone provides…

Europe is to the US Controlled GPS as Europe is to the US Controlled DNS Root?

• Comment posted Jan 09, 2006 2:25 pm PST — by The Famous Brett Watson
  Suresh, you wonder whether there is "some mechanism beyond market forces" to ensure uniform telephone numbering. So far as I am aware, the standard for international telephone numbers, specified by ITU-T E.164 has no legal force. It is merely a…

• Comment posted Dec 30, 2005 1:20 am PST — by The Famous Brett Watson
  At the risk of stating the obvious, I'll point out that the analogy falls down at a critical point. Whereas two independent navigation systems can coexist without conflict, two independent domain name systems will naturally contradict each other unless carefully…

IPv6: Extinction, Evolution or Revolution?

• Comment posted Sep 03, 2006 1:20 pm PDT — by The Famous Brett Watson
  What is this "TAMARA" of which you speak? I can find no network protocols by that name with a Google search.

Ask Vint Cerf: The Road Ahead for Top-Level Domains

• Comment posted Jan 18, 2006 2:37 am PST — by The Famous Brett Watson
  Vint, can you please describe ICANN's guiding principles with regards to the top level domains? Obviously one such guiding principle is that of technical feasibility—a principle that needs no further justification. Apparently another such guiding principle is that of "parsimony"—the…

AOL and Goodmail: Two Steps Back for Email

• Comment posted Feb 03, 2006 3:29 am PST — by The Famous Brett Watson
  It's a bit of a challenge sorting the facts from the rhetoric here. Matt Blumberg, the article author, represents a competitor of Goodmail, and Daniel T. Dreymann, author of comment #2, represents Goodmail itself. All in all, I don't feel…

Questioning "Net Neutrality"

• Comment posted Feb 11, 2006 5:28 am PST — by The Famous Brett Watson
  Karl, I agree with much of what you say, but I'm concerned that some of your remarks here create more confusion than they dispel. In particular, the idea that the Internet "was designed from the outset not to be content…

Internet Governance: An Antispam Perspective

• Comment posted Feb 15, 2006 5:31 pm PST — by The Famous Brett Watson
  Meng's article suggests a dichotomy: that the world will be "default accept" or "default deny", and the latter choice is the only one that will solve the problem of phishing. This is not a sound argument because the dichotomy is…

Hypertext Mail Protocol (a.k.a. Stub Email): A Proposal

• Comment posted Feb 20, 2006 3:59 am PST — by The Famous Brett Watson
  Nathan, I don't know what your direction is with this proposal: whether you intend to make a scholarly study of it, an implementation of it, or whether you were just running it up the flagpole to see if anyone would…

China's New Domain Names: Lost in Translation

• Comment posted Mar 03, 2006 4:29 am PST — by The Famous Brett Watson
  Karl, I'm unable to decipher a lot of the obscure and invented jargon being thrown around in this thread, but this much is clear. There is a downloadable plug-in (for IE, I assume) which adds Chinese-character domain names to the…

• Comment posted Mar 02, 2006 3:49 am PST — by The Famous Brett Watson
  James, I'm happy to focus on what is happening, rather than what could, but your explanation so far falls short of reality as we know it. Can you be any more specific about this "client available for download on CNNIC…

• Comment posted Mar 01, 2006 3:16 pm PST — by The Famous Brett Watson
  Well, be careful which hypothesis you're testing: I wasn't claiming that ".com" had lost universality. I was speaking in reference to comment #1 by James Seng, where he said the following. In practice, they did not actually use any alternative/parellel…

• Comment posted Mar 01, 2006 7:31 am PST — by The Famous Brett Watson
  Firstly, regardless of whether this constitutes an alternate root or not, there's no point panicing about it. Secondly, regardless of wether this constitutes an alternate root in some narrow technical sense, it operates as though it were an alternate root,…

A Day Which Will Live in Infamy: ICANN Board Approves VeriSign Settlement

• Comment posted Mar 01, 2006 11:28 am PST — by The Famous Brett Watson
  James, I think you'll find that it's the terms of the settlement, rather than the act of settlement itself, which is the bone of contention here.

The Future of Some Email May Not Use Email

• Comment posted Mar 08, 2006 1:38 pm PST — by The Famous Brett Watson
  Brad, Is this what it comes down to: that any attempt to make a (legitimate) sender pay for email connectivity, beyond the base cost of Internet service, is beyond the pale? I don't want to put words in your mouth,…

• Comment posted Mar 08, 2006 5:01 am PST — by The Famous Brett Watson
  Brad says: That spammers attack the innocent is no reason to decide it’s ok to punish the innocent in order to build anti-spam systems. Where behaviour involves attacking the innocent—even potentially—I agree, but asking senders to pay a premium for…

• Comment posted Mar 08, 2006 1:58 am PST — by The Famous Brett Watson
  Brad, the comparison with those ISPs that want to be paid twice is invalid for one very good reason: spam filtering is an added service. This isn't just a case of "how can we wring more money out of the…

China's MII Publishes New Email Regulations

• Comment posted Mar 10, 2006 3:17 pm PST — by The Famous Brett Watson
  Does anything in these new Chinese regulations mention the Chinese-character TLDs? Is there any other existing Chinese regulation which mandates something in relation to those TLDs? I'm half-expecting China to promote adoption of their new Chinese-character TLDs through regulation, but…

Report on DNS Amplification Attacks

• Comment posted Mar 24, 2006 12:52 am PST — by The Famous Brett Watson
  I think the conspiracy theorising is a little over the top in the face of an actual multi-gigabit DDoS attack. TCP SYN flooding was a purely theoretical attack for a while there too before anyone actually exploited it maliciously. Such…

New Code of Practice to Combat Spam

• Comment posted Mar 29, 2006 2:57 am PST — by The Famous Brett Watson
  Primary source information on this matter can be found at the Australian Communications and Media Authority's website: ACMA registers internet industry code on spam. From a technical perspective, this code of practice is noteworthy in that it considers publication of…

Internet Agency Weighs '.tel' Top-Level Domain

• Comment posted Apr 15, 2006 6:00 am PDT — by The Famous Brett Watson
  Telnic's proposal, as it stands, seems so ridiculously lame that I can't help but wonder whether it's a ruse. Their own FAQ describes the purpose and nature of ".tel" in the following terms. What will .Tel do? The Internet-Communications sTLD,…

ICANN Rejects Dot XXX Top-Level Domain Name Agreement

• Comment posted May 11, 2006 6:06 am PDT — by The Famous Brett Watson
  The decision to reject ".xxx" may not have been driven by specific political pressure, but it was most certainly driven by political (rather than technical) considerations. To wit, "the decision largely came down to whether by creating an 'xxx' domain…

.XXX and Conservative Groups

• Comment posted Jun 02, 2006 4:35 am PDT — by The Famous Brett Watson
  Some of the comments here might lead one to believe that the ".pro" registry works in a certain way, where the actual practice is rather different. For example, the domain "sex.pro" was registered on 2004-06-01. The same registrant obtained "porn.pro"…

• Comment posted May 18, 2006 1:37 pm PDT — by The Famous Brett Watson
  Patrick Vande Walle said, "… ICANN should think about replacing the current DNS system." Under absolutely no circumstances should ICANN even contemplate such a thing: it is completely outside their mandate. Such a system would be handled in various aspects…

Why ICANN Nominating Committee Has Difficulty Finding Directors

• Comment posted May 19, 2006 7:51 am PDT — by The Famous Brett Watson
  I don't want to be overly harsh, because ICANN-bashing is getting pretty old and tired. Even so, it's hard not to think that these wounds aren't largely self-inflicted. By how many orders of magnitude has the task increased since Jon…

Domain Tasting Target of US Federal Cybersquatting Lawsuit

• Comment posted Jun 13, 2006 1:32 pm PDT — by The Famous Brett Watson
  In comment #54, John Berryhill said the following in reference to me. You seem to want to draw a distinction between “domain tasters” and long-term registrants. I draw a distinction between obtaining something below cost, and obtaining something above cost.…

• Comment posted Jun 12, 2006 2:00 pm PDT — by The Famous Brett Watson
  In comment #45, John Berryhill says the following in reference to me. Considering that the registry fee is orders of magnitude above cost, I would guess that you are against any sort of volume discounts offered in any line of…

• Comment posted Jun 10, 2006 10:31 am PDT — by The Famous Brett Watson
  John, I feel like I'm stating the obvious, and I hate doing that, but I suppose it's necessary to mention the elephant standing in the corner of the room now and then. I don’t understand the “free ride” argument at…

• Comment posted Jun 10, 2006 2:51 am PDT — by The Famous Brett Watson
  For a publicly held company to define a revenue net-positive practice as “abusive” would not be responsible. That, in a nutshell, is why abusive cost-shifting practices like spamming and industrial pollution ultimately require government intervention. As it stands, the whole…

Conflict of Opinion

• Comment posted Jun 22, 2006 10:53 am PDT — by The Famous Brett Watson
  John, You can't mention "syllogism" without attracting my nit-picking attention. It could be argued that your own complaint here is based on a logical fallacy. The claim that "all cybersquatters describe themselves as 'domainers'" does not imply that "anyone describing…

Why We Need to Find Solutions on Internet Governance As Soon As Possible

• Comment posted Aug 31, 2006 2:25 am PDT — by The Famous Brett Watson
  Konstantinos, it's now clear that what you mean by "Internet 2.0" is "Web 2.0". I had an inkling that you meant this, but steered away from that interpretation earlier on the grounds that I couldn't fathom what possible relevance it…

• Comment posted Aug 29, 2006 10:56 pm PDT — by The Famous Brett Watson
  Konstantinos, I am going to criticise your article here, hopefully in a way that you will find constructive. On a first reading, there are two obvious problems with this article. One is that it's overburdened with unnecessary buzzwords. In particular,…

Tiered (Variable) Pricing Compromise?

• Comment posted Sep 08, 2006 5:49 pm PDT — by The Famous Brett Watson
  I particularly liked the Wired article that mentioned companies that were only established “on paper” - as if any corporation is established on something else… parchment or granite, one might suppose.  As a legal entity, corporations only exist on paper,…

• Comment posted Sep 01, 2006 3:32 am PDT — by The Famous Brett Watson
  One of the concerns raised here is the question of long-term stability. As has been said, ten years seems like a long time in Internet terms, but I'm sure that I'm not the only one here with a domain name…

EarthLink Criticized for Redirecting Nonexistent Domains

• Comment posted Sep 08, 2006 3:55 am PDT — by The Famous Brett Watson
  What I find interesting is the shift towards Site Finder shenanigans being acceptable on balance—where appropriate profit motive exists. Apparently the powers-that-be at EarthLink have realised that they, as an ISP, are actually in a better position than a DNS…

.MS: Alternate Root and Monoculture as Good Things

• Comment posted Sep 19, 2006 6:24 am PDT — by The Famous Brett Watson
  The problem with the "hosts" file itself—the primary reason why the domain name system was invented at all—is that it doesn't scale. That's why DNS is a distributed database. I seriously doubt that the hosts file can be used to…

ICANN and the DOC

• Comment posted Oct 03, 2006 12:44 am PDT — by The Famous Brett Watson
  Suresh, I'm not an advocate of total anonymity: I'm just opposed to a situation in which only the dishonest can maintain privacy. That's a perverse incentive we ought to avoid. I think that the workable middle ground looks something like…

• Comment posted Oct 02, 2006 7:10 am PDT — by The Famous Brett Watson
  Milton, please note that everything in my previous comment beyond the paragraph in which I say, "please forgive in advance my use of sarcasm here", is sarcastic, insincere, not representative of my beliefs, and damnable sophistry to boot. One can…

• Comment posted Sep 30, 2006 1:17 am PDT — by The Famous Brett Watson
  "...we still haven’t figured out a rational way to involve individuals and we still don’t have a rational process for adding new gTLDs." [Susan] I certainly don't envy ICANN the job. I suspect that objective, rational solutions to this problem…

Another View of the New ICANN-DoC Agreement

• Comment posted Oct 03, 2006 12:52 am PDT — by The Famous Brett Watson
  George, the sticking point is not whether or not ICANN did the right thing in blocking .xxx, but whether or not it did so for the right reasons. Assuming that Milton's assertion is true, and that the primary reason for…

Spamming the News Cycle: Spamhaus Non-Story Goes Viral

• Comment posted Oct 15, 2006 7:45 am PDT — by The Famous Brett Watson
  Hang on, I wasn’t saying that was the criteria that Spamhaus uses on deciding whether to stick someone on their blacklist. -- Kieren McCarthy It looks like you are describing criteria when you say the following. Spamhaus sticks people like…

ICANN Board to Vote on Domain Tasting Measure

• Comment posted Oct 23, 2006 3:23 am PDT — by The Famous Brett Watson
  John, I consider your "car dealership" analogy so deeply flawed that it actually generates confusion. Let me explain why, off the top of my head. A car dealership owns its cars up until the time it sells them: nobody is…

Release of IE7, Firefox 2.0 Will Drive Significant IDN Demand

• Comment posted Nov 01, 2006 1:47 am PST — by The Famous Brett Watson
  I wonder what portion of overall IDN registrations will be attributable to phishing and typo-squatting in the long run. I don't mean to imply anything negative about IDN in saying this, but I suspect that phishers in particular will take…

Huge Increase in Spam in October Email

• Comment posted Nov 30, 2006 6:09 am PST — by The Famous Brett Watson
  If everyone were obliged to give a verifiably true name and a location where they can be found and beaten with a lead pipe as part of their domain registration, spam would not cease. I doubt that it would even…

More than 99% of Email is Spam?

• Comment posted Nov 07, 2006 6:15 am PST — by The Famous Brett Watson
  While I agree in large part with the sentiment of this article, the reasoning is at least a little specious. Any large spam-filtering service provider (whether specialist, or part of a general email service) is in a good position to…

Map of the Internet: The IPv4 Space of 2006

• Comment posted Dec 29, 2006 5:08 pm PST — by The Famous Brett Watson
  Tom, thanks for the pointer to the IANA high-level delegation file. A brief non-exhaustive comparison of this data with the diagram uncovers no obvious discrepancies. The latter does contain more detail than the former in some cases, such as the…

• Comment posted Dec 29, 2006 3:37 am PST — by The Famous Brett Watson
  Tom, it seems to me that the most important thing about this representation is the allocated vs unallocated difference—that is the areas which are green relative to those which are not. The top right-hand corner of the map represents IP-space…

• Comment posted Dec 28, 2006 3:15 pm PST — by The Famous Brett Watson
  I don't care if it's produced by a webcomic author: the fractal layout is a cool idea, and the only remaining question of any relevance is that of accuracy. (I'll find an answer to that question if I need to…

Google's Top-10 Search Terms Dominated By Trademarks

• Comment posted Jan 16, 2007 9:28 am PST — by The Famous Brett Watson
  I raised an eyebrow at the inclusion of "ebay" in a list of generics, since it is clearly a trademark. Still, searching on the term "ebay" is not necessarily the same as searching for eBay(TM). I'd expect the first hit…

The Fragile Network

• Comment posted Feb 12, 2007 1:58 pm PST — by The Famous Brett Watson
  Interesting remarks, Karl. The question of "are we doing good engineering" (in protocol design) raises another question: do we have any kind of consensus on what constitutes good engineering in protocol design? There seems to be a dearth of literature…

Are Domain Name Registrars Free-Speech Friendly?

• Comment posted Feb 04, 2007 9:14 am PST — by The Famous Brett Watson
  The price of a domain name registration is both plainly visible up front and easily comprehended. A dollar cost forms a nice, simple, scalar quantity. Registrar behaviour, on the other hand, is a little harder to judge, and I'm pretty…

Attack Seriously Slows Two Internet Root Servers

• Comment posted Feb 09, 2007 11:15 am PST — by The Famous Brett Watson
  Every DNS service already maintains a cache of the root servers (usually called the "hints" file), although I grant that the size and rate of change in the root zone is greater than the root server hints. On the other…

• Comment posted Feb 08, 2007 1:12 am PST — by The Famous Brett Watson
  Are there any compelling reasons not to recommend caching of the whole root zone locally as a best current practice? I mean for networks that are already providing recursive DNS service, which is most of them. Under those conditions, DDoSing…

Are We Slowly Losing Control of the Internet?

• Comment posted Mar 12, 2007 8:06 am PDT — by The Famous Brett Watson
  Karl, I'd like to separate your discussion into two distinct but related issues. The bulk of your article talks about protocol design, albeit slightly obliquely. I will be the first to agree that the art of protocol design isn't anywhere…

The Real Problem with dot-XXX

• Comment posted Mar 19, 2007 3:46 am PDT — by The Famous Brett Watson
  John, although that is an accurate quotation, it's not directly relevant to the discussion of ".xxx". To the extent that it is relevant, it can only be described as ad hominem—drawing attention to the speaker, not the argument. Although it…

• Comment posted Mar 17, 2007 9:49 am PDT — by The Famous Brett Watson
  Michael Roberts starts this article with a quotation from "The Music Man", among others. "Professor" Harold Hill, who proclaimed "trouble right here in River City", was a classic American con man: he whipped up fear where none was warranted, declared…

An Alternative to .XXX: IANA Adult Port Assignments

• Comment posted Mar 18, 2007 4:50 am PDT — by The Famous Brett Watson
  I can think of a large number of variations on this theme, such as the inclusion of a keyword in the URL, using "xxx" as a bottom-level domain name (instead of the traditional "www"—cute, huh?), using PICS or various other…

Recent COPA Ruling Shedding Light on Usefulness of XXX as Voluntary Self Regulatory Vehicle?

• Comment posted Mar 26, 2007 8:43 am PDT — by The Famous Brett Watson
  This is an absurd argument that ICM has presented in referencing COPA. I disagree. The short version is that the overthrow of COPA, being yet another in a long line of defeats for censorship laws enacted in the name of…

ICANN Asked to Adopt Specific TLD for Banks

• Comment posted Mar 31, 2007 7:38 am PDT — by The Famous Brett Watson
  I think that's an unfair characterisation of this proposal. The point of having a TLD like ".safe" is that it's much harder to spoof. Go ahead and register "verysafebanking.com"; the first phisher to come along will look upon it with…

• Comment posted Mar 30, 2007 3:44 pm PDT — by The Famous Brett Watson
  As far as I can tell, the party issuing this call is F-Secure in a press release. It’s interesting that F-Secure is advocating this particular approach, but is the press release backed up by any intention to actually drive the…

Putting Some Circuit Breakers Into DNS to Protect The Net

• Comment posted Apr 04, 2007 3:23 am PDT — by The Famous Brett Watson
  It seems that the suggestion here is to insert a DNS "circuit breaker" to solve a problem that exists completely outside the DNS. The problem with DNS, if anything, is that it provides too good a service, and bad people…

Splitting the Root: It's Too Late

• Comment posted Apr 11, 2007 4:46 pm PDT — by The Famous Brett Watson
  If I send a packet to 192.5.5.241, port 53, the ISP *must* deliver it to 192.5.5.241. Silently proxying it to another machine *is* hijacking (unless I consented to this redirection). You consent to that sort of thing when you sign…

• Comment posted Apr 07, 2007 2:52 am PDT — by The Famous Brett Watson
  This is a verbatim re-post of an old article (December 2005).

Researchers Explore Redesigning Internet Infrastructure from Scratch

• Comment posted Apr 14, 2007 2:16 am PDT — by The Famous Brett Watson
  And not only the politics, but also the practicalities. Even if you could design a much better Internet from scratch, would it be worth anyone's while to actually deploy it? It usually takes a "killer app." or a factor-of-N improvement…

Commentary on the FTC Spam Summit

• Comment posted Jul 26, 2007 5:13 pm PDT — by The Famous Brett Watson
  the true problem IS the ability to register domains using bogus contact information You need to think that through a little more. For one thing, not all spammers register domain names. I'll let that slide, and pretend that domain name…

CADNA Launches National Campaign Against Typosquatting

• Comment posted Jul 25, 2007 8:44 am PDT — by The Famous Brett Watson
  I feel almost out of place commenting on an article (press release?) which presumes that Internet users can be divided into two groups: "consumers and businesses". This seems to presume that the Internet is a good in the sense that…

Phishers Now Targeting Domain Registrars

• Comment posted Aug 09, 2007 12:54 am PDT — by The Famous Brett Watson
  DNSSEC protects against unauthorised changes to DNS records. If you've been phished, the attacker has your authentication credentials, and DNSSEC won't help you.

• Comment posted Aug 08, 2007 3:15 am PDT — by The Famous Brett Watson
  Could it be that the target of the phishing here is not so much the domain name as access to the hosting facilities which GoDaddy also offers? The ability to construct websites under subdomains of existing domains would be quite…

Defending Networks Against DNS Rebinding Attacks

• Comment posted Aug 10, 2007 2:34 am PDT — by The Famous Brett Watson
  The problem here is one of authorisation. As the zone administrator of a domain name, I have the ability to make DNS records in my zone refer to any valid resource, whether or not that resource has anything to do…

How Spammers Get Around SPF

• Comment posted Aug 21, 2007 3:14 pm PDT — by The Famous Brett Watson
  SPF doesn't stop spam or phishing. SPF can stop some spam as a side-effect, but savvy spammers know how to avoid it—ditto for phishing. SPF regulates use of a domain name in the "mail from" address, also known as the…

If WHOIS Privacy is a Good Idea, Why is it Going Nowhere?

• Comment posted Aug 29, 2007 7:19 am PDT — by The Famous Brett Watson
  Several people have pointed out that the current WHOIS doesn’t satisfy European privacy laws, to which a reasonable response is so what? In other words, it's not a problem for Americans, and "sucks to be you" if you aren't one.…

Are Domain Name Portfolios Actually Worth What They Are Touted to Be?

• Comment posted Oct 30, 2007 5:20 am PDT — by The Famous Brett Watson
  customer said: Not a bubble and here is why… Supply and demand. Every bubble is based on supply and demand. The difference between a bubble and the common or garden variety of supply and demand is that prices in a…

• Comment posted Oct 29, 2007 6:01 am PDT — by The Famous Brett Watson
  Ok...Books.Com was purchased by B&N;a while ago.  So?  Not sure why this is so significant or why it hurts my argument… That should be obvious. Suresh is making a perfectly credible counter-argument that the valuations of generic domain names are…

• Comment posted Oct 28, 2007 2:58 pm PDT — by The Famous Brett Watson
  Why did Barnes & Noble buy Books.Com? Clearly, it was done to crush their arch-enemy, amazon.com! Amazon's superior Internet mind-share will not stand long against the power of this short, relevant, generic .com domain, and the indubitable tsunami of direct…

• Comment posted Oct 25, 2007 4:10 am PDT — by The Famous Brett Watson
  If you agree so far, the rest is easy.  Those who decide to establish an online business need a good home for their venture.  Same rule of real estate applies:  location, location, location.  In this case, your online location is…

Getting Rid of Whois

• Comment posted Oct 31, 2007 2:29 am PDT — by The Famous Brett Watson
  Indeed, the SOA record is supposed to have an email address in it already, which pretty much covers the technical point of contact for the domain. Additional information could be provided in TXT or RP records, and it would have…

NANOGGING

• Comment posted Oct 31, 2007 6:23 am PDT — by The Famous Brett Watson
  To the best of my knowledge, the idea for mapping the IPv4 address space onto a Hilbert curve can be attributed to Randall Munroe of xkcd. He cites the benefit that "[it] preserves grouping—any consecutive string of IPs will translate…

ICANN CEO: "High Politics" Fueling IGF Debates

• Comment posted Nov 14, 2007 3:00 am PST — by The Famous Brett Watson
  Many critics fear opening ICANN up to an organization like the United Nations could allow governments to politicize the Internet and more easily impose censorship. By changing just a few database entries, for instance, all Web sites for a specific…

An Internet Security Operations Viewpoint of IGF

• Comment posted Nov 29, 2007 3:41 am PST — by The Famous Brett Watson
  Gadi, I appreciate your taking the time to revisit this conversation. I have a reasonable amount of experience with both DNS and cybercrime, and I understand that DNS can act as a good choke-point to disable a criminal operation—temporarily, at…

• Comment posted Nov 23, 2007 1:25 am PST — by The Famous Brett Watson
  Why? What is the purpose of the experiment? To see if registrars effectively enforce their ToS or respond to external complaints of ToS violations? How will the outcome impact this argument?

• Comment posted Nov 22, 2007 10:08 pm PST — by The Famous Brett Watson
  Actually, I'm not looking for a fight; I'm looking for an argument. There's a difference. Specifically, I'm challenging your second point: the idea that the public info out there—specifically the registrant info—is in any way necessary. If you can demonstrate…

• Comment posted Nov 22, 2007 6:50 am PST — by The Famous Brett Watson
  This information has been public as a status quo, there is no hurry to change it, so don’t make it look like we are TAKING PRIVACY AWAY, we are in fact trying to give users MORE PRIVACY than they CURRENTLY…

• Comment posted Nov 21, 2007 11:57 pm PST — by The Famous Brett Watson
  Another subject of interest to me was my discussion with Milton Mueller on his advocacy of some information being removed from publicly accessible WHOIS data. Although ideologically I am with him on this privacy issue, practically it is the only,…

In Praise of Relatively Dumb Pipes

• Comment posted Dec 05, 2007 5:42 pm PST — by The Famous Brett Watson
  You seem confused about TCP, making the common error that it’s a network protocol. It is, in fact, an *INTERnetwork* protocol, good for moving data between one network and another. I'll admit a certain degree of bemusement as to that…

• Comment posted Dec 04, 2007 3:23 am PST — by The Famous Brett Watson
  It "works" like a hammer works on a screw. It manages traffic by effecting a DoS attack on the connections established by the endpoints until they give up trying to establish them. I'm repeating myself because I'm still trying to…

• Comment posted Dec 03, 2007 4:12 pm PST — by The Famous Brett Watson
  RED and packet dropping affect the rate at which TCP hosts transmit data over an established connection. Quite. And RST abnormally terminates an established connection (cf. normal termination with FIN), or indicates that a socket is not listening for connections.…

• Comment posted Nov 29, 2007 10:45 pm PST — by The Famous Brett Watson
  Richard, the source you cited includes the following explanation. So the only way to make this protocol stable is to actively limit the amount of data queued at the cable modem for upstream delivery, and only way to do that…

• Comment posted Nov 29, 2007 5:09 am PST — by The Famous Brett Watson
  From a technical perspective, TCP RST packets are not a reasonable way for an intermediate party to enforce bandwidth policies. In fact, I can't think of a legitimate reason why an intermediate third party would ever generate this signal. For…

DNSSEC: Once More, With Feeling!

• Comment posted Dec 17, 2007 5:12 am PST — by The Famous Brett Watson
  Geoff Huston said: Who does, who should, and who should not have the ability to authorize changes to the root zone and the process of consultation and signoff for such changes may well be a fascintating topic, but to suppose…

• Comment posted Dec 12, 2007 3:22 am PST — by The Famous Brett Watson
  DNSSEC may have quite dismal prospects of being deployed in actual practice, but look on the bright side: if DNSSEC were completely and perfectly deployed right now, it would not be addressing the latest and greatest DNS-related attack, which involves…

68,000 Open Recursive DNS Servers Behaving Maliciously; "This is a crime with few witnesses"

• Comment posted Dec 12, 2007 12:55 am PST — by The Famous Brett Watson
  The attack discussed in the article involves the use of malware to modify the resolver settings on the (Windows-based) victim system so that it queries a malicious DNS server. This is a more advanced form of the old trick where…

Up to 300 Megawatt Worth of Keepalive Messages to be Saved by IPv6?

• Comment posted Jan 08, 2008 12:53 am PST — by The Famous Brett Watson
  But does IPv6 result in reduced power consumption, particularly in light of its substantially increased header size? Think of all those extra bytes in every single packet, and all the energy they consume. IPv6 might cause the ice caps to…

IPv6: Do as I Say or Do as I Do?

• Comment posted Feb 11, 2008 11:46 am PST — by The Famous Brett Watson
  VoIP on IPv6 allows you to talk to other VoIP on IPv6 users, which leaves it far from "killer app" status at this point in time.

IPv6 in Slovak Academic Network

• Comment posted Mar 01, 2008 3:53 am PST — by The Famous Brett Watson
  Datastream is not delivered to every user (unicast) but to the whole group of users (anycast). Don't you mean "multicast" for delivery to all members of a group?

Don't Register Your Domain in the U.S. if it's Controversial

• Comment posted Mar 07, 2008 2:47 am PST — by The Famous Brett Watson
  John, I don't disagree with your analysis, but I think you've misunderstood my point. There are two issues here, and I've tried to keep them separate. The first issue is that the US Treasury Department is able to enforce this…

• Comment posted Mar 06, 2008 2:12 am PST — by The Famous Brett Watson
  @Dave Zan: If the US government starts exerting control farther up the chain, such as on US-based registries, or ICANN itself, it may well precipitate a revolution. The revolution may split the DNS very badly, but it's a question of…

Microsoft's Contribution Was TCP/IP

• Comment posted Apr 26, 2008 3:24 am PDT — by The Famous Brett Watson
  Microsoft has such a large influence on the desktop computing environment that any technology decision they make has the potential to swing adoption one way or another. Should we thank Microsoft for TCP/IP? I don't think so: they merely chose…

CIRA Creates Backdoor WHOIS Exceptions for Police and IP Owners

• Comment posted Jun 11, 2008 4:10 pm PDT — by The Famous Brett Watson
  Privacy is a balance. Well, actually it's an all out tug-o-war between conflicting interests. Unfortunately, it's usually the legitimate users who have the most to lose. I suspect that the average cybercriminal only uses anonymous registration because it's checked by…

Domain Registrars Releasing Suspended Domains to Attackers

• Comment posted Jun 12, 2008 5:37 am PDT — by The Famous Brett Watson
  Fergie wrote: This must be corrected, or the Internet will continue to slide into a state where every domain is untrusted, every domain is suspect, and there will be no trust in the entire domain registry process system whatsoever. What…

Potential Danger Ahead for Registrants: dot-info Abusive Domain Use Policy

• Comment posted Jun 23, 2008 3:07 am PDT — by The Famous Brett Watson
  Spam and botnets are illegal under certain laws in certain countries for certain values of "spam" and "botnets". An indeterminate number of other things are also illegal, depending on whose law is being enforced. The USA, for example, has an…

No Fines for Comcast

• Comment posted Jul 28, 2008 10:18 pm PDT — by The Famous Brett Watson
  Shouldn't an ISP like Comcast have enough Bandwidth/Infrastructure to support the advertised Bandwidth if all customers are concurrently using all of their connections' Bandwidth? No. There would be no economy of scale worth mentioning if that were the case, and…

• Comment posted Jul 15, 2008 11:06 pm PDT — by The Famous Brett Watson
  I'm not sure if I'm reading you right, but I sense that you have a bit of doubt that the P2P problem actually exists. I don't doubt that P2P is posing a problem. I don't doubt that it creates a…

• Comment posted Jul 15, 2008 1:37 am PDT — by The Famous Brett Watson
  This is a re-statement of the problem, not an explanation. Furthermore, this re-statement seems to be slightly different to the problem we have already discussed: it does not mention the DOCSIS upstream congestion problem, and seems to exclude cable modems…

• Comment posted Jul 14, 2008 4:30 am PDT — by The Famous Brett Watson
  Richard Bennett wrote: I'm yet to read a comment from you, Brett, that puts forward a serious argument. Making personal attacks may be amusing, but it doesn't advance the debate. The lack of a "serious argument" on my part is…

• Comment posted Jul 14, 2008 1:38 am PDT — by The Famous Brett Watson
  Richard Bennett said: ...I make my living doing network engineering and I don't want my profession equated with dealing drugs. For one thing, I don't recall having seen that parallel drawn before. For another thing, it's a ridiculous assertion and…

• Comment posted Jul 13, 2008 2:56 pm PDT — by The Famous Brett Watson
  Ian Woollard said: I'm constantly stunned at how badly Richard Bennett fails to get this stuff. I think you have a problem with your expectations. Richard is clearly an advocate or apologist for Comcast: his knowledge and competence are being…

Shouting 'Bug' on a Crowded Internet...

• Comment posted Jul 22, 2008 10:37 pm PDT — by The Famous Brett Watson
  Shouting 'bug' on a crowded internet is just as dangerous as shouting 'fire' in a crowded theatre, even in societies where free speech is valued and protected by law, and we should not assume that full disclosure is always the…

Possible First Attacks on DNS Flaw Have Been Reported

• Comment posted Jul 30, 2008 5:32 am PDT — by The Famous Brett Watson
  My observation (about the need to block spoofed UDP packets) is surely common knowledge… One would certainly hope that it's common knowledge in the appropriate circles. Even so, just in case it's slipped someone's notice, it's worth mentioning that address…

Another Wrong-Headed WSJ Editorial

• Comment posted Aug 04, 2008 6:36 am PDT — by The Famous Brett Watson
  Richard, if I weren't open to the idea that management using TCP Resets might be a reasonable idea, I would not have hammered you for specific details in such a frustrating and unfruitful exchange over such a long period. In…

• Comment posted Aug 03, 2008 2:00 pm PDT — by The Famous Brett Watson
  Is flow management the issue here, seriously, or is it just an irrelevant example? If flow management is the problem, then the solution would seem to be "don't do it". Why bias performance in favour of those who open many…

• Comment posted Aug 02, 2008 6:48 am PDT — by The Famous Brett Watson
  Richard Bennet claims, as he does at every opportunity… the TCP Reset is actually the only way to reduce the connection count down to something reasonable. If your network depends on there being a manageable quantity of open TCP connections,…

Hunting Unicorns: Myths and Realities of the Net Neutrality Debate

• Comment posted Aug 11, 2008 4:59 pm PDT — by The Famous Brett Watson
  The language you've used assumes variable pricing for limited services: specifically, you introduce the "bigger bills" bugbear, and all the associated fuss over whether traffic was solicited or not. For plans which are fixed in price but bandwidth-capped, these are…

• Comment posted Aug 11, 2008 2:27 pm PDT — by The Famous Brett Watson
  You make it sound like it's a choice between metered access and unlimited access. As I've pointed out elsewhere, the bulk of broadband services in Australia are neither metered nor unlimited, but rather limited on a gigabytes-per-month basis, and throttled…

• Comment posted Aug 09, 2008 3:44 am PDT — by The Famous Brett Watson
  Dan, the trouble with drawing the copyright aspect of the issue into the argument is that it downplays the damage being done to the legitimate users of the application. By analogy, just because ~95% of email is spam doesn't mean…

• Comment posted Aug 08, 2008 4:45 am PDT — by The Famous Brett Watson
  Dan, I realise that you like to address every conceivable aspect of a problem simultaneously [example], but I find that this muddies the waters. It's therefore somewhat exasperating to me that you've introduced the matter of "ILLEGAL STEALING OF COPYRIGHT…

• Comment posted Aug 05, 2008 6:02 pm PDT — by The Famous Brett Watson
  Myth 1: The Internet can be "neutral" towards all types of applications Status: true! The Internet can be and usually is neutral towards applications. No matter which ISP you use, most of the Internet is someone else, and although your…

Google's Cerf Offers Alternate Strategy to Metered Broadband Billing

• Comment posted Aug 05, 2008 11:31 am PDT — by The Famous Brett Watson
  Over the years, most Australian broadband ISPs have settled on fixed price plans with data limits and throttling (although not exclusively so). A low-end (but not bottom-end) service might offer 3GB of data per month, plus a bonus 3GB in…