Comments

Proposed New IETF Standard Would Create a Nationally Partitioned "Internet"

• Comment posted Jun 20, 2012 5:23 pm PDT — by Paul Hoffman
  ...that the last paragraph is clear. My issue is with the title and the first paragraph. ...and that I won't call you that name again, nor will I play poker with you in any jurisdiction. We disagree that the proposal…

• Comment posted Jun 19, 2012 10:51 pm PDT — by Paul Hoffman
  We agree that "The message is not technology, it is political". However, Milt's political message is "this proposal to the IETF is important so you should be afraid", and he knows that to be false. Anyone can propose any bad…

• Comment posted Jun 19, 2012 10:14 pm PDT — by Paul Hoffman
  The headline and intro paragraph are FUD. Anyone can submit any stupid idea to the IETF and ask that it become a standard. Making that act sound important is disingenuous at best. The discussion of the draft has already shown…

Providing Persistent Domain Names Under .ARPA

• Comment posted Dec 15, 2011 5:48 pm PST — by Paul Hoffman
  The conclusion of this article (and, if the author is correct, the conclusion of the meeting) is based on the flawed assumption that all infrastructure is the same. The extension envisioned here is just plain silly. If IANA or the…

IDN Evolution Discussed at ICANN Cartagena

• Comment posted Dec 20, 2010 4:33 pm PST — by Paul Hoffman
  It is not clear from your article if the new Affilias software uses the EAI protocol mentioned in the paragraph earlier. That would be an important piece of information for people deciding what software to use.

ITU, the Internet, and a Very Contentious Footnote

• Comment posted Nov 30, 2010 5:29 pm PST — by Paul Hoffman
  "Finally, it is important to note that resolutions decided after weeks of late nights are not always as clear as they could be." If they are unavailable (which it certainly appears), how can we tell if they are unclear?

Putting String Similarity into Context: Bulgaria's IDN (.бг) vs. Brazil's ccTLD (.br)

• Comment posted Aug 12, 2010 2:40 pm PDT — by Paul Hoffman
  The new TLD equivalents should be full names, not abbreviations. How many abbreviations should a country get? How many per script? Many languages don't have proper abbreviations, so allowing them puts countries with those languages at a distinct disadvantage. I…

• Comment posted Aug 11, 2010 5:48 pm PDT — by Paul Hoffman
  Is бг the proper name for Bulgaria, or just an abbreviation? If the latter, is it so common that it should be used as the TLD instead of the proper name? According to Wikipedia (an admittedly flawed source), the proper…

DNS, Content Providers Including Google and Neustar Propose Extending DNS Protocol

• Comment posted Jan 28, 2010 5:38 pm PST — by Paul Hoffman
  The proposal was submitted by a few engineers who work for "Google and other DNS and content providers such as Neustar/UltraDNS", *not* by the companies themselves. The IETF takes submissions from individuals, not from companies. There might be people at…

Obama's Missed Opportunity

• Comment posted Mar 26, 2009 8:41 pm PDT — by Paul Hoffman
  "Crawford understands the Internet in metaphoric terms, not as a real thing." Hrm. The Susan Crawford I have spoken with about the Internet understood it as a real thing. She spoke about actual protocols and bits on the wire, more…

• Comment posted Mar 26, 2009 3:23 pm PDT — by Paul Hoffman
  The article you quoted (which still has not been substantiated in the real news, as far as I can tell), says "She will likely hold the title of special assistant to the president for science, technology, and innovation policy, they…

Memo to John Markoff: There are No "Do Overs" in History

• Comment posted Mar 03, 2009 5:00 pm PST — by Paul Hoffman
  ...both about not often agreeing with Mliton and that this time I do. Excellent analysis, and a punchline that summarizes the problem quite well.

Comcast Proposes Its IPv6 Transition Solution to IETF, Invites ISPs to Participate

• Comment posted Jul 23, 2008 3:04 pm PDT — by Paul Hoffman
  It's nice that Comcast is working to roll out IPv6, but that's not the topic of the story. The story is about a specific solution. Notice that the article said "Durand points out that Comcast has not yet committed to…

• Comment posted Jul 22, 2008 10:13 pm PDT — by Paul Hoffman
  The fact that there is a first draft by someone who works at company Foo in the IETF drafts directory is meaningless. There are a zillion of them. Alain works for Comcast, but he has already said that he wants…

Lack of DNSSec Adoption Due to Standard's Inherent Complexity

• Comment posted Nov 20, 2007 7:03 pm PST — by Paul Hoffman
  The article misses the major reason why DNSsec (however you want to capitalize it) has not caught on. If a user makes a secure DNS query and gets back an error, they are not going to know what to do,…

Developing Internet Standards: How Can the Engineering Community and the Users Meet?

• Comment posted Sep 21, 2007 5:35 pm PDT — by Paul Hoffman
  Paul Hoffman said: - The statement that There is this often expressed feeling in the engineering community that technological choices are politically neutral by design is not supported by facts. I cannot find many statements to that effect, and I…

• Comment posted Sep 21, 2007 12:25 am PDT — by Paul Hoffman
  A few important notes showing how far off-base this argument is. - The straw man argument comparing the signature on the DNSSEC root with the From: address on an email message shows a deep lack of understanding of security. Anyone…

The Inextricable Issue of Internationalized Domain Names

• Comment posted Jul 06, 2007 4:23 pm PDT — by Paul Hoffman
  Patrick Vande Walle said: ICANN may find itself in the middle of political tensions if it limits the number of accepted IDN equivalents for each ccTLD ou gTLD. The current .EH case exemplifies quite well how local political issues can…

• Comment posted Jul 06, 2007 12:23 am PDT — by Paul Hoffman
  What is wrong with giving India 24 TLDs? Given that the vast majority of countries have only one to three languages, is there really a problem with adding a thousand or so new TLDs? Have the people running the root…

.berlin TLD Awared the German Internet Award 2007

• Comment posted Jun 25, 2007 2:22 am PDT — by Paul Hoffman
  A few questions on this proposal: - Why .berlin instead of .bern, which is more linguistically correct? - How many other such localities should have their name in the root? 100? 10,000? Based on what criteria? - Would people from…

Getting WHOIS Server Address Directly from Registry

• Comment posted Apr 22, 2007 3:18 pm PDT — by Paul Hoffman
  (Trying that again...) I haven’t had that problem. I’m sure that the person at help-jwhois@gnu.org would appreciate knowing which TLDs are not working.

• Comment posted Apr 22, 2007 3:16 pm PDT — by Paul Hoffman
  I haven't had that problem. I'm sure that the person at <help-jwhois@gnu.org> would appreciate knowing which TLDs are not working.

• Comment posted Apr 22, 2007 2:55 pm PDT — by Paul Hoffman
  For those of us who use command-line interfaced, the "jwhois" package is a nice transparaent interface to all of the whois services. See the jwhois page for more info.

Vint in International Herald Tribune on IDNs

• Comment posted Oct 31, 2006 5:44 pm PST — by Paul Hoffman
  Patrick says: Paul, you may be right I kind of misquoted the article. I am right, Patrick. It is easy to veryify by reading the IHT article that you pointed to. The core of my post is still that the…

• Comment posted Oct 30, 2006 11:39 pm PST — by Paul Hoffman
  The posting is quite misleading. The IHT article says nothing like "those who want deployment of IDNs now are “political gambits”". The IHT article says that Vint "feared the network's addressing system would break down if "political gambits" by international…

Lessons for the Internet Governance Forum from the IETF

• Comment posted Oct 23, 2006 7:39 pm PDT — by Paul Hoffman
  It is a gross overstatement to say that the IETF has any governance over the Internet. The IETF makes suggestions that the vast majority of the Internet accepts, sometimes grudgingly. The IETF also makes suggestions that nearly no one accepts.…

The Future of Some Email May Not Use Email

• Comment posted Mar 07, 2006 8:40 pm PST — by Paul Hoffman
  You think it’s way off the mark to be worried about that as a precedent? About what it means for the architecture of e-mail (now one of the world’s most important media of speech)? Yes. It sounds like you trust…

• Comment posted Mar 01, 2006 9:48 pm PST — by Paul Hoffman
  Larry is somewhat correct on both counts. I don't assume the very worst about AOL's competence, but I do rate it very low. Their current handling of mailing lists (banning them outright because one user says "this is spam" when…

IDNs and IE7 and the Coming Storm

• Comment posted Feb 03, 2006 8:24 pm PST — by Paul Hoffman
  >I don’t know of anyone who’s offering this service to the public, though I suspect it won’t be long in coming. That would probably depend on whether the agreement with the zone owner even allows publishing that information. >But that…

• Comment posted Feb 03, 2006 7:36 pm PST — by Paul Hoffman
  While otherwise great, this article has a significant technical error. It says "you can’t at present search for anything except an exact match”. That is plainly incorrect. You cannot search the untranslated zone file for an exact match, but as…

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

• Comment posted Jan 20, 2006 10:07 pm PST — by Paul Hoffman
  Internationalized Domain Names (IDNs) are clearly very popular and useful. The only serious concern raised so far has been that of security in zones that do not carefully review IDNs being place in the zones. Of course, any IDN TLD…

ICANN and Legalities

• Comment posted Nov 30, 2005 6:18 pm PST — by Paul Hoffman
  Oh well, I really can’t wait to see ICANN become a for-profit U.S. Corporation. That's the problem: it already is very clearly for profit. The profits don't go to "shareholders", but they certainly go to self-perpetuation. You’d get blue helmets…