CircleID

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Ye Olde DNS

• Comment posted Aug 29, 2003 4:30 pm PDT — by Mike O'Donnell
  Bob has hit an important nail right on the head. I strongly encourage everybody to read the clear pithy dotDNS essay. We focus far too much on the particular bundle of functions in the current DNS. Those functions can be…

Special Coverage: Domains Gone Wild!

• Comment posted Sep 18, 2003 7:13 pm PDT — by Mike O'Donnell
  dotDNS is a partial solution to hijacking This is a good time to look at Bob Frankston's dotDNS proposal for a layer of reliable but meaningless domain names: http://www.circleid.com/article/225_0_1_0_C. dotDNS lookups can be made self-verifiable using public-key signatures, but without…

Breaking the Internet's Consensus Rule

• Comment posted Sep 24, 2003 8:00 pm PDT — by Mike O'Donnell
  We can "route around" Verisign The DNS root zone, as supported by Verisign, bundles together two different services: 1. Handle service: a handle is a token (not necessarily humanly readable or mnemonic) that can be owned by a user and…

Site Finder as Starting Point for True Innovation Above DNS

• Comment posted Oct 21, 2003 3:20 pm PDT — by Mike O'Donnell
  "what does it add, what does it break, and how can we fix anything it breaks?" Those aren't really the key questions. They draw all attention to the "what"s that are already around. The key questions are 1. "Does it…

NAT: Just Say No

• Comment posted Nov 01, 2003 4:23 am PST — by Mike O'Donnell
  NAT has nothing essential to do with security. Packet filtering is useful for security. Packet filtering is often bundled with NAT, but is completely independent. Packet filtering can be installed on any bottleneck with or without NAT. Mike O'Donnell

Lobbying for Whois Privacy

• Comment posted Nov 01, 2003 4:27 am PST — by Mike O'Donnell
  We don't really need policy here. We just need one sponsor with a well defended 2d level domain (nicesponsor.org) who is willing to provide 4th level domains (nemo.anonymousdomains.nicesponsor.org) to anonymous requesters. Mike O'Donnell

Blissful Ignorance: Placement Prostituting the Press

• Comment posted Nov 18, 2003 4:38 pm PST — by Mike O'Donnell
  "Quo vadis"? That means, "Where are you going?" I think you want "cui bono?"

Market Forces Should Control Registry Services?

• Comment posted Dec 03, 2003 12:05 am PST — by Mike O'Donnell
  "Market Forces Should Control Registry Services?" Of course they should. But Verisign's hijacking of unregistered domain names was not mediated by any market forces. It completely bypassed the market for domain name registration. The particular qualities of the SiteFinder hosts…

When Did We Give Away the Internet?

• Comment posted Dec 13, 2003 7:08 pm PST — by Mike O'Donnell
  "And who ultimately is in charge of the Domain Name System? You are. You determine what domains you view. Somewhere on your personal computer is a configuration option that determines where you go to resolve top-level domains, ..." I think…

Letting DNS Loose

• Comment posted Jan 12, 2004 2:39 am PST — by Mike O'Donnell
  From Brad Neuberg's comment: "While I believe that Zooko is correct in identifying that you can't achieve complete decentralization, complete security, and human-friendly names at the same time, I do feel that it is possible to have both security and…

Using Whois to Enforce Law?

• Comment posted Feb 10, 2004 5:38 pm PST — by Mike O'Donnell
  "I've been thinking of writing an anonymous DNS registration system ...—this system would issue digitally signed certificates of ownership of a domain and retain no record of who those certificates were issued to. Amendments to domain information would require the…

DNS WHOIS: Barking Up the Wrong Tree

• Comment posted Jul 06, 2004 1:30 pm PDT — by Mike O'Donnell
  We need a lot more thinking in this style. We naturally wish to defend methods that were very agreeable in the good old days. But not all of those methods continue to serve in a much larger and more diverse…

So, Who Really Did Invent the Internet?

• Comment posted May 07, 2005 5:39 pm PDT — by Mike O'Donnell
  Please stop tossing off tangential references to the false story that Al Gore claimed to invent the internet: "historians seem to agree ... that it was not ... Al Gore." Read the actual inverview in which he said something quite…

Introductory Remarks from Innovation '08

• Comment posted Jun 17, 2008 2:56 am PDT — by Mike O'Donnell
  BTW, neither the Breslau/Shenker analysis of reservations, nor mine, really depend on the reservations going end-to-end. Any reservation of resource at any point in the path (including the beginning and end) is subject to the same probabilistic phenomena. As I…

• Comment posted Jun 17, 2008 2:40 am PDT — by Mike O'Donnell
  "The previous question was about adding bandwidth to eliminate congestion. Before we go off on this tangent, do you agree with my arithmetic on that point?" Sure, I did the exercise in Peterson & Davie, and I understand how increased…

• Comment posted Jun 17, 2008 1:56 am PDT — by Mike O'Donnell
  "What you have to do to reduce congestion is to add bandwidth in such a way that it's not immediately consumed, and that turns out to be an impossible task." I'm not convinced that reducing congestion is, by itself, a…

• Comment posted Jun 17, 2008 1:28 am PDT — by Mike O'Donnell
  "For years we've been told that adding symmetric capacity to the Internet and its access networks would obviate the need for rationing and QoS, but that's simply a myth." Oh dear. It's hard to get a grip on statements that…

• Comment posted Jun 17, 2008 12:59 am PDT — by Mike O'Donnell
  Now, I'm very confused about what you are claiming, so I despair of understanding well enough to get insight regarding the claims. From the article: "This problem is not going to be solved simply by adding bandwidth to the network"…

• Comment posted Jun 16, 2008 8:53 pm PDT — by Mike O'Donnell
  I won't be offended if you get bored with this little point and drop it. But I don't want to leave the impression that things are settled in any simple way. "P2P can tolerate a lot more jitter than VoIP…

• Comment posted Jun 16, 2008 4:33 pm PDT — by Mike O'Donnell
  The presentation of a sound signal to the ear is very sensitive to jitter in the transmission of the sound wave. But that doesn't imply that VoIP network services are inherently sensitive to jitter in the network. Assuming sufficient buffer…

• Comment posted Jun 16, 2008 4:00 am PDT — by Mike O'Donnell
  So, from another point of view, a communication link with high latency and low jitter is actually performing the buffering within the network. It's a lot of fun (which I'll leave to someone else) to caculate how many bits might…

• Comment posted Jun 16, 2008 3:55 am PDT — by Mike O'Donnell
  Another technical point to pick at: "the real distinction is between jitter sensitive and insensitive applications," I have heard concerns about jitter before, and have studied them rather carefully. I am not at all confident that they are wrong, but…

• Comment posted Jun 16, 2008 3:41 am PDT — by Mike O'Donnell
  I generally agree with the attitude of this particular Anonymous Coward. But I think that it is more important to learn precisely what is and isn't going on on the Internet than to affirm or deny particular attitudes. So, I'll…

• Comment posted Jun 16, 2008 3:16 am PDT — by Mike O'Donnell
  This is a very useful article as a starting point for thinking. But that thinking should lead us to examine, and in some cases contradict, some of the statements that it presents as obvious. For those who worry: I'm not…

RIAA Loses Again: No Legal Wins Against P2P File Sharers So Far

• Comment posted Sep 30, 2008 6:42 pm PDT — by Mike O'Donnell
  the verdict reaffirms that simply making a copyrighted work available is not the same as actually distributing the work There is no verdict. The court recently vacated the old verdict, mainly due to improper jury instructions. on appeal (i.e., after…

Comcast is Right, the FCC is Wrong

• Comment posted Sep 30, 2008 8:40 pm PDT — by Mike O'Donnell
  I run NAT on my house network because, presumably due to the delay in deploying IPV6, it is not cost-effective for me to pay my ISP to provide me with more than one IPv4 address. When I run NAT, I…

• Comment posted Sep 30, 2008 7:03 pm PDT — by Mike O'Donnell
  The more significant point is whether it's reasonable to prioritize applications according to their unique requirements at all. That point so dwarfs the pedantic discussion of one technique over another as to render it moot. Stunningly wrong. The more significant…

• Comment posted Sep 30, 2008 6:58 pm PDT — by Mike O'Donnell
  Brett Watson explained the reason why the TCP reset packets generated by Comcast are properly viewed as "forged" much better than I would have. There is so much distracting noise in the ensuing discussion, that I think it worth adding…