Brandon Bailey reporting on Mercury News: "In a surprising twist, Sun Microsystems announced this morning that it will be acquired by Oracle in a deal worth roughly $7.4 billion, or $5.6 billion net after accounting for Sun's cash and debt. The news comes just a few weeks after earlier talks for IBM to buy Sun [link] collapsed..." more
A Twitter thread on trolls brought up mention of trolls on Usenet. The reason they were so hard to deal with, even then, has some lessons for today; besides, the history is interesting. (Aside: this is, I think, the first longish thing I've ever written about any of the early design decisions for Usenet. I should note that this is entirely my writing, and memory can play many tricks across nearly 40 years.) more
By any metric, the queries and responses that take place in the DNS are highly informative of the Internet and its use. But perhaps the level of interdependencies in this space is richer than we might think. When the IETF considered a proposal to explicitly withhold certain top-level domains from delegation in the DNS the ensuing discussion highlighted the distinction between the domain name system as a structured space of names and the domain name system as a resolution space... more
As part of a larger effort to make the internet more private, the IETF defined two protocols to encrypt DNS queries between clients (stub resolvers) and resolvers: DNS over TLS in RFC 7858 (DoT) and DNS over HTTPS in RFC 8484 (DoH). As with all new internet protocols, DoT and DoH will continue to evolve as deployment experience is gained, and they're applied to more use cases. more
Can we develop better transport protocols for communication across the Internet? In a world where the "end-to-end" principle is no longer certain and middleboxes are common, which paths through the Internet are actually available to applications? Which transports can be used over these paths? How can applications cooperate with network elements to improve path establishment and discovery? ... These are all questions posed for the Internet Architecture Board's (IAB) Workshop on Stack Evolution in a Middlebox Internet (SEMI). Taking place in Zürich, Switzerland from 26-27 January, 2015. more
The posting with a similar name seems a bit contrived by anonymous in some strange attempt to enhance its significance. Many others, including myself, have been discussing this subject for some time. Indeed, a concerted lobbying effort and anti-competitive efforts by legacy TCP/IP internet stakeholders have been really ramped up over the past year to mischaracterize what is occurring. more
Having Comcast et al provide Internet connectivity is like having your barber do surgery because he knows how to use a knife. I was reminded of this when my Comcast connection failed. This is part of the larger topic of consumerization. In the past, we were happy to have products that worked at all. I grew up in the world of consumer products and got my start in software building online services meant for use by non-experts. more
As much as we talk here about the inner workings of the Internet's infrastructure, there are times when you have to just sit back and look at how incredibly cool some of the things are that are enabled by the Internet. For example, last week I was delighted to stumble across this excellent music video collaboration between the International Space Station's Canadian commander Chris Hadfield, the Canadian band Barenaked Ladies along with a Canadian student choir. more
No, that title is not a typo. The WHOIS service and the underlying protocol are a relic of another Internet age and need to be replaced. At the recent ICANN 43 conference in Costa Rica, WHOIS was on just about every meeting agenda because of two reasons. First, the Security and Stability Advisory Committee put out SAC 051 which called for a replacement WHOIS protocol and at ICANN 43, there was a panel discussion on such a replacement. The second reason was the draft report from the WHOIS Policy Review Team. more
The other day several of us were gathered in a conference room on the 17th floor of the LinkedIn building in San Francisco, looking out of the windows as we discussed some various technical matters. All around us, there were new buildings under construction, with that tall towering crane anchored to the building in several places. We wondered how that crane was built, and considered how precise the building process seemed to be to the complete mess building a network seems to be. more
Geoff Huston, APNIC's Chief Scientist, is visiting the RIPE NCC this week to spend time with his fellow Regional Internet Registries (RIR) colleagues and to strengthen collaboration on shared projects. We've used this opportunity to invite him to produce the 'Interesting Graph of the Week'. Geoff has been monitoring the global routing system for many years. Here are his most recent observations. more
Our goal was to announce Usenet at the January, 1980 Usenix meeting. In those days, Usenix met at universities; it was a small, comaparatively informal organization, and didn't require hotel meeting rooms and the like. (I don't know just when Usenix started being a formal academic-style conference; I do know that it was no later than 1984, since I was on the program committee that year for what would later be called the Annual Technical Conference.) more
With the upcoming celebration of the 50 years of the Internet, I'm trying to figure out how the traditional story misses the powerful idea that has made the Internet what it is -- the ability to focus on solutions without having to think about the network or providers. It's not the web -- thought that is one way to use the opportunity. The danger in a web-centric view is that it leads one to make the Internet better for the web while closing the frontier of innovation. more
We knew that Usenet needed some sort of management system, and we knew that that would require some sort of authentication, for users, sites, and perhaps posts. We didn't add any, though -- and why we didn't is an interesting story. The obvious solution was something involving public key cryptography, which we (the original developers of the protocol: Tom Truscott, the late Jim Ellis, and myself) knew about: all good geeks at the time had seen Martin Gardner's "Mathematical Games" column... more
Running a DNS server that serves the root gives an interesting view into the world of the DNS. With the ongoing improvements to the ICANN operated L-ROOT, we've been fortunate enough to be able to make use of the "DNS Statistics Collector" (DSC) tool. "DSC" allows us to generate different views of the DNS queries we have been seeing at the L-ROOT systems. more
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