zotz

I had a very long rant composed, but I'm ditching it. The short version is that I love the "control of the internet" fight because the people having the fight really don't know what the hell they're doing, or what they're fighting over, or who it will effect how. I trust other sysadmins to at least understand the tech. I don't trust government, be it the US's or the EU's or Brazil's, or... to do right by people, to make good policy decisions, and especially not to make good technical decisions. So the EU can do what it likes, and we'll ignore them just like we ignore the Dept. of Commerce now.

Dave Hendon can go screw as long as the F-root server lives in Paul Vixie's living room (I once used one of the 13 most important computers on the internet as a foot stool!).

I just noticed a couple of things that cause me to want to reply to myself (best conversations I ever get).

• The aforementioned Paul Vixie is running a root server for ORSN, the body which Hendon apparently wants to take over from the ICANN / VeriSign / DoC triumvirate. This is being done alongside the root server he still maintains for IANA.
  
• He and a couple of other volunteers in this project are currently doing this as much to measure how the two mirror namespaces diverge as anything.
  
• ORSN, for an independent body, shows total fealty to the IANA namespace except for ". NS" RRsets, mainly because they *have* to edit that one or everything breaks at the top level. So they buy some nominal control on the TLDs, but they're still vulnerable to things like cache poisoning and wholesale rewriting of zone files as they pass over international interconnects... I don't get it. I really really don't. They've protected themselves against the Bush administration, but we're still getting operationally raped by 15 year old script kiddies in Roumania. Yay team.
  
• Am I the only person who remembers the alternic, new.net, unidt, open-rsc, and on and on and on, through however many previous attempts to spawn a viable mirror namespace?
  
• I'm still not clear on what this buys anyone, since most root nameserver operators now use anycast to spread load on the root nameservers. So, for example, f.root-servers.net isn't just Paul's box in the kitchen in San Jose anymore, but it's 26 machines, five of which are in the EU and only four of which are in the US currently.
  
• By the last count I have, 50% of all root servers are homed outside both the EU and the US.
  
• I I think I just found an error on one of the ORSN root servers. Not sure who to report this to, since I don't know who admins that machine. The zone file is older than the one linked to by the FAQ on the ORSN web site, so maybe they broke their serial numbers. <shrug>
  

Sorry, that wasn't supposed to be so long, but given all the other insanity going on today in internet governance (Level 3 and Cogent are de-peering each other, and sucking others into the fight) I've been thinking a bit about what changes can and can't really make my life suck, and the government just can't pull it off without the cooperation of the packet slingers. I think the people who fear the US government hijacking the internet haven't been paying attention to all the other reasons to fear my country right now, and the people who think they could hijack it first are sadly mistaken.

Reading the second link, I'm left wondering what exactly "control of the Internet" means. I mean, I understand TCP/IP and DNS pretty well, but I've no real idea what they hope to achieve by whatever actions they are planning, and I suspect they have less than that.

In this case, as far as I can tell, whether overseeing bodies like ICANN and IANA, and contract awards for gTLD management, should be the preserve of the US government, or whether other bodies (the ITU is the one that always gets mentioned) should have this function.

And for his next trick, get him to point the main communications antenna to Earth...