At 08:56 PM 7/21/99 -0700, you wrote:
>
>Here's what I would have said were I going to be there tomorrow....
>
> http://www.cavebear.com/cavebear/growl/
>
> --karl--
>
And I would applaud. That is a good piece of work, and what it says
brings to my mind what a terrible loss and destruction of the nature
of the internet has in fact occurred.
What was the fundamental operating principle of the ARPA net?
Not its purpose: that was to exchance scientific and technical
data relating to federal research. The operating principle was
that was to be multi-redundant: no reasonable collection of
nuclear weapons hits could knock it out.
What do we have now? NSI gets tangled up in its own web and
systems go down. If .com drops, commerce drops. If NSI yanks
the Whois by its arbitrary practices, nobody knows who anybody
is.
Multi-roots solves the problem of access to the DNS; redundant
DNS, as in a network of well known mirror sites, solves the problem
of domain name lookup.
Now what were the names of those funny organizations they used
to have? NSI? ICANN? And that huge field of arcane life forms that
sometimes sit around chewing on each other's back sides, trying to
out-tech each other, babbling about things of which few of them know
anything, but for the most part has been the only source of creative
thinking in the whole history of the internet? Wasn't it IFWP or
something like that?
Bill Lovell
