At 07:01 PM 8/12/00 -0500, Jim Choate wrote:
I believe one of the consequences of increased commercial and governmental
regulation of the 'Internet' will be the rise of private neighborhoods or
communities of users sharing name and resource space that isn't available
globaly.
There's no point in using a neighborhood name space that's
not available globally for a resource that _is_ connected globally -
you just hang your space as a 3LD or 4LD or 5LD under the existing DNS,
like julie.jimsfriends.ssz.com or julie.myfriends.billstewart.my-ip.net,
where my-ip.net is one of the free DNS services.
The purpose for having TLD space that's not part of the main DNS system
is so you can have cool-looking domain names (4LDs aren't as cool),
which isn't necessary for neighborhood name spaces.
The question of what name space to use for a non-global IP is more complex -
you may have a firewall or virtual private network running 10.x addresses.
You can still use a FakeTLD or 3LD or 4LD for your names, but the machines
will only be accessible from the outside world if you're using proxies
(I'm counting MX servers at your firewall as proxies - but why use emails
like
[EMAIL PROTECTED] instead of [EMAIL PROTECTED]?)
The place it gets messy is when you want URLs that look the same from
inside and outside the firewall, like www.research.att.com.
One approach is to have the firewall differentiate between
externals like www.research.att.com and internals like printer.sanfran.att.com
and fetch the material from outside when an insider wants it.
Another is to use a master copy inside and copy updates to the outside
version,
so insiders are seeing a server in 10.x space and outsiders see public IP.
We also need a public store and forward network for sending e-mail and
low-bandwidth traffic up and down the interstates using CB radio's and
1200 baud packet modems. Why wait around for the gov to come up with some
commercial only solution?
The problem is that the government regulates the spectrum to protect the
interests of big business the public, so there are limits
on what technology is available for data. Amateur Packet Radio
had done the technology development, but of course you need licenses,
and enough amateurs _Believe_ in that sort of thing that unlicensed users or
encrypted traffic will get hunted down. CB radio probably bans data,
not that anybody's cared about the rules on CB radio for decades,
but the radio problems are tougher because of interference from
some yahoo in Florida with a 100-horsepower linear amplifier on his truck
(that's 74600 watts) and long-distance propagation at those low
frequencies.
There is unlicensed spectrum in 900MHz and 2.4GHz bands, and companies like
Metricom / Ricochet do make equipment and services that use them.
You tend to need a high concentration of users to make that practical;
there's commercial service in the Bay Area and a few other cities and
airports,
and people have done private MosquitoNets, primarily around Stanford.
Of course there _is_ still UUCP and FidoNet technology - the first email link
into Tonga was UUCP. Fidonet tends to have restrictions on sending
encrypted data,
partly because they wanted to deal with the billing problems since it ran on
unsubsidized telephone calls, so your email message might cost the net
hundreds if not thousands of dollars if it went internationally instead of
within US local calling areas. Anything using dialup modems is of course
traceable, but the remaining parts of uucpnet and fidonet may still have
Obscurity value.
Fidonet names didn't have ego-conflict problems - nobody much cares about
the commercial/uniqueness value of being Node123 in Zone 4,
and the addresses mapped into DNS as something like n123.z4.fido.net.
UUCP names inherently had conflicts, but it was a mostly local namespace,
so you could and did have 20 machines named mozart and 17 named bilbo,
and the conflicts that mattered were who got to use the name at the
popular hub machines like ihnp4, allegra, and uunet,
though ihnp4!mozart! might point to a different machine than uunet!mozart!
and it was OK. The .uucp DNS namespace was a real hack; I think it
was resolved by connectivity to uunet, but I'm not sure that was consistent.
Thanks!
Bill
Bill Stewart, [EMAIL PROTECTED]
PGP Fingerprint D454 E202 CBC8 40BF 3C85 B884 0ABE 4639
