Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Chinese RFC proposes separate, independent, national internets and DNS roots

tools.ietf.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

71–80 of 81 posts

Re: Chinese RFC proposes separate, independent, national internets and DNS roots

#71

Post by Wingman4l7 »

batista wrote: post #35

> Chinese RFC proposes separate, independent, national internets and DNS roots See how it's ALWAYS about politics and never about technology? I say that for hackers that believe that political action doesn't matter, and that technology will just liberate us every time, because we can always "find workarounds for closed systems, surveillance technologies, DRM" etc... Will it do much good for you to be able to use some…

Cory Doctorow has an excellent examination of this issue (which he coins "nerd determinism") and another similar issue ("nerd fatalism") in his Guardian piece "The problem with nerd politics": http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2012/may/14/problem-ner...

For those on the go, here's a direct link to the podcast of said column: http://archive.org/download/Cory_Doctorow_Podcast_229/Cory_D...

Re: Chinese RFC proposes separate, independent, national internets and DNS roots

#72

Post by EricBurnett »

ricardobeat wrote: post #60
EricBurnett wrote: post #23

Setting aside the motivations for this draft, the idea of removing the one single DNS 'root' is a reasonable one. It acts as a single point of failure for the DNS system and puts the entire DNS hierarchy under the jurisdiction of the United States Department of Commerce. There are already existing alternative roots[1], but no interoperability between them and no standards governing them. Indeed, the IETF is strongly…

I thought there wasn't one single root, but 13? And aren't root DNS servers already de-centralized geographically and using anycast? Here is the map of current root servers: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Root-current.svg

Yes and no. There are 13 'installations' (essentially IPs), some anycasted, but they all serve the same contents that are provided by the ICANN. So they are one conceptual root, albeit a geographically distributed one. The IETF has worked hard to make it robust (successfully so far), but the fact remains that 13 hardcoded IPs and one file that comprise the root of the DNS system.

http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/DNS_root_zone has some details.

Re: Chinese RFC proposes separate, independent, national internets and DNS roots

#73

Post by connectionreset »

Volpe wrote: post #64
cocoflunchy wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The '@qq.com' part seemed more professional to me than the '644247110' part.

Phone number style email addresses are quite common in China. I assume it's because you can't have unicode email address? (can you?) And there are only a hundred or so different names (in pinyin without tone marks)...

>And there are only a hundred or so different names (in pinyin without tone marks)...

My instinct tell me that's not correct. So I did the calculation:) From the ancient Chinese surname document "百家姓" [1], there're more than 500 hundreds surnames listed. And by removing the tone marks, I got 295 unique surnames in pinyin. But these are just surnames commonly used thousand years ago. Multiple by thousands unique first names, I believe that there're at least hundreds of thousands different names in pinyin.

Of course this is still far less than the number of different names in western countries. But it's not the main reason that some people in China use number style email addresses.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_surname

Re: Chinese RFC proposes separate, independent, national internets and DNS roots

#74

Post by stock_toaster »

EricBurnett wrote: post #23

Setting aside the motivations for this draft, the idea of removing the one single DNS 'root' is a reasonable one. It acts as a single point of failure for the DNS system and puts the entire DNS hierarchy under the jurisdiction of the United States Department of Commerce. There are already existing alternative roots[1], but no interoperability between them and no standards governing them. Indeed, the IETF is strongly…

  > * 3. Ownership conflicts
I have been wondering how ownership conflicts will work with GTLDs. If someone buy's "lol." and puts up "yahoo.lol.", how is that conflict resolved since "lol." is not managed by a "neutral" company but by the people that in fact own "lol."?

Re: Chinese RFC proposes separate, independent, national internets and DNS roots

#75

Post by richardjordan »

climis wrote: post #32

Perhaps we are all wrong, the authors just want the world to know what the Chinese gov is doing with DNS poisoning and what will be ended up with if we cannot stop it.

that's an interesting thought... a subtle and sophisticated subversive act

Re: Chinese RFC proposes separate, independent, national internets and DNS roots

#76

Post by PeterisP »

The proposed draft breaks the whole concept of URI's, as they become not unique. Not speaking about the web, even on the identifier side it is quite important that something.org is a single concept, regardless from where it is accessed. Requiring all URI's to have explicit lettered roots (such as something.org.A or something.org.cn) would be a possibility; but implicitly translating from something.org to something.org.B would break things in a million places if sometimes or someplaces it is translated differently.

Re: Chinese RFC proposes separate, independent, national internets and DNS roots

#77

Post by tankenmate »

EricBurnett wrote: post #72
ricardobeat wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I thought there wasn't one single root, but 13? And aren't root DNS servers already de-centralized geographically and using anycast? Here is the map of current root servers: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Root-current.svg

Yes and no. There are 13 'installations' (essentially IPs), some anycasted, but they all serve the same contents that are provided by the ICANN. So they are one conceptual root, albeit a geographically distributed one. The IETF has worked hard to make it robust (successfully so far), but the fact remains that 13 hardcoded IPs and one file that comprise the root of the DNS system. http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/DNS_ro…

Those 13 IPs aren't as hard coded as you suggest. They typically ship with the DNS server software (ISC bind for example) but these are updated at regular intervals. As long as all 13 IPs aren't changed at once you could quite easily transition from one set of IPs to others. In ISC bind this root "cache" even has its own zone type; "hint".

Re: Chinese RFC proposes separate, independent, national internets and DNS roots

#78

Post by tankenmate »

stock_toaster wrote: post #74
EricBurnett wrote: post #23

Setting aside the motivations for this draft, the idea of removing the one single DNS 'root' is a reasonable one. It acts as a single point of failure for the DNS system and puts the entire DNS hierarchy under the jurisdiction of the United States Department of Commerce. There are already existing alternative roots[1], but no interoperability between them and no standards governing them. Indeed, the IETF is strongly…

> * 3. Ownership conflicts I have been wondering how ownership conflicts will work with GTLDs. If someone buy's "lol." and puts up "yahoo.lol.", how is that conflict resolved since "lol." is not managed by a "neutral" company but by the people that in fact own "lol."?

All new gTLDs are required to support the Uniform Dispute Resolution Policy (UDRP), the Uniform Rapid Suspension policy (URS), and the Trademark Clearing House. These policies are in differing stages of development, and in the case of the Trademark Clearing House are not even fully nailed down.

[1] http://gnso.icann.org/en/ongoing-work/issues/udrp.htm [2] http://www.icann.org/en/news/public-comment/urs-15feb10-en.h... [3] http://gnso.icann.org/meetings/transcript-sti-tch-25nov09-en...

Re: Chinese RFC proposes separate, independent, national internets and DNS roots

#80

Post by EricBurnett »

tankenmate wrote: post #77
EricBurnett wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes and no. There are 13 'installations' (essentially IPs), some anycasted, but they all serve the same contents that are provided by the ICANN. So they are one conceptual root, albeit a geographically distributed one. The IETF has worked hard to make it robust (successfully so far), but the fact remains that 13 hardcoded IPs and one file that comprise the root of the DNS system. http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/DNS_ro…

Those 13 IPs aren't as hard coded as you suggest. They typically ship with the DNS server software (ISC bind for example) but these are updated at regular intervals. As long as all 13 IPs aren't changed at once you could quite easily transition from one set of IPs to others. In ISC bind this root "cache" even has its own zone type; "hint".

Thanks, I wasn't aware they changed regularly. From what I can find, 4 v4 IPs have changed since 1997, plus the addition of a number of v6 IPs over the years. I'd be curious to know the last time all IPs were different, if ever.
Post reply on HN