Statements against new.net?

Thu Mar 15 08:08:42 UTC 2001

At 11:21 PM 3/14/2001, Vadim Antonov wrote:
>And so does any web browser and even all popular e-mail software.  The
>point is: you don't _remember_ e-mail addresses with their FQDNs, you look
>them up in the address book.

I remember FQDN's.

I know where to email when I want to reach abuse at some.isp too. I also know 
how to tell someone over coffee what my address is, or my mom's email address.

For that matter, she remembers my email address, FQDN and all. This is a 
woman who labeled every port and every cable with matching labels like "a", 
"b", etc, just to move her desktop to a different room in the house.

Labels have an intrinsic value that goes far beyond the scope of the 
internet, and even beyond the scope of language.

A name. What is a name? A rose by any other name... Wouldn't be a rose 
anymore, would it? We place immense value in names. When you are sick, the 
first thing you want to know is the name of the disease. When you see 
someone, someone that stirs the ancient hormonal need to breed, what do you 
want to know? A name. When something is discovered, be it molecule or star, 
organism or crystalline formation, what do we do to mark the occasion? We 
name it. And then we name the day we named it, so we can celebrate that name.

Trying to divorce names from our thought processes (even if only in this 
one area) would be painful (if possible at all) to the general populace. 
Not to mention the damage it would do to marketing campaigns (print, radio, 
and TV).

>Long-term memory is _much_ better remembering gestalts than precise ASCII
>strings.  I'm exchanging e-mail with my colleague nearly every day, but
>i can't remember what exactly variant of spelling is used for his name
>(there's at least sixteen ways to spell his name in English, each as good
>as any other :).

Methinks he needs a shorter alias.

>What i learned so far - if technology aims to change human nature, it
>fails.  It is very naive to assume that brotherhood of technologists will
>stay cooperative when real money gets in.  I do not like it any more than
>any other techie, but let's face reality.  The control of domain name
>space is passing from technologists to lawyers and politicos.

Only if we bend over and lube for it.

>What i am proposing is to remove the contention point. When "names" do not
>have intrinsic value, nobody'll fight over them.  Do you see many scandals
>around people who own cool IP addresses? :)

No, but I bet you would see a mad dash for 123.123.123.123 and the like if 
your proposal were to take hold.

> > There's a lot of other stuff behind that, but, I think that you get the
> > point.
>
>The Internet is successful precisely because it is decentralized.  There
>is absolutely no reason to make the few "natural" central points
>vulnerable by having them to dispense what is considered intrinsically
>valuable property. (Thanks God, NAT made IP address allocations somewhat
>less critical).

The Internet is only useful because of standardization (IP, TCP, UDP, SNMP, 
ICMP, the list goes on forever). Otherwise, we are left sitting in a dark 
room with 200 other people... all speaking different languages.

Let's just ditch this whole "Internet" thing and go back to BBSes, shall we?

~Ben, blah blah speaks for himself blah not reflect blah blah employer
---
    Ben Browning <benb at theriver.com>
       The River Internet Access Co.
              Network Operations
1-877-88-RIVER  http://www.theriver.com