Statements against new.net?

Wed Mar 14 04:00:29 UTC 2001

> Oh, that's right, Usenet is still usable, with fairly comprehensive
> guidelines on how hierarchy and group maintainers can keep things running
> smoothly. Even in the face of different news servers having different
> namespaces. Funny, that.

DO you think so? It *is* acceptable (to some, not everyone) that an article posted
in a group may not make it all the way around the world because my server's
copy of a NG is different from one with the same name over there.
But I don't think it would be at all acceptable if my email address had a different
owner over there. There *is* a difference in a basic naming scheme that is the basis
for a large multitude of communication systems and one that is specific to one
non-mission critical service.

> What exactly scares you so much about this? The fact that individual
> nameserver operators are realizing that they are the ultimate authorities
> over their DNS infrastructure, rather than a political commitee? (Why am
> I suddenly reminded of the "Grassroots DNS" effort that someone 
> put forth a
> few years back?)

I don't know what scares him. What scares me is that a decision made by my
brother's ISP back in Germany might impact whether email he sends to me
could go to a different person altogether. And he would not have an easy choice
which ISP to chose, because each one might have a different view of the DNS and
namespace, thus making it impossible to decide which ISP to use at all.
The fact that services like email perform DNS lookups at every hop along the way
(from the initial MX lookups via the reverse lookps, sender-domain checks to
fight SPAM etc) would mean that no-one could say whether the emailevenhad a chance
reaching me.

And this is only email. Other services will introduce other chances for amiguities etc altogether.
The upshot of all this would be that no-one can rely on email and the Internet as a medium
for communication (and e-commerce etc) would be finished.

And don't think once this mistake is realized it would be easy (or fast) to turn bak the time
to a sane state, as AFAIK there is no complete record of the current state and disputes over
what is and is not to be part of the restored Internet would be legion.

Mathias