Archive for Sys Admin category:
Internationalisation of DNS continues
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Like most original internet standards, the DNS was designed to initially suit the needs of any section of the world that could communicate using 7-bit ASCII and Latin character sets. Then the internet became really popular. Everywhere. The DNS had to evolve to cope with naming schemes that came from alphabets all [...]
Text editors to be placed on endangered species list
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When men were men and text was text, I could open a text editor, then put some, err, text in, and then save it as text. Then Apple released Leopard, the latest version of their operating system which shipped with the usual text editor (called Text Edit). And it doesn’t let me save [...]
If VoIP kills phreaking, who are tomorrow’s engineers?
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“Ma Bell is a system I want to explore. It’s a beautiful system, you know, but Ma Bell screwed up. It’s terrible because Ma Bell is such a beautiful system, but she screwed up. I learned how she screwed up from a couple of blind kids who wanted me to build a device. A certain [...]
Making the right ipv6 noises
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I’ve been allowing the webcast of RIPE55 to mutter away in my ears all week and have let myself get distracted from time to time when the topics turned relevant to networks I operate or the chatter got interesting. A bit like the end of today’s ipv6-wg session.
Six months ago I was quite sure that [...]
Making Round Robin DNS usable.
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I have been fairly consistently telling people a lie for the last ten years – and that is that Round Robin DNS can not be used for high availability. Its a view I have held pretty strongly, but two people have shown me techniques in the last week that have made me change my [...]
Net Neutrality debate gets traction
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I cited a DoJ statement in a previous article that was destined to stagnate or kill all innovation on the web, by permitting ISPs to end the end-to-end nature of the internet.
I’ve been trying to draw the attention of some other technical people by talking about NN on mailing lists. Sadly some people have got [...]
A license to do something bad isn’t reason to.
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For months, ISPs in Europe have been campaigning to preserve their ‘mere conduit’ status, or in English they have been fighting to prove that they should be able to treat all packets, between customers and the resources that they want to access equally. This means, no content blocking, monitoring, and fundamentally no commercial favouritism – [...]
Why Municipally Provided Wifi Must Never Be Allowed
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I have twice now had to defend an unpopular premise – that local governments should not provide free wifi to residents and visitors. A recent thread on the Open Rights Group discussion list almost got pretty out of hand between a few people who thought it was dangerous for the government to be providing [...]
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