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All the news that's... whatever.
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to Random Bytes...
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Friday, January 03, 2003
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....and it simply uses http redirects like 90% of retail domain resellers, and it uses the "frame trick" and the redirect engine is written in PERL - if you don't use the plug-in. And, it eats non-http requests and pretends that Verisign's webfarm @ 198.41.1.35 is authoritative, when it is most definitely not. I knew this solution was coming down the pipe, so why do I suddenly feel ripped off by the internet? Before today, some things, like the DNS, had almost magical qualities. Today I feel like we've looked behind the curtain and only found that the wizard is out to lunch. 
3:21:20 PM
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As Brett points
out, VGRS starts resolving IDN's effective today - sort of. What
they are in fact doing is providing responses instead of error messages
to certain types of queries for a specific protocol. Translation: They
are sort of providing IDN in the DNS for web-only traffic. It’s a hack
of roughly the same complexity as the search function built-in to IE or
the former Realnames implementation. While there are obvious technical
differences between these three approaches, they are all based in and
around the same cruft. I don't like this - resolution needs to work
across the entire protocol-space, or it doesn't really resolve much now
does it. Effective today, this is no longer true in a hugely broken and
irresponsible way. Please mark this on your calendar as the day that
internet marketers officially won out over internet technologists. The
loser here is, again, the internet user.
There is a better solution here that no one is talking about. Take IDNs
away from the gTLD-space and allow them to be run along
cultural/national lines a la the ccTLDs. My naïve understanding of the
technology leads me to believe that this is the only way that we can
avoid the technical, economic and political pitfalls that have plagued
the development and rollout of IDN technology since it was first
conceived. I'll describe more later tonight - in the meantime, I'll
leave it as an exercise for you to figure out a) what I'm getting at and
b) whether or not ICANN would have the chutzpah to make it happen. Hint:
This is largely a social solution that is currently being dealt with,
inappropriately, by the IETF. Of course, the IETF is increasingly
dealing with social isssues that ICANN simply won't - makes me wonder
who is really calling the shots nowadays - perhaps more on that later as
well....
[ObDisclaimer: I work for Tucows, Tucows sells and supports VGRS IDNs,
I'm not involved in Tucows IDN initiatives, but I do work in policyspace
on IDN issues. None of this is Tucows officialspeak per the standing
disclaimer at the bottom of this page that applies to all of the content
here.]
3:13:10 PM
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© Copyright
2003
Ross Wm. Rader. The opinions expressed in this weblog are solely those of the respective authors.
Last update:
1/27/2003; 11:38:20 PM.
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