Via Joi Ito:

I’m listening to Andrew Odlyzko giving a talk right now about why Quality of Service (QoS) and real-time streaming is stupid. He showed a slide showing that P2P and other traffic are generally transmitting files at faster speeds than their bit rates. Basically, if you cache and buffer, you can have outages in the downloads and you’ll usually be fine. I agree. I can see why carriers would want to spread the rumor that QoS is some feature that we have to have, but it’s strange that so many researchers seem to think we will need QoS supported video streaming. Maybe they need to stop watching cable TV.

Bingo! I agree. I am on the file side of the debate – I see the future in download not streams. Streams dont offer more control then files – except giving you the constant worries how to deliver high amount of data to your users at the same time. Streams don’t give you any better DRM then files – Streams can be easily captured and converted into files without DRM.

Look around you – all the cool stuff we have today are file based – Tivo, iPod, Bittorrent, etc. No streaming service I know was successful. So I wasn’t too surprised when Steve Jobs say no to Sirius.

¹ Incidently, Andrew already made similar points in his paper: Pricing and architecture of the Internet: Historical perspectives from telecommunications and transportation; I blog about it about a year ago.

Since WGIG has avoided the topic of “what is Internet Governance”, let me point to a few posting I made regarding this topic on the APDIP IGOVAP mailing list.

• Mechanism of Internet Governance 17th Jan 2005
• Mechanism of Internet Governance 25th Jan 2005
• strategic policy priorities? 29th Jan 2005¹
• another discussion about management of root server (definition of Internet Governance) 21st Jan 2005

My position can be summarise as follows:

1. Internet Governance would cover anything that would related to proper function of Internet (including domain names, IP address) but it does not mean that we have policy for all of them (no policy might be a better policy sometimes).

2. In terms of mechanism, I support developing countries (esp. China) to get more involved but I do not believe in a single centralized (intergovernmental or otherwise) entity. We should continue to bring like-minded people together to solve problems in various groups and forums rather then a high level committee doing hand-waving.

3. In terms of operation, preference should be given to industry self-regulation over centralized/government intervention. Despite any market failure of free market, government intervention often comes at a higher cost, not to mention the Law of Unintended Consequences.

¹ Oh yea, very nice to see many of them made it on the list of topics discussed at WGIG.

Adam Peake and myself wrote a joint comment to the Multilingualization of Internet naming system. (btw, Multilingualization isn’t a word in the English dictionary).

This paper really shock me with its biases (and attempt rewrite reality). I also finish reading 17 out of 20 of the paper and with an exception of a few (Internet names and Address, Root Server, Interconnection) the rest are seem to be written by (a) put together by people who don’t know what they writing (b) put together in a hurry (but at least they know what they writing) (c) put together by organization pushing their private interest (like the Multilingualization paper).

The overall quality of the papers by WGIG was really disappointing.

Anyway, I also finish writing (shorter) comment on some of the papers. A general question I have is how they select these 20 topics as some of them does not seem to be Internet Governance issue to me. e.g. User Protection – Yes, it is important but why is it an Internet Governance issue?

Most importantly, they avoid discussing or develop a working definition of Internet Governance which is really one of the goals for the WGIG. It is hard (10 people have 12 definitions of it) but WGIG shouldn’t have sidestep it.

¹ Yep, this is what I have been doing on Chinese New Year Day.

The Working Group for Internet Governance has just published some working papers (via Adam Peake) on a whole set of issues like IP address & domain names, root servers, peering and interconnection, multilingualization, spam, voip etc etc.

I already taken a quick look at the Multilingualization paper and I am shock! shock shock shock! What a piece of bias BS! Written from a very Korean-centric position where in fact, Korean keyword is an exemption experience then the norm.

The VoIP paper is no much better – totally lack substance. I think we have done a much better job describing the issues facing regulators and consumers on VoIP with our (IDA) consultation paper.

And that comes from the supposingly THE working group for internet governance? I know it is set of draft working papers but still, this level of quality is not acceptable. I have high confidence in them originally (yes, I do!) but now I am not so sure they will produce anything useful other then a lot of noise.

Note: The public feedback period is also very short closing on 11thFeb 2005. And you have submit it via a word document template. Duh.

A man in London was arrested for attempting to hack the Tsumani donation. But according to boingboing, here is what happened:

For donating to a Tsunami appeal using Lynx on Solaris 10. BT [British Telecom] who run the donation management system misread an access log and saw hmm thats a non standard browser not identifying it’s type and it’s doing strange things. Trace that IP. Arrest that hacker.

Armed police, a van, a police cell and national news later the police have gone in SWAT styley and arrested someone having their lunch.

Out on bail till next week and preparing to make a lot of very bad PR for BT and the Police….

Now, lets not jump into conclusion yet (It is his words vs the police & BT) but if it is true, it is totally silly!

I just gave a presentation at TEIN2 meeting on SingAREN GIX. SingAREN GIX is a new Gigabit Internet Exchange we are building for the Advance Research and Education Network (AREN) community in Singapore. It is meant to be a carrier-neutral, open exchange for any research organizations (including commercial) and also provides optional Internet2 transit.

One of the main driver for GIX is to merged the SingAREN and Singapore National GRID Pilot Platform (NGPP) infrastructure. It is also time to redesign the architect since the last time we look at it seriously is in 1997.
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Remember I wrote about Internet Peering settlement last year? Well, Geoff Huston just published an excellent article which goes into great detail on various financial settlement model. Check it out!

Efforts to extend this regulatory activity to the area of regulated interconnection and peering have been investigated by various national regimes, but with little in the form of regulatory outcomes to date. Attempts to impose measures of mandatory domestic SKA peering at nominated exchange points tend to create an environment where there is a disincentive for larger players to aggressively invest in further infrastructure given the ability for smaller players to leverage this investment to their advantage without making comparable investments of their own. This has the risk of leading to an excessively fragmented serviced industry where natural economies of scale are not realized, and the consumer base is exposed to an inefficient supply industry which inherently imposes price premiums at the retail service level. The issue here is the supply of Internet services is not an end in itself – the objective is to ensure an efficient and effective service industry that provides the necessary foundation for other economic activities that can themselves leverage the capabilities of the Internet.

Last year, I blog about a problem with Microsoft IPv6 implementation?

So after you installed the v6 stack on XP and unable to connect to 6bone for any reasons, you would also lost your ability to talk to any of the dual stack site, even though you can reach them via v4.

This should not be so if applications follows the Internet Draft on Application Aspects of IPv6 Transition. Section 4.3 reads:

Implementations typically by-default prefer IPv6 if the remote node and application support it. However, if IPv6 connections fail, version-independent applications will automatically try IPv4 ones. The resolver returns a list of valid addresses for the remote node and applications can iterate through all of them until connection succeeds.

So on platforms where this is implemented properly (e.g. FreeBSD), you just notice some delay (~3-5sec) in all your IP communication to the dual-stack hosts.

The delay is irriating but would not adversely affect normal Internet uses. Internet users who encounter this problem will eventually debug this and hopefully fix their IPv6 connectivity and join the v6 world (ya!), or turn off their IPv6 (sigh).

But recently, there are more serious problems. A discussion thread in NANOG few days ago noted that some users are experiencing DNS resolution failures.

Is anyone else experiencing DNS timeout errors. I’ve tried using multiple name resolvers, and tested multiple domain names using different name servers, and I keep getting “name not found” errors.

What happened is when users or ISPs installed the latest BIND¹, which comes with dual-stack support and IPv6 records in root zone file, installed it on their Linux/FreeBSD server that shipped with IPv6 enabled by default, but did not have their IPv6 connectivity in place, the DNS resolution will timeout as it tries to connect to the root DNS² on IPv6 via the not-working IPv6 interface. The IPv6 timeout is longer then the DNS timeout so queries will fail.

Put IPv6 DNS records into root & .com/.net zone and ISC meant and to have support for dual stack BIND are all the little things we (the Internet community) do to try to get towards IPv6. All of us meant well I am sure but this clearly demostrated the danger of unintended consequences.

Karl Auerbach actually warns about this problem in Oct 2004. See also his latest entry.

But unlike Karl, I don’t think this is “end-of-the-world” or suffice to wack ICANN, ISC or whoever is involved. It is just a amusing hiccup that can be easily resolved. The workaround is as above: join IPv6 world or turn off IPv6 support (e.g. named -4).

¹ BIND started shipping with IPv4/IPv6 transition support, dual-stack-servers with root zone file with IPv6 records in Sept 2004.

² ICANN added IPv6 to DNS Root in July 2004. Related news, Verisign announce to IPv6 support for .com/.net zone in Oct 2004.

Vint Cerf, who is normally a private person, wrote an article for CircleID as titled.

In a sense, ICANN has become the only globally visible body charged with any kind of oversight for the Internet. The scope of this oversight responsibility was deliberately and intentionally limited in the process of the creation of ICANN. But as the Internet continues to grow, as domain names become increasingly visible in the context of the World Wide Web, and as the so-called “dot.com” bubble expanded between 1998 and early 2000 and then burst, many people with concerns or complaints about problems associated with the Internet or use uses (and abuses) have turned to ICANN expecting it to address many of these issues.

This is very much what I said about ICANN in the last one year, that ICANN charter is names & numbers; that while it is part “Internet Governace” but it is not all to it; that we should not expect ICANN to solve all the other Internet problems; that ICANN is in this unfortunately position been the ‘only girl in town’, or in this case, ‘the only target to shoot’…

Blogging was slow these days. Other then suffering from this intolerable cough that refuse to go away, day work has not been kind to me either. Anyway, I have two interesting meeting today.

1) Richard Stallman who is in town to give a talk on Free Software (he refuses to use the term Open Source) and also Software Patent (and he also rejects the term ‘Intellectual Property’). I thought I was pretty left-wing but I think I am wrong: If I am a 6 on the scale of 10, Richard is a 12. Won’t say I disagree with everything he said on both areas but cant say I agree with everything either.

2) An old friend, Fred Baker was also in Singapore, passing by on his way home from China. Fred is a Cisco fellow, former IETF chairman and currently chairman of Internet Society among other things. We have dinner and of cos, beers :-) It is always a pleasure to entertain old friends and sharing ideas. Oh, Fred has this interesting co-existence theory of smart and stupid network. He is going turn it into a talk of some sort so no spoliter here.