Previous Politech message: http://www.politechbot.com/2005/10/06/karl-auerbach-replies/ -------- Original Message -------- Subject: Re: [Politech] Karl Auerbach replies on U.N. Net control and many, many top-level domains Date: Fri, 7 Oct 2005 01:44:55 -0500 From: Jim Davidson <davidson@private> To: Declan McCullagh <declan@private> CC: karl@private Dear Declan, Thanks for the excellent analysis from Karl Auerbach. A couple of thoughts got my attention: > Clone roots may also have reason to come into existence during the > recovery from natural or human disasters ... But those would > usually be short-lived. Tyranny is one of those human disasters that sometimes lasts many decades. > What is of interest to me in this is that the question is not > a technical one but rather one of social and individual rights > and values. Actually, the question is both technical and philosophical. There are technical issues relating to how top level domains are managed. Having two completely different managements running .ewe would certainly be a problem for the university Watsamatta.ewe if its content were not served to everyone seeking that content. The inability to resolve between two root servers each claiming to be serving the IP address for the correct .ewe domain would likely be resolved by nobody reaching either set of content. But, far worse would be a governmental authority that demanded the power to limit access to content and force the character of content to change. There is something deeply and very fundamentally wrong with Google.com choosing to describe Taiwan as a province of the vicious, evil, communist People's Republic of China on their "Google Earth" site, presumably because the management of Google are communists, or, perhaps, in their favor, they are merely avaricious for the wealth that comes from serving their Chinese government masters. This sort of compliance is part of an overall trend of those in governments determining that they must control what people can see in order to attempt to control what they think. In the case of tyrants, the goal is always to dupe people into becoming willing slaves. Naturally, when people are most free to choose what information they see, they are best able to determine for themselves what to accept, what to doubt, what to act upon, what to disbelieve, and what to ignore. When people are forced by those in government to ingest fecal material instead of useful web content, they suffer and, inevitably, some die as a result. The problem of who controls access to content on the Internet, the person seeking information or the governmental authorities seeking to limit access is fundamental to freedom which is, in turn, fundamental to property and prosperity, as well as life itself. Something over a thousand people are dead along the Gulf Coast from hurricanes Katrina and Rita, by "official" estimate, and a great many thousands more have suffered because of government control over: drainage, basic services, evacuation, weather predictions, search and rescue, and information about local, national, and global conditions. I've written a bit about this topic on my page at http://indomitus.net/betterworld.html Fortunately, some technologies being developed and implemented may make it possible to host content without being dependent on root name servers to reach it. This sort of technology becomes more interesting in the context of projects like Loom Gold which make available gold content (digital warehouse receipts for gold) and other monetary "information." The Loom Gold site is explained at https://loom.cc/gold/?function=ask Some of the precursor technology on data hosting independent of domain information is tor.eff.org if I correctly recall the URL. Regards, Jim http://indomitus.net/ _______________________________________________ Politech mailing list Archived at http://www.politechbot.com/ Moderated by Declan McCullagh (http://www.mccullagh.org/)
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