Good. Ethernet has been defying Moore’s Law for a while.
Faster loading animated cat gifs!
How fast will it be if the U.N. decides to shut off domains it disagrees with?
Anyone can set up an alternate DNS, if need be. Though I wouldn’t be surprised to see Microsoft and others try to stop users reconfiguring DNS to connect to such alternate servers.
DNS is a distributed database with master and slave servers. Yes, anyone can set up an alternate DNS and you can point to any of them. But they are updated and hackers already use that to poison some of them. The official maintainer just went to ICANN yesterday. Ted Cruz for one, failed to stop this (why would they try if no danger exists?)
The danger might be the official maintainer poisons all of them in such a way that you don’t even realize it is happening.
You could bypass DNS altogether but your average user has no idea about that. Those users in countries which censor the internet now are probably more aware but that isn’t the general American public which is the most likely target.
There is no reason to let the official maintainer have access to your alt server. The users would need to know how to point their browser how to it or to get their ISPs to point to it.
Your alt server still must be updated.
In principle an alternate DNS pseudo-root could exist. but it would need to know about domains the UN controlled primary root denies.
Plus, and perhaps more often, it doesn’t have to be a denial but a redirect to a site that looks exactly like the original but with false information.
All you need to do is set up a root server that points existing domains to the existing sites, and adds a .uncensored domain that UN-censored sites can register with.
Job done.
At least until Microsoft, Apple et al require all DNS reponses to be digitally signed, to ensure that only the UN can control it.
And worrying about hackers ‘poisoning’ DNS is a bit silly when you can be 100% sure that the UN will.
The real effort right now is going into new techs that eliminate DNS altogether, because it’s antiquated, and a horrible, centralized weak point in the Internet.
Nothing to worry about then. 😉 So comforting to know we can just trust.
The good news is as long as they can, some will fight for freedom of information.
Back to the point of the original post, which is pushing 5 Gb/s through copper cables… Back in 1990, when my team was building the first working DSL modems in the world (as far as I know), I would have bet a year’s pay that this was impossible. Not “too expensive to be practical” but “violates the laws of physics.” And I was an expert in the field.
Clarke’s First Law in action. Wow.
wow indeed
Now if it could be done with a POTS line I might switch back to the phone company for Internet.
I still remember Nicholas Negroponte moaning in Wired Magazine about the need for a vast, government project to put fiber optics in everyone’s homes. Simple cable could just not compete. Countries like Italy and South Korea were going to destroy America with their fiber optics cables, leaving us in the dust–all because Congress wasn’t interested in a Manhattan style project.
Good. Ethernet has been defying Moore’s Law for a while.
Faster loading animated cat gifs!
How fast will it be if the U.N. decides to shut off domains it disagrees with?
Anyone can set up an alternate DNS, if need be. Though I wouldn’t be surprised to see Microsoft and others try to stop users reconfiguring DNS to connect to such alternate servers.
DNS is a distributed database with master and slave servers. Yes, anyone can set up an alternate DNS and you can point to any of them. But they are updated and hackers already use that to poison some of them. The official maintainer just went to ICANN yesterday. Ted Cruz for one, failed to stop this (why would they try if no danger exists?)
The danger might be the official maintainer poisons all of them in such a way that you don’t even realize it is happening.
You could bypass DNS altogether but your average user has no idea about that. Those users in countries which censor the internet now are probably more aware but that isn’t the general American public which is the most likely target.
There is no reason to let the official maintainer have access to your alt server. The users would need to know how to point their browser how to it or to get their ISPs to point to it.
Your alt server still must be updated.
In principle an alternate DNS pseudo-root could exist. but it would need to know about domains the UN controlled primary root denies.
Plus, and perhaps more often, it doesn’t have to be a denial but a redirect to a site that looks exactly like the original but with false information.
All you need to do is set up a root server that points existing domains to the existing sites, and adds a .uncensored domain that UN-censored sites can register with.
Job done.
At least until Microsoft, Apple et al require all DNS reponses to be digitally signed, to ensure that only the UN can control it.
And worrying about hackers ‘poisoning’ DNS is a bit silly when you can be 100% sure that the UN will.
The real effort right now is going into new techs that eliminate DNS altogether, because it’s antiquated, and a horrible, centralized weak point in the Internet.
Nothing to worry about then. 😉 So comforting to know we can just trust.
The good news is as long as they can, some will fight for freedom of information.
Back to the point of the original post, which is pushing 5 Gb/s through copper cables… Back in 1990, when my team was building the first working DSL modems in the world (as far as I know), I would have bet a year’s pay that this was impossible. Not “too expensive to be practical” but “violates the laws of physics.” And I was an expert in the field.
Clarke’s First Law in action. Wow.
wow indeed
Now if it could be done with a POTS line I might switch back to the phone company for Internet.
I still remember Nicholas Negroponte moaning in Wired Magazine about the need for a vast, government project to put fiber optics in everyone’s homes. Simple cable could just not compete. Countries like Italy and South Korea were going to destroy America with their fiber optics cables, leaving us in the dust–all because Congress wasn’t interested in a Manhattan style project.