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“Bikeshedding” Parkinson’s Law of Triviality is C. Northcote Parkinson’s 1957 argument that members of an organisation give disproportionate weight to trivial issues. He provides the example of a fictional committee whose job was to approve the plans for a nuclear power plant. He postulates that they would spend the majority…
APNIC Labs is partnering with Cloudflare for a joint research project relating to the operation of the DNS. I’d like to explain our motivation in entering into this research project, explain what we hope to be able to achieve with this work, and describe briefly how we intend to handle…
I’m never surprised by the ability of an IETF Working Group to obsess over what to any outside observer would appear to be a completely trivial matter. Even so, I was impressed to see a large-scale discussion emerge over a single bit in a transport protocol being standardized by the…
March has seen the first of the DNS Operations, Analysis, and Research Center (OARC) workshops for the year, where two days where too much DNS is just not enough! These workshops are a concentrated two days of presentations and discussions that focus exclusively in the current state of the DNS.…
I’ve been prompted to write this brief opinion piece in response to a recent article posted on CircleID by Tony Rutkowski, where he characterises the IETF as a collection of “crypto zealots”. He offers the view that the IETF is behaving irresponsibly in attempting to place as much of the…
The story about securing the DNS has a rich and, in Internet terms, protracted history. The original problem statement was simple: how can you tell if the answer you get from your query to the DNS system is ‘genuine’ or not? The DNS alone can’t help here. You ask a…
Time for another annual roundup from the world of IP addresses. Let’s see what has changed in the past 12 months in addressing the Internet and look at how IP address allocation information can inform us of the changing nature of the network itself. There is no doubt that the…
It has become either a tradition, or a habit, each January for me to report on the experience with the inter-domain routing system over the past year, looking in some detail at some metrics from the routing system that can show the essential shape and behaviour of the underlying interconnection…
In the United States the debate between advocates of market-based resolution of competitive tensions and regulatory intervention has seldom reached the fever pitch that we’ve seen over the vexed on-again off-again question of Net Neutrality in recent weeks. It seems as it the process of determination of communications policy has…
It strikes me as odd to see a developed and, by any reasonable standard, a prosperous economy getting into so much trouble with its public communications policy framework. I’m sure that this comment could apply to many countries, including Australia with their political football called the National Broadband Network. But…
