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The period around the end of the nineteenth century and the start of the twentieth century saw a number of phenomenal advances in the physical sciences. There was J.J. Thompson’s discovery of the electron in 1897, Max Planck’s quantum hypothesis in 1900, Einstein’s ground-breaking papers on Brownian motion, the photoelectric…
Ten years ago, I wrote an article that looked back on the developments within the Internet over the period from 1998 to 2008. Well another ten years has gone by, and it’s a good opportunity to take a little time once more to muse over what’s new, what’s old and…
It’s been six years since World IPv6 Launch day on the 6th June 2012. In those six years we’ve managed to place ever increasing pressure on the dwindling pools of available IPv4 addresses, but we have still been unable to complete the transition to an all-IPv6 Internet. Nobody predicted this…
The Problem It’s pretty clear that the Internet has a problem. If you want to include Facebook’s misuse of personal information in ways that closely resemble unconstrained abandon, then the Internet probably has hundreds of millions of problems! More prosaically, lets confine our view of problems to the Internet Protocol…
In September 2017 the proposed roll of the Root Zone Key Signing Key (KSK), scheduled for 11th October 2017 was suspended. I wrote about the reasons for this suspension of the key roll at the time. The grounds for this action was based in the early analysis of data derived…
“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…
