Re: [ga] China confirms alternate root for TLDs

[Hugh Dierker <hdierker2204@xxxxxxxxx>]

Karl,
   
  You did not address whether or not this can "hurt" the "net" as the rest of us use it.
  I am having trouble finding the harm. I rely on experts like yourself to break it down and tell me why it is bad.
   
  e

Karl Auerbach <karl@xxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
  
On Mon, 6 Mar 2006, Veni Markovski wrote:

> Danny and all, perhaps you may wish to take a look at 
> http://english.people.com.cn/200603/03/eng20060303_247684.html for the true 
> information?

Not much actual information at that link, merely a denial without concrete 
substantiation of what actually is being done.

> It's always good to double check such "news" before posting them to the 
> mailing list.

Some of actually went and did better than mere "double" checking. We 
cranked up DNS tools, like "dig" and sent queries and looked at responses. 
No plugins were involved and nothing was playing games appending suffixes 
or rewriting names; we went to the bedrock level, DNS and nothing but DNS.

My own check was somewhat cursory and was replicative of the cheks of 
others - some of their output is on the Circle-ID thread - but from my own 
observation I am quite sure that some Chinese servers were, in fact, 
answering for the purported TLDs.

It was late at night when I did it so I didn't make note of the important 
little bits, like the "aa" flag - yes, it was dumb of me and sloppy. But 
the point was that some Chinese name servers did appear to be responding, 
without error, to queries using the new names.

Perhaps I, and others, were seeing responses containing cached data from 
some transient experiment? Maybe. But then again maybe not. Perhaps I 
and the others were simply misinterpreting what we saw - in my case I know 
that my work was not of scientific quality - but then again our eyes are 
somewhat familiar with the arcane art of looking at DNS queries and 
following chains of delegations.

So, my sense is that it does seem like there is rather a solid nugget of 
truth buried deep within the rumors and concerns.

Now, I would hope that ICANN might actually make an inquiry and publish a 
highly detailed statement of what, in fact, happened. And I would hope 
that if China is doing what new.net did that ICANN will publicly apply the 
same words and phrases of condemnation to China that ICANN did to new.net.

But I doubt that ICANN will make such an inquiry. ICANN did not make an 
inquiry into how Taiwan munged its own roots a couple of years ago. (You 
can find the technical details of that buried in the board email archives 
when I described the details to the board. That is assuming that someone 
at ICANN has created an archive of board email - It didn't have one when I 
was on the board.) And yes, Taiwan was very definitely running its own 
root for a while and admitted it privately and described it, apparently 
accurately, as an experiment that somebody forgot to turn off.

--karl--







		
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