Re: Peer-to-peer

[Valdis.Kletnieks at vt.edu]

On Fri, 21 Sep 2001 19:42:23 +0200, Thor Harald Johansen <thorhj at yahoo.com>  said:
> Is there an Internet standard for the kind of peer-to-peer communication
> FreeNet (www.freenetproject.org) is capable of? I think there should be. The

Well... there's RFC791, which specifies IP, 792 specifying ICMP, 793
specifying TCP, and 768 that specifies UDP.   Beyond that, you *really*
need to think about what you're trying to DO - NFS for file sharing will
have very different constraints and design paramaters than H.263 video
conferencing.

> Web, especially the DNS system, is too much in the hands of commercial
> interests. I think everyone with access to the Internet should have the
> right to own at least one domain name. Yes, I know the good ones would be
> taken more or less immediately, but aren't they already? :)

Everybody already has the right to own a domain name.  The problem is
paying for sufficient infrastructure to actually support it.  For starters,
you need to have 2 DNS servers willing to answer queries abut the name - and
you need at least one computer that the domain name actually points to.

Then of course, you end up with the white pages/yellow pages problem - the
.com tree is already flooded, you won't fit 380 million Americans in there
and expect to *FIND* anybody.

And that's the *real* issue, isn't it?  I mean - I end up using lots
of domain names in the course of my work, but for the rest of the world,
I'm just an e-mail address, or a Yahoo or ICQ or AIM handle.  None of that
inherently has a domain name that belongs to *ME* attached to it (and if
you want to get anal-retentive, I don't *HAVE* a domain name I own - all
the ones I use are maintained by my employer).

And although I've been on the net since the early 80's, the lack of owning
a domain name has never seemed to be a major inconvenience when dealing
with the outside world...
-- 
				Valdis Kletnieks
				Operating Systems Analyst
				Virginia Tech

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