The DNS is not a right. Oh yes It is. Oh no it isn't. Oh yes it is...

There has been a debate in the public recently about this. On the one
hand, the Interweb evangelist for the Houyhnhnms Corporation
has claimed that the DNS is not a right. On the other hand
Lord Waterloo of Sandwich has claimed that it is. On the other hand (if
you're a monkey like me) I claim this is just a bit more subtle than
either of these thinly disguised gentlemen admit.

Cory Doctorow of Boing-Boing fame has made a passionate plea
to comprehend the nature of arbitrary restrictions that various
agencies are trying to impose on General Computing, and, by extension,
on the end-to-end services of the Internet, in the name of Security or
DRM.

See this link for the video of his talk
http://boingboing.net/2011/12/27/the-coming-war-on-general-purp.html
at the Chaos Computer Convention at the end of 2011.

The core of his argument is that computers embody Turing machines,
which of course are, as Alan Turing pointed out, capable of arbitrary
computations. Placing extreme (e.g. remove any arbitrary recursion or iteration, or simply remove ability to re-programme) restrictions on these (reducing them to a mere
appliance capable of a single task) throws away their fundamental
value (adaptability/shared use). Anything less in restriction will
always be surmountable.

By analogy, the Internet is the most general form of communications
network one can envisage. The famous hour-glass model partly illustrates this. Previous attempts by vested interests (i.e. telcos) to control the vertical stack led to stovepipe monopolies with a tip of a pyramid. By contrast, the narrow waist of the hourglass allows arbitrary channels below, and an arbitrary inverted pyramid (a very wide divergence) of heterogeneous applications above.

Recently, various aberrations caused both by bad luck (lack of IPv4 address space) and bad design (lack of decent end system security) have appeared in the deployed internet. Because the core must still maintain some end-to-end services, workarounds for these aberrations (NATs, Firewalls, other broken-middle-boxes) always manage to appear. As (I believe) J. Noel Chiappa once said,
the Internet will route around damage.

So the only way that the Internet can be restricted as a right is to
make it a narrow pyramid structure rather than an hour glass - i.e.
remove the "Turing Complete" nature of the service.

Now, there are arguments for the agencies policing laws and carrying out intelligence services doing various things on the net to make sure that other human rights are not abused. However, these do not require the stunning of the Internet technology so that it can't provide an arbitrary range of technical communication activities. Such laws (and ethics) require those agencies to look at what people say (write) and do, in the same way they always have. And the require all of us as users to behave responsibly too.

So why have I titled this piece "The DNS is not a right". Well because
this is a reductio ad absurdum. It is well known that one of the most
extreme ways to route around damage is to run IP over DNS queries and
build a DNS server that de-capsulates the (Unicoded) IP packet from
the DNS Lookup and forwards it on native. To remove this capablity
would require an agency to own all the DNS servers in the world. Or to
remove the DNS itself.

To illustrate another aspect of the problem, lets think about
TCP-friendliness. TCP-friendliness is not a right. That is true -
you can send traffic in an uncontrolled way. However, pretty soon,
your ISP might disconnect you. or charge you a lot of money. Its not
that you can't send TCP-unfriendly traffic. Its just irresponsible.

And that's no joke.

You'll notice that I have not gone on to discuss different
notions of what a "right" is. There are some pretty important, but
subtle differences between what is considered a right in the
Bill of Rights that the US employs, versus other notions of Universal Human Rights such as those in the
UN declaration on same topic. US rights are operationally encoded
in the constitution, and crucially controlled by a set of checks and
balances. These are sufficient to understand that the same approach
can be taken to providing a TCP-friendly, Human Readably Named
Internet, that can embody the abstract notion of the Right to
communicate freely with whomsoever we wish on any subject they care to
hear about, in a concrete technology that is the communications
equivalent of a Turing Complete Difference Engine.

Reference
http://www.un.org/en/documents/udhr/

some SF MS found in a 3rd party cookie

1. Cache

boy from a primative tribe is playing in the woods and finds a
strange bulbous hand sized box which, when knobs are pushed, shows
funny poictures and sounds on the screen.....

after years of this, one day the battery falkls out (of the soloar
panel wears out) and the words "Psion 5a NC" fade for ever

the young man and his memories are now the sole remaining wireless web
Cache active on the planet


2. Stability

A tribe worship the route of all things, the ring that binds them,
the end to endless truth, but they get blackholed by a passing gibson

3. the end 2 end and hop by hop principles of go-betweens, young
lovers and their triangles


4.Connectivity
rashevskys number is the number of possible neural interconnects
in the human brain (permutations) - it is more than enough to number
al the atoms in the known universe and give their (floating in the
sky, point-less) position to the nearest heartbeat or caress, but not
both at the same time

Seven, 7, is the number of people it takes to reach across the human
population from any hermit to any recluse, mailman by rider, pony
express by next door neighbour

what have these two numbers in common except this story?

5. The Protocols of the Elders of ARPA, wearing Mitres, walking tall,
and Society of Blind CIDRs have written, on whatever it is that they
write it on up there, that
wot is writ is rot
wot is done is achieved
and what is recorded is restored
but never can the PCBs and TCP
be removed from the O-Zone

6. A Moo, is an ever changing world of the imaginmation, limited only
by your vocabulary and syntax ....

for many years, one moo sings louder and brighter than all others
and is a focus of strange attraction....one set of interactors become
the high priests of virtual personality fashion...

one day, the participants discover that in fact, they are all also
working in the day at the same chicken factory, canning mutant
salmonella (a safe, and highly nutritious form of something that used
to plague the poultry industry, until they reversed the role of
disease and foodstuff)....

7. statelessness is next to godliness
after e-mail, f-mail

f-mail is fumigated, and powered by certificates, but people develope
a yen for a new form of mail, c-mail. c-mail is clean, and uses only a
working set of 300 words, all harmless...

one day, the world is invaded by aliens, who have no trouble taking
over because noone can remember the word for