[p2p-research] Fwd: <nettime> Wikileaks and Protocol

Sun Dec 26 15:16:57 CET 2010

VERY interesting discussion on how dns access control may have shifted to
google,

Michel

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Dante-Gabryell Monson <dante.monson at gmail.com>
Date: Mon, Dec 20, 2010 at 3:03 AM
Subject: Fwd: <nettime> Wikileaks and Protocol
To: Michel Bauwens <michelsub2004 at gmail.com>, Samuel Rose <
samuel.rose at gmail.com>, Sepp Hasslberger <sepp at lastrega.com>

interesting thread...

a link Jaromil shared :
*
*
*http://www.coralcdn.org/*
*

"Coral is a free peer-to-peer content distribution network, comprised of a
world-wide network of web proxies and nameservers. It allows a user to run a
web site that offers high performance and meets huge demand, all for the
price of a $50/month cable modem.

Publishing through CoralCDN is as simple as appending a short string to the
hostname of objects' URLs; a peer-to-peer DNS layer transparently redirects
browsers to participating caching proxies, which in turn cooperate to
minimize load on the source web server. "
*

and another reference given by Rory, in this thread :

1998 ( ? ) paper by Ted Byfield , "DNS: A short history
and a short future" :

http://outreach.lib.uic.edu/www/issues/issue4_3/byfield/index.html

excerpted :

<http://outreach.lib.uic.edu/www/issues/issue4_3/byfield/index.html>*"DNS
policies inflexibly founded on past conditions have conspired with marketing
forces to create an illusory scarcity of domain names."*
*
*
***"The benefit that DNS offers is its "higher level of abstraction" - a
stable addressing layer that permits more reliable communications across
networks where changing IP numbers change and heterogeneous
hardware/software configurations are the norm. But "higher" is a relative
term: as the substance of the Net changes - as what's communicated is
transformed both in kind and in degree, and as the technical proficiency of
its users drops while their number explodes - DNS's level of abstraction is
sinking relative to its surroundings"
*
Forwarded conversation
Subject: <nettime> Wikileaks and Protocol
------------------------

From: *Joss Winn* <joss at josswinn.org>
Date: Fri, Dec 17, 2010 at 3:20 PM
To: nettime-l at kein.org

I don't know if Alexander Galloway is still on this list, but I was
wondering
what people thought about his argument that in Protocol (which
I'm in the middle of reading):

"All DNS information is controlled  in a hierarchical, inverted-tree
structure. Ironically, then, nearly all Web traffic must submit to a
hierarchical structure (DNS) to gain access to the anarchic and
radically horizontal structure of the Internet." (Protocol: How control
exists after decentralisation - 2004, p.9)

When wikileaks.org was "turned off" by EveryDNS, the site continued to
run at http://213.251.145.96/

A Google search for 'wikileaks' still places http://213.251.145.96/ at
the top of its results.

In my experience, most users of the web, do not use their location bar
to type in wikileaks.org, rather they search for 'wikileaks' and then
click on the appropriate result. In this case, they click on the link
for http://213.251.145.96/

In this example, the hierarchical structure of control of DNS seems to
have shifted to the hierarchical control of Google. Is it possible to
"turn off" a website by removing its DNS, when search engines are quick
to re-index? Has Google made an exception here to continue returning the
wikileaks site in its results, despite the absence of DNS?

Thanks,

Joss

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----------
From: *jaromil* <jaromil at dyne.org>
Date: Sat, Dec 18, 2010 at 10:43 AM
To: nettime-l at kein.org

hi Joss,
FYI, when wikileaks.org was shut down this project helped to keep it
reachable http://www.coralcdn.org

when the s**t comes down, as JH says, DNS hierarchy can bypassed
without many problems and without significant changes for the user
experience.

ciao

--
jaromil, dyne.org developer, http://jaromil.dyne.org

GPG: B2D9 9376 BFB2 60B7 601F  5B62 F6D3 FBD9 C2B6 8E39

----------
From: *Rory Solomon* <solomonr at newschool.edu>
Date: Sun, Dec 19, 2010 at 7:19 AM
To: nettime-l at kein.org

Hi Joss,

Thanks for the posting. I think this is a great point and important to
bring up.

One thing worth emphasizing straightaway is that that comment from
Protocol references an excellent article called "DNS: A short history
and a short future" by Ted Byfield, a colleague of mine here at
Parsons / The New School, and a former co-moderator of this mailing
list!

But I think your comment really speaks to the core of the issue. I
think if there is one flaw with *Protocol* it is that for the most
part we are actually not yet experiencing the "distributed" model that
the book spends most of the time discussing. We're still somewhere
back in the decentralized model. I cannot connect to your computer
directly, I would connect to you through some Internet backbone server
-- the network of networks is decentralized, but still oriented a
highly hierarchical notion of a center. And for access to it, I pay
Time Warner $45 / month. And there is really no way around that.

DNS is another example that illustrates this perfectly. Highly
centralized.

There are efforts like this one:
http://www.nettime.org/Lists-Archives/nettime-ann-1012/msg00003.html
to create a distributed P2P DNS system. I'm very excited by this
project, although I know there have been projects similar to it before
that have failed.

However this is a great point:
I agree that it is almost as if search already has created a de facto
distributed DNS. The name of something is simply the name as it is
defined by a critical mass of other people.

Of course now we are in even deeper trouble than before. At least DNS
was somewhat "transparent". If search is the new de facto DNS then
we're even more beholden to Google than we thought.

So this just begs the question: can we come up with a truly
distributed search! I know of some projects attempting to do this.
Like: http://www.majestic12.co.uk/ but I don't have a sense of how
much traction they have.

And anyway, you probably see where I'm going with this. If Wikileaks
leaves any lasting legacy it will be to catalyze discussion around
another point from *Protocol*, which is essentially a reframing of
McLuhan's remediation for the network age: every protocol contains
within it another. And as such, the true point of resistance is not
Wikileaks, nor DNS, nor search. To realize a truly open or public net
would require building a truly distributed rhizomatic infrastructure
all the way down. So perhaps Wikileaks and the markedly *not* free
and open response it received from the businesses that run the
pseudo-public space that we call the Internet will help to mobilize
efforts like Peter Sunde's P2P-DNS, or a distributed search, or a
distributed social network like Diaspora, etc etc. Anyone wanna help
me set up a long range ad hoc wireless mesh network? P2P backbone.

To end with a humorous counter-example, did anyone follow this recent
drama around NY Times, Google, and Vitaly Borker?

http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2010/12/being-bad-to-your-customers-is-
bad-for.html<http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2010/12/being-bad-to-your-customers-is-bad-for.html>Basically,
the New York Times reported on a Brooklyn
ecommerce eyeglass merchant who got high google search results
by being a jerk. Few days later, google publishes that blog post
explaining how upset the article made them and how they re-worked
their search algorithm(!) to exclude Borker and people like him.

While most of us would agree it's probably nicer not to have this
guy on google page 1 anymore, in a way, this is precisely the same
circumstance as Wikileaks / Amazon but on a smaller scale.

Essentially, what kind of protocological system do we have when one
can be perfectly compliant with the protocol, only to wake up one day
and see how easily it can be modulated right around you.

cheers -
Rory

----------
From: *David Mandl* <dmandl at panix.com>
Date: Sun, Dec 19, 2010 at 5:04 PM
To: nettime-l at kein.org

The hilarious thing about that official statement was the fact that Google
claimed the business owner in question--who, remember, terrorized and
implicitly threatened the life of his customer--"provides an extremely poor
user experience." When the only language you have is a hammer, every
situation looks like a nail.

  --Dave.

--
Dave Mandl
dmandl at panix.com
davem at wfmu.org
Web: http://www.wfmu.org/~davem <http://www.wfmu.org/%7Edavem>
Twitter: http://twitter.com/dmandl

-- 
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