Category Archives: Internet

Snarky letter in today's NYTimes, Letter – How to Find a Book

To the Editor:

Re “A Library to Last Forever” (Op-Ed, Oct. 9):

Sergey Brin, the co-founder of Google, writes, “Today, if you want to access a typical out-of-print book, you have only one choice — fly to one of a handful of leading libraries in the country and hope to find it in the stacks.”

Fly??? I’m pretty sure I can e-mail a reference librarian and ask her to check holdings before I do anything so drastic as fly. Hasn’t this guy ever heard of the Internet?

Lauren Baratz-Logsted
Danbury, Conn., Oct. 9, 2009

Not to mention this major civilization advance known as “inter-library loan” — a service provided not only by university libraries but even by better public libraries.

For a brief while, all .se domains were inaccessible to most Internet users due a small one-character typo.

The official explanation is at Incorrect DNS information | .SE. What seems to have happened is that someone left off the trailing “.” in the routine republication of the official announcement of the .se root zone.

The mistake was identified within an hour or so, and the official .se data republished, but without some of the authentication information it would usually carry. The result was, if I understand what happened, was that .se remained inaccessible for a while for two groups of people: those whose ISPs had uploaded the erroneous .se data and hadn't gotten around to updating to the corrected .se info, and those whose ISPs are meticulous about validating DNSSEC signatures and noted that the (corrected) replacement failed that test.

In short, the laziest and the most painstaking were the most effected.

Update More at Sweden’s Internet broken by DNS mistake, including this:

The problems were made worse by the fact that DNS lookups are cached externally. Since DNS lookups are cached a certain time and the .se zone has a 24 hour time-to-live (the time information is cached by external DNS servers), the problem could last for up to 24 hours for some users.

..

Problems that affect an entire top-level zone have very wide-ranging effects as can be seen by the .se incident. There are just over 900,000 .se domain names, and every single one of these were affected.

Via downforeveryoneorjustme.com:

It's not just you! http://gmail.com looks down from here.

There is an old joke that when the hot line between the white house and the Kremlin was installed, the strategists were very concerned that a mistranslation might set off a world war, so they invested heavily in machine translation projects.

One way in which machine translations get tested is that you take a text in the first language, translate it to the second, then translate it back. If it's recognizable, you're doing well. Well, the story goes that the Army came up with computer program it thought would do the trick, but the folks at the White House demanded a live demo. At the demo they input the phrase “out of sight, out of mind”.

After a round trip via Russian, it came back as “blind drunk”.

I'm reminded of this by Translation Party which will take your English text, translate it to Japanese and back and repeat the process until it achieves what it calls a “equilibrium”. Inputting “out of sight, out of mind” I got “Vision and heart”.

So far, the most steps I can get it to do for a short saying is 11 (“Every llama thinks his load is the heaviest” becomes “All the heavy burden of Rama and his”).

And my weirdest is “Pot calling the kettle black” which quickly became “Runny nose, laughing eyes KUSO”.

(And “measure twice, cut once” went into an endless loop.)

[Only] Four ICANN Board members dissent in vote on NCSG charter. Milton Mueller tries to find a silver lining in this cloud — four dissents! out of fourteen votes! — but it's pretty small.

By choosing to gut public participation — for that is the result that the ICANN staff has lead the Board into — ICANN makes a high-stakes bet about its future.

Will the Obama administration see this as proof that ICANN lacks the maturity to be trusted with increased independence? (One hopes.) Or will ICANN be able to sail under the radar and walk away with the Root while the staff keeps the ability to pay itself millions per year.

We'll see.