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daily link  05 June 2002

Mozilla 1.0 Available

Slashdot is reporting that the open source web browser, Mozilla 1.0, has been officially released.

 9:18:24 PM  permalink  Google It!    

America's Technology Industry Increasingly Intertwined with Government

The Economist has a good piece on how the US high-tech industry is getting cosier with government and notes that the "free-wheeling, libertarian stance of the industry, always somewhat hypocritical, has been changing since the mid-1990s". Eli Noam pointed this out back in July 1997 in his wonderful opinion piece in the New York Times: An Unfettered Internet? Keep Dreaming.

 5:33:50 PM  permalink  Google It!    

KPNQwest Crisis and a lesson about Critical Network Infrastructure

Is there a bottom in the telecoms onslaught? The sudden collapse of KPNQwest, who operated a large pan-European data network carrying an estimated 25-30% of Europe's IP traffic is a hot topic of discussion on Total Telecom. The collapse is going to have an unknown impact on Internet infrastructure and connectivity within Europe and internationally. Ebone and GTS, who KPNQwest acquired only in March 2002, appear to be casualties.

The rapid collapse of KPNQwest provides an interesting lesson vis-à-vis contingency planning of critical network infrastructure. Besides the large numbers of customers who'll be left stranded or scrambling for new providers, KPNQwest's infrastructure provided DNS services (secondaries through ns.eu.net*) for a number of Internet country code top level domains (ccTLDs). Those ccTLDs may need to rapidly find out whether they have enough distributed secondaries if ns.eu.net vanishes. Update: RIPE NCC has made an agreement with KPNQwest to temporarily take over the hosting of ns.eu.net.

This reminds me that less than a year ago there was a partial unavailability of one of the Internet's master root name servers, namely c.root-servers.net, located in PSInet’s network infrastructure, when a large backbone provider, Cable & Wireless, disconnected PSINet's peering connections because they no longer met C&W’s requirements. The result was that C&W customers were unable to reach that root name server until the peering arrangement was reinstated.

*EUnet was acquired by Qwest in 1999 before KPNQwest was created.

 4:08:43 PM  permalink  Google It!    

 
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Last update: 03/04/2003; 11:47:12.