Tim Berners-Lee on the Web 224
notmyopinion writes "In a wide-ranging interview with the British Computer Society, Sir Tim Berners-Lee criticizes software patents, speaks out on US and ICANN control of the Internet, proposes browser security changes, and says he got domain names backwards in web addresses all those years ago."
Re:Looking back... (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:But how could you make a jingle out of ... (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:A true Brit. (Score:3, Interesting)
If you're going to use bookmarks, portals and search engines anyway, why not leverage them fully and make all names/identifiers collision-free cryptographic names. Trademark problem: solved permanently.
'Duh' Browser security (Score:5, Interesting)
"Most browsers have certificates set up and secure connections, but the browser view only shows a padlock - it doesn't tell you who owns the certificate."
I still can't believe that, to this very day, there is no major browser that displays the right information about a certificate by default! This is the whole point of a certificate: it tells you that paypal.com actually belongs to a real-world entity named "PayPal Inc."
At the very least, when connected via SSL to a site with a valid cert, the browser address bar should have an extra line that names the real-world entity. A yellow padlock and location bar tell you nothing about who you're really talking to. You shouldn't have to manually examine the certificate to find out this information.
Does anyone have any idea why even Firefox, with all its other great usability and security innovations, still gets this basic thing wrong??
Re:Looking back... (Score:3, Interesting)
well, he got it wrong again (Score:5, Interesting)
if the server name isn't going to be the name of a server, then you can do this:
http://uk/org/bcs/members
and now everything is a hierarchical pathname that is resolved to a fqdn internally and nobody needs to worry that bcs.org.uk is a node on the network and members is a service on that node...
add it to the pile of big-woops! ideas along with ken thompson's anally elided 'e' in "creat()"...
A sad case of marketing anti-genius (Score:5, Interesting)
The following story is true, though extraordinarily sad.
At the company where I used to work, they registered all TLDs for their name. We had .com, .net, .org, .biz, etc.
One day, our chief marketing goober decided that .biz was going to be the next "in" thing on the Internet, and we would be one of the first companies to capitalize on it. So we had all of our business cards chaged, our mailers, our letterhead... everything. We were explicitly told never to use the .com domain name in our business dealings, it was .biz. We, the IT gurus, begged and implored them not to do this, that it would cause more trouble in the end than it was worth, and that the only companies that use .biz are fly-by-night companies that grab the .biz equivalent of famous .com names so that they can rip people off.
Who do you think they listened to?
Long story short: Within a few months, after our customers, suppliers, vendors, and lots of other really, really important people started complaining that their e-mails to us were bouncing back and e-mails from us were not being received because spam blockers were automatically assuming that our .biz address either weren't valid, our chief marketing goober decided to "spend more time with his family," our old business cards, letterhead, etc. was dug out, and we were instructed never to use the .biz domain name again.
Re:A sad case of marketing anti-genius (Score:3, Interesting)
Sorry, I forgot, they're management. Survival of the skinniest and hardest-working, then. Yanno, like the fable of the ant and the grasshopper.
Re:A true Brit. (Score:3, Interesting)
The X25/X29 PAD addressing thing was very much akin to using the Internet without a DNS, that's all. A PAD was merely a terminal server which gave you a command line access. I've used TCP/IP terminal servers which were very similar.
The naming convention used in the UK for e-mail (which was supported long after the transition to TCP/IP) was purely that, an e-mail address convention. At the time it was decided upon the ARPAnet were making their own decision and opted for the opposite to the UK (and New Zealand). C'est la vie.
Before JANET transitioned to TCP/IP it was "interesting" keeping the mail system up to date. You had a special version of the Sendmail config called UK-Sendmail which had a list of every JANET mail server address. What fun!
Anyway, I always thought that ARPAnet got it the wrong way around for the domainnames as it's easier to parse a big-endian address. e.g. uk.ac.ucl.ts means, it's in the UK.. ok.. look that up and pass the message on.. then once in the UK, it's an "ac" academic address, pass it to the mail server which deals with that, and so on. Just like routing packets.