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<body><p style="margin-top:0;margin-bottom:0;margin-left:0;margin-right:0;">Hi Peter, I really appreciate this discourse too. With what's happening in the world now and with this particular executive order affecting even something as niche as DNS, I like how it offers a vessel to have this public discussion.</p>
<br /><p style="margin-top:0;margin-bottom:0;margin-left:0;margin-right:0;">On Tuesday, April 8, 2025 7:40:44 PM CEST Peter 'PMc' Much wrote:</p>
<p style="margin-top:0;margin-bottom:0;margin-left:0;margin-right:0;">> So what You are saying is, it might still work to just talk to these</p>
<p style="margin-top:0;margin-bottom:0;margin-left:0;margin-right:0;">> people?</p>
<p style="margin-top:0;margin-bottom:0;margin-left:0;margin-right:0;">> In earlier times that was usually my stance when discussing matters</p>
<p style="margin-top:0;margin-bottom:0;margin-left:0;margin-right:0;">> in the underground - I might say, why do we not just make a date and</p>
<p style="margin-top:0;margin-bottom:0;margin-left:0;margin-right:0;">> actually talk to the concerned people, as basically they're also</p>
<p style="margin-top:0;margin-bottom:0;margin-left:0;margin-right:0;">> humans, like you and me? And occasionally things did indeed work</p>
<p style="margin-top:0;margin-bottom:0;margin-left:0;margin-right:0;">> out pleasantly that way...</p>
<p style="margin-top:0;margin-bottom:0;margin-left:0;margin-right:0;">> </p>
<p style="margin-top:0;margin-bottom:0;margin-left:0;margin-right:0;">> But given the development of recent years, I mostly lost my</p>
<p style="margin-top:0;margin-bottom:0;margin-left:0;margin-right:0;">> optimism. Like a fellow mystician put it: <Adam Kadmon has been tied</p>
<p style="margin-top:0;margin-bottom:0;margin-left:0;margin-right:0;">> up upside down> and it is difficult to cope with sheer madness - I</p>
<p style="margin-top:0;margin-bottom:0;margin-left:0;margin-right:0;">> even made it onto the death-list of some activists ---</p>
<br /><p style="margin-top:0;margin-bottom:0;margin-left:0;margin-right:0;">This is something I've been thinking about a lot recently, and does deserve some nuance. In one of the events that I previously mentioned, it was FSFE inviting me over and the rest of the practical bits essentially just lining up. The choice to rent out a hotel floor in Brussels, was quite smart. This meant that, just as I could easily go there from Antwerp, the politicians could also quite easily go there from their offices in "de Wetstraat / Rue de la Loi" (the street where their offices are located) to what was Hotel Le Grand Central at Rue Beillard 190. Being just 1.5km apart, it could even be walked to. The rest is really just a matter of pinging the right people.</p>
<br /><p style="margin-top:0;margin-bottom:0;margin-left:0;margin-right:0;">What it makes me think about in Europe right now though, is how much that proximity has affected my ability to be there. Or for that matter, how much being a Belgian resident - the host country of these administrative buildings - has affected my ability to reach out to these people in the correspondence about the Chips Act. Unlike the GitHub lobby, that was just me voicing my concerns in response to a press release.</p>
<br /><p style="margin-top:0;margin-bottom:0;margin-left:0;margin-right:0;">The reason why this is significant to me, is that when I visit Portugal (which I often do), suddenly I am a lot further away from these administrative affairs. It feels a lot more distant, because it is. Rather than 50km, suddenly it's 2000. And that is reflected in the media as well. So if I were born Portuguese and not just stay there for a couple of years, would I have the same beliefs about Brussels? Would I have the same access? In an ideal world, of course I should, every EU citizen should. But would that be reality?</p>
<br /><p style="margin-top:0;margin-bottom:0;margin-left:0;margin-right:0;">That is where I turn my gaze across the pond, and the various executive orders that have been ratified so far. Going back to what started this thread, that was one of them. The event called "Liberation Day" was another. In response to that, even the EU's executive branch themselves have attempted to enter dialogue, by undoing their 2% tariff to the US. And it was, unsurprisingly, met with more dismissal. From politicians to politicians, organizations that by all accords, should be on the same level. This was never about reciprocity. And not even just across the pond, even inside the US there are various concerned speeches from presidential figures like Bernie Sanders and Barack Obama now.</p>
<br /><p style="margin-top:0;margin-bottom:0;margin-left:0;margin-right:0;">Obama's presentation, as published by Hamilton College:</p>
<p style="margin-top:0;margin-bottom:0;margin-left:0;margin-right:0;"><a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nU3E8r0n27w">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nU3E8r0n27w</a></p>
<br /><p style="margin-top:0;margin-bottom:0;margin-left:0;margin-right:0;">So what could be done about it in the US, that is rapidly heading towards a fascist dictatorship? For us Europeans, I think it's most important to acknowledge how fragile democracy really is, and how history taught us how important it is to be upheld. For Americans meanwhile, the precedent has been an attempted insurrection, an attempted assassination, blatantly ignoring the rule of law, and crashing the stock market. In 2020, the US has also gotten very close to a civil war. To merely call it a state of turmoil, would be a grave understatement. Its administration is a loose cannon, willing to burn every bridge made with every single ally across centuries. As an onlooker, it's an ongoing exercise to remember that the administration is not its people.</p>
<br /><p style="margin-top:0;margin-bottom:0;margin-left:0;margin-right:0;">Meanwhile for organizations like ISC and the IETF, perhaps the expression of dissent by adopting primary/secondary was more than just "social justice" as what I opposed it for way back when. If that is one of the few ways that American people and organizations can still reach their government, that is praiseworthy. Better than a swasticar, that much is for sure. And for nonprofit organizations like ISC, it's even more genuine because the added work would've been a net liability. That is in stark contrast with for-profits, who may well only care about public perception to not harm sales. So for nonprofits to enact these things, that is truly admirable. Coming to terms with that, has been long overdue. I should've known better.</p>
<br /><p style="margin-top:0;margin-bottom:0;margin-left:0;margin-right:0;">> ! > will be not far into the future that safety-critical material ends</p>
<p style="margin-top:0;margin-bottom:0;margin-left:0;margin-right:0;">> ! > up there - probably unnoticed until some accident happens. And after</p>
<p style="margin-top:0;margin-bottom:0;margin-left:0;margin-right:0;">> ! > the accident the outcry for regulations will be imminent.</p>
<p style="margin-top:0;margin-bottom:0;margin-left:0;margin-right:0;">> !</p>
<p style="margin-top:0;margin-bottom:0;margin-left:0;margin-right:0;">> ! Fascinating. Just the other day, I did experience a denial of service</p>
<p style="margin-top:0;margin-bottom:0;margin-left:0;margin-right:0;">> attack, ! that turned out to be performed by none other than OpenAI. It was</p>
<p style="margin-top:0;margin-bottom:0;margin-left:0;margin-right:0;">> against my ! Gitea server, with OpenAI's crawlers requesting an</p>
<p style="margin-top:0;margin-bottom:0;margin-left:0;margin-right:0;">> unreasonable amount of zip ! and bundle archives from it. Those were</p>
<p style="margin-top:0;margin-bottom:0;margin-left:0;margin-right:0;">> generated, (presumably) transferred ! and saved to disk. This took down my</p>
<p style="margin-top:0;margin-bottom:0;margin-left:0;margin-right:0;">> Gitea instance twice so far, in both ! cases due to storage being depleted.</p>
<p style="margin-top:0;margin-bottom:0;margin-left:0;margin-right:0;">> </p>
<p style="margin-top:0;margin-bottom:0;margin-left:0;margin-right:0;">> Ah, yeah, I've seen these. I don't think it is intentional DoS, rather</p>
<p style="margin-top:0;margin-bottom:0;margin-left:0;margin-right:0;">> just recklessness. I have a cgit public, and I found them there,</p>
<p style="margin-top:0;margin-bottom:0;margin-left:0;margin-right:0;">> downloading utterly worthless copies of the Berkeley sources.</p>
<p style="margin-top:0;margin-bottom:0;margin-left:0;margin-right:0;">> It seems to work similiar to the California gold rush - they think the</p>
<p style="margin-top:0;margin-bottom:0;margin-left:0;margin-right:0;">> more worthless garbage they download from the web, the richer they</p>
<p style="margin-top:0;margin-bottom:0;margin-left:0;margin-right:0;">> will get (for whatever rationale I do not understand). So they ignore</p>
<p style="margin-top:0;margin-bottom:0;margin-left:0;margin-right:0;">> any robots.txt, and fetch every url they can construct, no matter how</p>
<p style="margin-top:0;margin-bottom:0;margin-left:0;margin-right:0;">> useless it might be.</p>
<p style="margin-top:0;margin-bottom:0;margin-left:0;margin-right:0;">> </p>
<p style="margin-top:0;margin-bottom:0;margin-left:0;margin-right:0;">> I openend a thread here:</p>
<p style="margin-top:0;margin-bottom:0;margin-left:0;margin-right:0;">> https://forums.freebsd.org/threads/how-valuable-is-the-freebsd-source.96962/</p>
<p style="margin-top:0;margin-bottom:0;margin-left:0;margin-right:0;">> </p>
<p style="margin-top:0;margin-bottom:0;margin-left:0;margin-right:0;">> Bottomline so far: I switched my server to IPv6 only, and the spook</p>
<p style="margin-top:0;margin-bottom:0;margin-left:0;margin-right:0;">> was gone entirely. So this is not any technologically advanced party,</p>
<p style="margin-top:0;margin-bottom:0;margin-left:0;margin-right:0;">> and rather some make-money-fast gangs.</p>
<br /><p style="margin-top:0;margin-bottom:0;margin-left:0;margin-right:0;">It's kind of funny how we each, independently, came to the same conclusion. While I would've compared to the Australian gold rush and pretty much the only money-making organizations being those selling shovels, the parallels are striking. I appreciate that you mention IPv6-only to be a possible solution to this. Other than that, I've so far also seen writings from Cloudflare about protection from this being available in their free tier. I'm still contemplating whether I want Cloudflare to front my web presence, but if it gets unmanageable, I'll have to bite the market consolidation bullet.</p>
<br /><p style="margin-top:0;margin-bottom:0;margin-left:0;margin-right:0;">Heh, come to think of it... That link to Cloudflare was one posted in your FreeBSD forum thread. Swings and roundabouts huh :)</p>
<br /><p style="margin-top:0;margin-bottom:0;margin-left:0;margin-right:0;">> Anyway, recklessness has greatly increased nowadays. Gotten rid of</p>
<p style="margin-top:0;margin-bottom:0;margin-left:0;margin-right:0;">> this one, I already found the next: somebody is sending thousands and</p>
<p style="margin-top:0;margin-bottom:0;margin-left:0;margin-right:0;">> thousands of queries against my named, with randomly created</p>
<p style="margin-top:0;margin-bottom:0;margin-left:0;margin-right:0;">> hostnames:</p>
<p style="margin-top:0;margin-bottom:0;margin-left:0;margin-right:0;">> </p>
<p style="margin-top:0;margin-bottom:0;margin-left:0;margin-right:0;">> 1 | m6nij.f71. in a</p>
<p style="margin-top:0;margin-bottom:0;margin-left:0;margin-right:0;">> 1 | ctvwmkxbl25.m0bwykiudf3yozg0u.f75. in a</p>
<p style="margin-top:0;margin-bottom:0;margin-left:0;margin-right:0;">> 1 | hvg5s6rr087hjml.55bvzlcm6ctwyy2.fas. in a</p>
<p style="margin-top:0;margin-bottom:0;margin-left:0;margin-right:0;">> 1 | 5pagomi84gl.fb. in a</p>
<p style="margin-top:0;margin-bottom:0;margin-left:0;margin-right:0;">> 1 | c5eczkjrv.zwm5r3.fb. in a</p>
<p style="margin-top:0;margin-bottom:0;margin-left:0;margin-right:0;">> 1 | vunqrps4r.fbc. in a</p>
<p style="margin-top:0;margin-bottom:0;margin-left:0;margin-right:0;">> 1 | c3u8ya1dasu.fc. in a</p>
<p style="margin-top:0;margin-bottom:0;margin-left:0;margin-right:0;">> 1 | qoo48n.fc. in a</p>
<p style="margin-top:0;margin-bottom:0;margin-left:0;margin-right:0;">> 1 | 57lozdnlui3.pzt6dvia7zr.fch. in a</p>
<p style="margin-top:0;margin-bottom:0;margin-left:0;margin-right:0;">> 1 | 1k03772f837.fcs. in a</p>
<p style="margin-top:0;margin-bottom:0;margin-left:0;margin-right:0;">> </p>
<p style="margin-top:0;margin-bottom:0;margin-left:0;margin-right:0;">> This is a public authoritative server, they never get an answer beyond</p>
<p style="margin-top:0;margin-bottom:0;margin-left:0;margin-right:0;">> REFUSED.</p>
<br /><p style="margin-top:0;margin-bottom:0;margin-left:0;margin-right:0;">Strange and fascinating. I would like us (as in, members of this list) to discuss this. The only thing I can come up with, is that "fb" vaguely resembles fb.com. But for it to be terminated into fb., that just makes it a domain that can't exist on the Internet. Meanwhile the preceding strings are sometimes used by botnet operators to sneak payloads into, on account of DNS being hard to filter (though also one of the first to be targeted by filters). The idea is that you could, say, base64 encode instructions into the subdomain of a domain you're authoritative for. Then the infected zombies on that botnet could just query that via DNS, and receive instructions accordingly. This is also why DoT/DoH is such a double-edged sword, privacy is great but applications being able to establish a secure channel to a specified server is a great way to hide malice too. Or at least better than the IRC that preceded it. These attackers are not that educated, they'd be called engineers if they were.</p>
<br /><p style="margin-top:0;margin-bottom:0;margin-left:0;margin-right:0;">> ! The case of radio kill switches is interesting to me. Unlike smartphone</p>
<p style="margin-top:0;margin-bottom:0;margin-left:0;margin-right:0;">> radios ! and their proprietary drivers (which I don't think will ever be</p>
<p style="margin-top:0;margin-bottom:0;margin-left:0;margin-right:0;">> open source, ! with very few exceptions), radio kill switches are easier to</p>
<p style="margin-top:0;margin-bottom:0;margin-left:0;margin-right:0;">> argue for. Not ! only does the technology already exist, it's also easy to</p>
<p style="margin-top:0;margin-bottom:0;margin-left:0;margin-right:0;">> make a privacy ! argument here. No matter how technical people are, we want</p>
<p style="margin-top:0;margin-bottom:0;margin-left:0;margin-right:0;">> privacy and control ! over who gets to see what. Everyone wants to be able</p>
<p style="margin-top:0;margin-bottom:0;margin-left:0;margin-right:0;">> to close their proverbial ! curtains. I think that many people have been</p>
<p style="margin-top:0;margin-bottom:0;margin-left:0;margin-right:0;">> desensitized over time, into an ! idea that they can't change this status</p>
<p style="margin-top:0;margin-bottom:0;margin-left:0;margin-right:0;">> quo and should therefore simply accept ! it. But that doesn't make the</p>
<p style="margin-top:0;margin-bottom:0;margin-left:0;margin-right:0;">> desire go away, it just buries it.</p>
<p style="margin-top:0;margin-bottom:0;margin-left:0;margin-right:0;">> </p>
<p style="margin-top:0;margin-bottom:0;margin-left:0;margin-right:0;">> I didn't consider that one, just the safety implication of radio</p>
<p style="margin-top:0;margin-bottom:0;margin-left:0;margin-right:0;">> waves. But You are right, it is also a possibility to spy and track</p>
<p style="margin-top:0;margin-bottom:0;margin-left:0;margin-right:0;">> a given hw MAC address, and a proper kill switch should avoid that.</p>
<p style="margin-top:0;margin-bottom:0;margin-left:0;margin-right:0;">> I don't know what happened to the people. Back in the 90s we went to</p>
<p style="margin-top:0;margin-bottom:0;margin-left:0;margin-right:0;">> the street because the government wanted to do a census and we were</p>
<p style="margin-top:0;margin-bottom:0;margin-left:0;margin-right:0;">> opposing the data collection.</p>
<p style="margin-top:0;margin-bottom:0;margin-left:0;margin-right:0;">> So, I still try to figure out what did change, what actually happened</p>
<p style="margin-top:0;margin-bottom:0;margin-left:0;margin-right:0;">> to the people, from a sociological rsp. systemic point of view.</p>
<p style="margin-top:0;margin-bottom:0;margin-left:0;margin-right:0;">> </p>
<p style="margin-top:0;margin-bottom:0;margin-left:0;margin-right:0;">> Just an hour ago, at the supermarket, there was a new cashier, and so</p>
<p style="margin-top:0;margin-bottom:0;margin-left:0;margin-right:0;">> he asked if I particpated in the "bonus program" (that is, the "app").</p>
<p style="margin-top:0;margin-bottom:0;margin-left:0;margin-right:0;">> In return I asked him if he isn't ashamed for wanting to sniff</p>
<p style="margin-top:0;margin-bottom:0;margin-left:0;margin-right:0;">> out his customers. He had some difficulty figuring the involved</p>
<p style="margin-top:0;margin-bottom:0;margin-left:0;margin-right:0;">> association chain (apparently they don't brief their cashiers on their</p>
<p style="margin-top:0;margin-bottom:0;margin-left:0;margin-right:0;">> wrongdoings), and in the meantime some guy behind me came to help and</p>
<p style="margin-top:0;margin-bottom:0;margin-left:0;margin-right:0;">> commented "sadly, you are right".</p>
<br /><p style="margin-top:0;margin-bottom:0;margin-left:0;margin-right:0;">Ahh, supermarkets and their loyalty programmes... A practice that I also have reservations with. It is an attempt at data collection, and cost for it is likely booked as market research. Retail chains are incredibly consolidated, and it's extremely important for inventory to near exactly match local demand. The alternative is spoilage and resulting waste, in razor tight profit margins that really can't afford any waste. Environment as reason or a pleasant side effect of business goals.. well, at least it offers a marketing opportunity.</p>
<br /><p style="margin-top:0;margin-bottom:0;margin-left:0;margin-right:0;">Many people are unaware of the logistics behind this though, and that includes the workers staffing each of these establishments. More often than not, they're entry-level employees for whom it's little more than a springboard, something to put on their CV as work experience. It's one of the things where I think it's really important to understand the levels of a given hierarchical structure.</p>
<br /><p style="margin-top:0;margin-bottom:0;margin-left:0;margin-right:0;">Recently I bumped into that on the IETF's work too, where I walked into a Ziggo establishment in the Netherlands to ask about their parent company, Liberty Global. After a bit of back and forth with an employee that just started there, I got to a managerial gentleman who led me to the back of the store. There I was asked to make my case, and to present my own, a researcher's (the owner of an AS), and even the IETF's own credentials. Who are these people to ask about a technical contact within Ziggo, who "only partners with Vodafone, not LGI"?</p>
<br /><p style="margin-top:0;margin-bottom:0;margin-left:0;margin-right:0;">Eventually the contact was found, and this representative of LGI and this researcher (Tobias Fiebig) met at IETF 122 in Bangkok. They communicated their results back to me and the DNSOP list, but unfortunately time prevented me from getting back to it to this day. Tell you what, maybe I'll put Tobias in CC. What it taught me is that some subjects are best addressed from above, while others can only be approached from below. That case was best approached from above, and I would make the same argument for the logistics of retail chains.</p>
<br /><p style="margin-top:0;margin-bottom:0;margin-left:0;margin-right:0;">> So, here is the problem: this is not something that is "sad", this is</p>
<p style="margin-top:0;margin-bottom:0;margin-left:0;margin-right:0;">> something that needs to be handled. But people don't do anything, anymore.</p>
<br /><p style="margin-top:0;margin-bottom:0;margin-left:0;margin-right:0;">I think the issue here is that time is a limiting factor that affects all of us equally. 80 years in this world, and then our story of a lifetime.. is done. That affects the CEO making millions just as much as it affects the folks stocking shelves. When things affect us personally, that's when we take action. Meanwhile for things that are far away (distance, hierarchical level, etc), it's often better to just form a conclusion and move on. Take this email for example, it took a whole evening to write! Even just reading up to this point would honestly make me very impressed.</p>
<br /><p style="margin-top:0;margin-bottom:0;margin-left:0;margin-right:0;">> cheerio,</p>
<p style="margin-top:0;margin-bottom:0;margin-left:0;margin-right:0;">> PMc</p>
<br /><br /><p style="margin-top:0;margin-bottom:0;margin-left:0;margin-right:0;">-- </p>
<p style="margin-top:0;margin-bottom:0;margin-left:0;margin-right:0;">Met vriendelijke groet,</p>
<p style="margin-top:0;margin-bottom:0;margin-left:0;margin-right:0;">Michael De Roover</p>
<br /><p style="margin-top:0;margin-bottom:0;margin-left:0;margin-right:0;">Mail: isc@nixmagic.com</p>
<p style="margin-top:0;margin-bottom:0;margin-left:0;margin-right:0;">Web: michael.de.roover.eu.org</p>
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