Galloway

I thought it really very interesting when Galloway talks about protocol and how it affects the hierarchy and coding within the internet.

“The inventor of the World Wide Web, Tim Berners-Lee, describes the DNS system as the ‘one centralized Achilles’ heel by which [the Web] can all be brought down or controlled.’
“If hypothetically some controlling authority wished to ban China from the Internet (e.g., during an outbreak of hostilities), they could do so very easily through a simple modification of the information contained in the root servers at the top of the inverted tree. Within twenty-four hours, China would vanish from the Internet.
“As DNS renegade and Name Space founder Paul Garrin writes: ‘With the stroke of a delete key, whole countries can be blacked out from the rest of the net. With the ‘.’ [root file] centralized, this is easily done…Control the ‘.’ And you control access.’”
(Galloway, page 10)

It’s fascinating that such a powerful community as the Internet has such a pivotal “Achilles’ heel” that leaves virtually any information vulnerable to a higher authority. How unbelievable is it that all information concerning an entire nation as large as China can be removed from the entire Internet in the space of a mere 24 hours. It’s also interesting to note the reason why such a thing is possible with Internet protocol.

“These regulations always operate at the level of coding…protocols are highly formal.”
(Galloway, page 7)

This formality of protocol at the base level of coding allows for such a simple deletion of something like a period. When reading this, I instantly thought of my experience trying to use the most current OurTunes. Yes, yes, yes. I know. It’s illegal, but I still use it. Anyway, with the Itunes 7 update, OurTunes became defunct and the programmers for OurTunes were predominantly college students who didn’t have the time to get around the update’s new rules. Finally, someone took up the cause and figured out how to download music from other people’s libraries, from what I believe is a sort of mirror program. Ecstatic to find a working OurTunes again, I immediately tried to get it to work. Unfortunately, this version is not quite as user-friendly as the older versions and I mistook the area where you designate how you want the files named for a search bar. Needless to say, my files downloaded as some pretty funky things. This is what is originally in the file name place: %R_%a-%t.%e-mpeg. When re-entering the information, I forgot to add the period after the “%t” and the files downloaded as corrupt files. No kidding, they file names weren’t formatted properly. Anyway, it really is unbelievable how something like a “.” can affect protocol and coding.