[IP] QuiteATake.com a view from the HINDUSTANI Times
<http://www.hindustantimes.com/news/181_400322,00030007.htm>
QuiteATake.com
Deepak Mankar
Mumbai, October 4, 2003
[]
Do you ever wonder why capitalism is more workable than socialism? Because
it gets along with human nature: greed, envy, one-upmanship, rivalry,
economic Darwinism. Socialism by definition is a non-starter. It needs
people to share, cooperate and get along. India never had socialism. What
we had was state capitalism. Only Canada and some of Europe seem to be
practicing Socialism, in the sense that they are more amenable to doing
things for the common good (conserving resources, universal health care,
etc.). At
<http://www.libertarianthought.com/smalltexts/capitalism.html>libertarianthought.com
and <http://www.mises.org/mmmp/mmmp13.asp>mises.org there are a couple of
short pieces that are worth a look. Previous QuiteATake.com link:
('CAPITALISM: A CAPITAL IDEA? You serious?')
<http://www.hindustantimes.com/news/181_361190,00030007.htm>hindustantimes.com.
MAKE NO MISTAKE. Your typos are ours to profit from.
A couple of weeks back, I wrote about remembering a bit of Shakespearean
wisdom from Julius Cæsar ("There is a tide in the affairs of men/Which
taken at the flood, leads on to fortune; ?":) owing to an Internet
happening.
<http://www.hindustantimes.com/news/181_380747,00030007.htm>hindustantimes.com.
This week too, I'm again reminded of the same quotation by another instance
of an opportunity being "taken at the flood". It's Verisign's bold move
this time. They quietly made changes to the DNS system using their acquired
company, Network Solutions, which administers the .com and .net registry
DNS servers. According to their admission in a post to the NANOG mailing
list <http://www.merit.edu/mail.archives/nanog/msg13602.html>merit.edu,
they've added a "wildcard A record to the .com and .net zones". The outcome
of this fiddle-faddle is that surfers making a typo in the search box get
not the familiar DNS Error Message but are instead taken to Site Finder
<http://sitefinder.vesign.com/>sitefinder.vesign.com. This is Verisign's
own ad-sponsored search page. The crime is turning domain name typos into
an ad opportunity. Critics are aghast at its enormity as well as audacity.
Much trouble looms ahead. More on this 'scandal' at
<http://www.technewsworld.com/perl/story/31608.html>technewsworld.com and
<http://www.nytimes.com/2003/09/18/technology/18MISS.html>nytimes.com. "If
you let them get away with this, there will be chaos on the Net, with
anyone getting away with anything" is Dave Farber's reaction to all this.
Farber is considered a 'Lion' of the Internet, in case you didn't know.
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