Jon Postel, who has been involved in the development and management of the Internet since it was started as the ARPAnet in 1969, died in Los Angeles at the age of 55 of complications from heart surgery. Postel was the director of the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority, which has control of the assignment of domain names and IP addresses. Proposed changes are in progress that will eventually reassign this control to a new international organization to be formed by the year 2000, but this process is far from complete, and Postel remained instrumental in maintaining order in the implementation of the current system, keeping everything running smoothly despite being buffeted by enormous political pressures from all directions now that the Internet has become a big-money thing. What will happen to all of that now that he's not around remains to be seen.
During the ongoing debates about the future of the domain name system, the point was frequently made that Postel was doing a good job of running it now, but if anything ever happened to him it could all fall apart. The "benign dictatorship" model of net governance, with Postel making lots of decisions behind the scenes without checks and balances, worked out as long as the "right kind of person" was in charge, and had certain advantages over more-democratic systems that would introduce all sorts of messy politics. However, the downside is that once the original "dictator" is gone, all of his power could devolve on people less qualified to wield it. Thus, there was a growing movement to create a less-centralized system, full of committees and politics and all the stuff most people hate, but capable of continuing beyond the lifespan of any one person. The new U.S. government plan to turn over Internet management to an organization to be created followed such a method, and it's too bad that Postel didn't survive long enough to complete the transition to it. We can all hope that whoever succeeds Postel will be capable of managing the completion of this process.
Recently a hacker managed to send a forged e-mail message to Internic, the registrar which manages .com, .net, and .org domain names, redirecting America Online's domain, aol.com, away from AOL. Such Internic change requests are handled routinely every day and are usually perfectly legitimate, as when a site changes its server configuration or a domain name owner moves the domain to a different network provider. But in this case, the requestor was not authorized to make changes to AOL's domain record, but managed to forge the origin of the message to make it appear he was. This resulted in aol.com e-mail addresses being unreachable for several hours from when the change was made until it was corrected when AOL management noticed it had been changed and made an immediate request of InterNIC to change it back.
This "hack" shows the lack of security in the domain name system. Actually, when you register a domain name you can choose various different security levels for authenticating domain change requests, including registering a password, or for even higher security, a PGP key (for the Pretty Good Privacy encryption program). However, many domain owners haven't done this and are still using the default security method of requiring change requests to come from the correct "From:" address, but that's easy to fake by reconfiguring your mail program.
Version 4.5 of Netscape Communicatior has now been released in its final version (a beta version was out before). This is the final "4.x" version before they move ahead to 5.0, which will incorporate elements developed or redeveloped by independent programmers in the mozilla.org project using the publicly-released source code.
New features added in 4.5 include "smart browsing", where you can type keywords into the "Location" field in place of a full URL and cause related sites to be selected from Netscape's database or a search engine, and a "Related Sites" pulldown menu to link to other sites similar to the one you're on.
In a controversial move, if on installation you say yes to making Netscape your default browser and Netscape's home and search pages the defaults for those features, Communicator 4.5 will actually change your MS Internet Explorer configurations to use Netscape's site as the startup and search pages even when you're running MSIE. This seems to be an attempt to retaliate at Microsoft for its making MSIE take over various settings, and be integrated into the operating system to the exclusion of other browsers.
Lately, MSIE has been gradually taking market share from Netscape. Netscape has now dropped below 50% share, though it still has a plurality of Web users. Netscape is hoping to regain some share by being more aggressive in marketing its latest version. Since both browsers are free, the aim is to use browser market share to promote other products and services, especially the "portal" web sites operated by both browser companies.
(Contact Daniel Tobias at dan@softdisk.com. My personal World Wide Web page is at:http://www.softdisk.com/comp/dan/)