Nastic Gryzunova. Seine. Issue 75

Russian Magazine / Net-culture / Seine www.russ.ru/netcult/nevod/20000605.html

Seine. Issue 75 Nastic Gryzunova Publication date: June 5, 2000 Review of current online events and publications

funny life

“I congratulate you, dear, on the end of one idiotic season and the onset of another, even more idiotic one ,” said the academic angel with Archangel powers at the third hour on June 1. Not being able to change anything without any reason at all, without external references at all, without justification at all, I take advantage of this rather dubious occasion to make several global statements.

Firstly, Sevod, oddly enough, is alive, despite the general impression he still gives to the contrary.

Secondly, changes are coming - more global than my next attempt to return to a weekly schedule. However, I still don’t know exactly which ones. But since we spend our whole lives guided by the principle “we don’t know what we want, but we know exactly what we DO NOT want,” this is not so important.

Clink - a cracked plate flies out of the window, not having time to re-qualify as a flying one before landing on the route eleventh-first floor, the monitor goes out due to a power outage, which has not been turned off for me for a long time, a two-year-old child endlessly repeats: “ this is a feature, it’s a bug ", accompanying this thoughtful statement, indicating a radical revaluation of our usual values, with sounds of sincere joy, and in the midst of all this, I periodically - without hope of success, however - press the red button with the inscription "Panic". Quite acceptable scenery.

RosNIIROS: the impossible is possible

What we no longer believed in has happened: at the meeting of the Coordination Group of the .RU domain on May 26, it was decided to introduce a system of distributed registration of domain names in the .RU zone. Still, there is some conditional benefit from sudden movements by the authorities: they provoke the necessary surges of adrenaline, sometimes ultimately leading to constructive actions.

Initially, from June 1, RosNIIROS planned to introduce prepayment for registration of second-level domain names. The announcement of this caused an increase in the activity of domain grabbers - one of them, a certain young man from Dubna, managed to register about 1,700 domains, without hiding his intention not to pay for them, and for some - to demand money from trademark owners. Since a scandal arose around this story in the last days of May, RosNIIROS, two days before the new rules came into force, closed for preventive maintenance, hiding from such inventive citizens.

In general, we are rewarded for your patience: complete with prepayment, a trial zone of the .Ru domain began operating on June 1. The list of domain name registrars includes Bureau of Telecommunication Services , Web Plus , Garant-Park-Telecom , DataForce IP , Demos-Internet , Zenon N.S.P. , Institute of Organic Chemistry named after N. D. Zelinsky RAS , " East Telecom ", " Combellga ", " Comstar ", ", " Kronix Plus " Macomnet ", " MTU-Intel ", " Peterlink ", RU-NIC, " Relcom. Business Network ", " Russian Telecommunication Network ", " Global One Network ", " SCS Sovintel ", " TeleRoss " and " Elvis-Telecom ". RosNIIROS resigns from performing the functions of a domain name registrar and, as the accounting periods of the domains registered by it expire, transfers they are under the jurisdiction of RU-NIC.

Providers: Turkmen example

On May 29, a cataclysm on a national scale occurred with the Turkmen Internet: the Ministry of Communications of Turkmenistan revoked the licenses of all private Internet providers. The official version presented by the authorities as an explanation for this step is that all companies that held telecommunications licenses - all of them - provided incorrect information for the renewal of licenses. Thus, the only provider in the blessed state of Turkmenistan remains the scientific and technical center of the state telecommunications company Turkmentelecom, which is part of the Ministry of Communications. This latter had hitherto had little more than a hundred clients; At the expense of clients of closed providers, he received about a thousand more. I would like to know why exactly the Ministry of Communications is distinguished by such a thirst for profit - it is clear that technical progress requires funds, but not to the same extent.

This exotic story seems to have an unpleasant parallel in Russia. As reported in the news feed of the Union of Internet Operators with reference to Internet.Ru (the latter, in turn, refers to the Political News Agency, but, as usual, there are problems with finding original sources), Russian Internet providers could theoretically face a similar problem. APN, citing its sources in the Ministry of Internal Affairs, reports that none of the Russian non-state Internet providers currently has a complete package of documents confirming its license. Thus, at any moment, the Ministry of Internal Affairs and the Ministry of Communications, during any inspection, can cancel the licenses of all Russian private providers. It is unlikely that in Russia this would happen in the same way as in Turkmenistan - the scale is not the same, still not 1,100 clients; however, the possibility of local blackmail of providers by the authorities remains - for example, in matters relating to SORM-2. And, which is typical, everything is within the law.

Y2K: Little Ghost from Vazastan

"Problem 2000" still seems to Russian authorities to be a good opportunity to get some money. I would not be surprised if in 2010 the Ministry of Communications will demand additional funding to launch the systems stopped because of it. However, the Ministry of Communications, having received its coveted $50 million from Exim Bank, and then the government decree “On the reorganization of the system of state supervision of communications and information in the Russian Federation,” will now diligently chew on the funds received for some time and look forward to the promised ones. But now the State Duma needed the money.

On June 2, deputies adopted an appeal to Prime Minister Mikhail Kasyanov regarding the disruption of measures to cure the “2000 problem” in ministries and departments of the Russian Federation. Unlike the Ministry of Communications, the State Duma still demands money from the Russian budget - we don’t get any joy from this, but at least there are no scary fairy tales for frightened Americans in the script. In their address, the deputies remind that the government allocated 2.3 billion rubles to solve the Year 2000 problem, and receiving part of these funds made it possible to begin the necessary work. However, at the next stage of financing, the Ministry of Finance allocated only a third of the planned amount, citing the lack of consequences of the “2000 problem” - as a result, deputies report, the State Duma, the Ministry of Defense, the Ministry of Internal Affairs, FAPSI, the Ministry of Taxes and Duties and other departments were forced use the traditional method of solving problems by turning off the power to everything and covering the sources of spontaneous combustion with their bodies. In this regard, the State Duma wants the rest of the amount allocated for Problem 2000.

Strangely enough, one believes somehow more in the validity of parliamentary hysteria than in Leonid Dododzhonovich Reiman’s fundraising exercises. That is, apparently, it is quite possible to assume that in the State Duma, the Ministry of Internal Affairs and the Ministry of Taxation everything is so bad with computer systems that the only possible solution to the “Problem 2000” for them is to disconnect the systems from the power grid forever. Which, of course, perfectly characterizes Russian ministries and departments, but still looks more like the truth than the suffering of the robot Reiman.

How much does a domain cost?

ShoutLoud has launched a free domain name valuation service. The assessment is made according to certain parameters (length of the name, prevalence of the word, demand for the product it denotes on the market, domain zone, etc.) I’m already tired of talking about this, but I’ll say it anyway. Please take everything that follows as a lecture for complete dummies - in my opinion, these are completely obvious things.

Firstly, ease of memorization, length (up to certain limits), and prevalence of the word included in the domain name play a role only from the point of view of users who come to the Web for the first, second, or third time in their lives. A person who is looking for a specific product/service/data will poke into some (sorry) attraktsion.ru only in his first online session. No domain name can save a company that doesn't provide the information a user is looking for on its website, or overcharges, or otherwise ruins a potential customer's experience.

Secondly, the more common a word is chosen as a domain name and the more vague its meaning, the less chance of success. What, pray tell, is a user looking for when they type the letter combination “www.business.com” in the “location” line? What kind of business? Don't consider everyone around you idiots - there are far fewer idiots than people think. In any area of ​​consumption, a normal person either immediately focuses on the brands he knows, or tries to imagine the entire possible range of services provided in a complex. For the first, domains containing trademarks greatly help - fortunately for all of us, more or less adequate mechanisms are already in place to combat the practice of hijacking such names by people who have nothing to do with these trademarks. If a potential client requires the most diverse information, search engines can be very useful. I don’t really see where there is a place for special domain names. That is, it is clear that a certain number of people will use the “location” line before going on a keyword search; however, it can be assumed that their number is not so large that they would pay millions for domain names.

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