Internet
Jump to Fair Use, Warner, Online Videos, Online Music, Etc, notes and discussions which catch up on what happened in the Warner vs. Google dustup in December 2008 (over shares of YouTube music video ad revenues) and what’s happened since, or
Or take a walk down memory lane with some of the circa Dec 2009 / Jan 2010 “How the Internet Works” discussions …
The “Trying to Figure Out How the Internet Works” TwitLonger discussions
On Sunday 3rd January 2010, @tommcmullenjr said:
bp025 – For Geeks Only – Wondering How The Internet Works – Still doing a little thinking (yeah, I know, very little) about internet issues like how routing works and how internet IP address ranges (used for website host IP addresses, external static IP addresses, and web user/browser/router external IP addresses, and, I don’t know, maybe other things requiring IP addresses) are described/specified using CIDR prefixes, and how those IP address ranges (CIDR prefixes) are located within autonomous systems (AS), and how those AS use IGP (Internal Gateway Protocol, sometimes called Internal Routing Protocol, but still with BGP initials, go figure) for routing within the AS, and how those autonomous systems use Border Gateway Protocol (BGP) for routing between ASs, and how ASs use BGP to “advertise”/announce the reachability of their IP address ranges (CIDR prefixes) to adjacent ASs, and how those ASs then advertise those ranges (prefixes) and their own ranges (prefixes) to the next adjacent ASs, and how that process repeats and repeats and repeats and repeats and repeats and repeats and repeats for every next adjacent ASs, and for every IP address range (CIDR prefix), until all autonomous systems all over the internet have used their BGP to create routing tables with AS-to-AS-to-AS paths to every IP address range (CIDR prefix) that exists on the internet, anywhere on the internet, all over the world.
Hm.. I guess when one states the purpose of the inquiry that way, one has also pretty much already stated more than a little bit of its answer as well? 😉 Sure, but there’s always more detail, various perspectives, applications, and examples. Not to mention songs, sonnets, poems, arias, jokes, and limericks.
************ blog post 025 ***************
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References on current point:
Excellent Cisco paper – Cisco’s the major, or one of the major (I’m not up-to-date on all the players), providers of internet routers and, I think, other stuff, ideas, technology, services, software … big influential commercial and technology player. Another big name, at least in the 80s, for packet switching innovation, technology, software, hardware, and network design and operations management services was Bolt, Beranek, & Newman (BBN). Anyway, the Cisco paper by Geoff Huston is excellent.
http://www.cisco.com/web/about/ac123/ac147/archived_issues/ipj_9-1/autonomous_system_numbers.html
Autonomous System (AS) – Wikipedia
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Autonomous_system_(Internet)
CIDR – prefixes – shows why “prefix” is synonym for “IP address range” – Wikipedia
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Classless_Inter-Domain_Routing
Border Gateway Protocol (BGP)- Wikipedia
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Border_Gateway_Protocol
Other references:
Internet Routing Registry – Wikipedia
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_Routing_Registry
More Routing Registry
– 1994 paper by some internet insiders, referenced in wikipedia article on Internet Routing Registry, that has some routing tutorial and a lot of specs for the routing data that flows between autonomous systems.
ftp://ftp.ripe.net/ripe/docs/ripe-181.txt
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I checked with @askleo-pedia on some things, including whether he (Leo) had ever been a bartender. He said, no, but I’m not so sure. How could anyone know as much as Leo knows about the internet and all that other tech stuff if he’s never been a bartender? That just doesn’t add up. 😉
tom
*********** the prior posts ***********
twitlonger moved their server. they said they were going to move the old posts to the new server. if they do or did, the links below will or do work. if not, well, i guess twitlonger’s a nice service to have for free. if they don’t move the posts and you want one, you could tweet to @twitlonger, give them the link URL, and maybe he’ll give you it.
bp024
building our own example isp, for thinking about routing issues
http://www.twitlonger.com/show/1ef9c
bp023
routing continued. life is a game? naaah. internet routing registry. border gateway protocol (BGP) allows decentralization and uses CIDR.
http://www.twitlonger.com/show/1e542
v022 (aka bp022)
changing IP addresses, no obvious pattern … shift focus for a while to how routing, routers, routing tables, and CIDR work.
http://www.twitlonger.com/show/1e4fl
v021
browsers and nameservers whistling and shouting and stuff (re: setting up online connections). overview. central role of cookie. detail of nameserver lookups
http://www.twitlonger.com/show/1dorh
v020
talking laptops, talking wireless routers, and talking ISPs (DHCP). ipconfig. @askleo . ipv4 and ipv6.
http://www.twitlonger.com/show/1dcu6
v019
magic – one possible explanation for how online connections work
http://www.twitlonger.com/show/1cukq
v018
internet backbone: where it was then, where it is now. role of al gore and his 1991 law in internet.
http://www.twitlonger.com/show/1c3j9
v017
another hack attack – DDoS attack on amazon and walmart via overloading neustar, their DNS hosting company
http://www.twitlonger.com/show/1bq7t
v016
google’s an isp?! tale of a packet’s travels from oklahoma through denver to san francisco. internet money flows.
http://www.twitlonger.com/show/1bif2
v015
http://www.twitlonger.com/show/1bgoq
v014
http://www.twitlonger.com/show/1b940
v013
http://www.twitlonger.com/show/1b8k2
v012
http://www.twitlonger.com/show/1b7lk
v011
♫ a packetful of sugar makes the internet go round ♫
internet tech experts: andrews-poppins & cocoatoby
http://www.twitlonger.com/show/1b6me
v010
bartenders, sugar bowls, and sugar packets.
http://www.twitlonger.com/show/1b65n
v009
perspectives. circa 1996 – free website from compuserve, when web was still new. circa 1999 – blogging before “blog” was a word yet. svColo.com, is the data center for several companies. team twitter.
http://www.twitlonger.com/show/1av6p
v007 & v008
http://www.twitlonger.com/show/1aklm
v006
twitter’s hack attack: the maybe/probobly of what and how it was done
http://www.twitlonger.com/show/1abms
v005
more info about hack attack by blogger at @techcrunch
http://www.twitlonger.com/show/1aaj9
v002, v003, v004
two symptoms, early reports, what’s a DNS record?
http://www.twitlonger.com/show/1a2eg
v001
twitter hacked. dec 17-18. hmm … ??
http://www.twitlonger.com/show/1a16f
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Tom McMullen
On Thursday 31st December 2009, @tommcmullenjr said:
v022 rev 001 – For Geeks Only – Wondering How The Internet Works – Still doing a little thinking (yeah, I know, very little) about internet issues like another aspect of how routing works … happy new year …
************** rev 001 *******************
added: examples of IP addresses, server locations, and ISPs for (1) a Japanese company website (nec.com, server in Japan, ISP is NTT) and (2) the France/French part of Yahoo! (yahoo.fr, servers in London and Switzerland, ISP is London Web).
************** version 022 ***************
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the v016 post in this little series (link at bottom of page) did a pretty good job of figuring out how, at one level of detail, internet packets get routed from, for example, oklahoma through denver to get to san francisco. The short example followed a packet in and out of router ports and assumed each router had a “routing table” that, based on the packet’s destination IP address, told the router which outgoing port to send the packet to. That’s fine, as far as it goes.
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But the v021 discussion about twitter (or amazon or walmart) users, in the same or different parts of the world, getting different IP addresses from DNS hosting companies like Dynect (or Neustar), made me wonder about how the routing tables in all those internet routers all over the world are organized and work.
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Also in mind is something I tried a while ago. Here’s what I mean. I just tried it again:
★ Twitter ★
http://www.ip-adress.com/whois/twitter.com
Refreshing this site a few times gave several different IP addresses for twitter including:
168.43.162.36 and 128.121.146.100, all on an ISP with server in Englewood, California.
★ Google ★
http://www.ip-adress.com/whois/google.com
Changing to google gave me several IP addresses, including 74.125.43.99 and 209.85.135.104, all
on an ISP with server in Mountain View, CA
These addresses that start with 168, 128, 74, and 209 are all in Northern California. If you and I are an internet router in China, do we send everything starting with numbers less than 210 on an undersea cable or satellite link across the ocean to North America? Or what?
Hmm … let’s try to get an IP address on a server in Asia.
★ NEC ★
I changed the link to nec.com for Nippon Electric Company’s website (Nippon means Japan in Japanese):
http://www.ip-adress.com/whois/nec.com
Refreshing the page a few times, I got an IP address of 211.123.209.101 that didn’t change at all. That IP is with NTT (Nippon Telephone & Telegraph company) as ISP with server location in Japan.
Maybe addresses starting with numbers below 210 are north america, while numbers around 211 are in asia? Probobly not.
★ Yahoo! France ★
Try another. Yahoo! site for France, http://yahoo.fr .
http://www.ip-adress.com/whois/yahoo.fr
Ok. IP addresses are 217.146.186.221 in London and 87.248.121.75 in Switzerland, both with London Web as ISP.
So, if the numbers are organized by continents, Japan and London wouldn’t have such close numbers as 211.x.x.x and 217.x.x.x. So there’s some other way these numbers are assigned and appear in the router’s routing tables.
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The reason I’m looking for some relatively compact system for the website domain IP address numbers is there are SO MANY websites and IP addresses that it seems like having a separate entry in the routing table for each IP address would be a LOT to establish, search every time, and keep up-to-date. But maybe that’s the way it has to work. Maybe that’s not as hard as it sounds.
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Anyway, that’s led me to google on “routing.” That’s led to an interesting wikipedia article about CIDR (Classless Inter-Domain Routing). Yeah, I know. “Classless.” 🙂 I don’t think it means what you and I are thinking. 🙂 Anyway, apparently, CIDR is what the internet engineers (the IETF, Internet Engineering Task Force) invented when they found out pretty early on that the internet was growing so fast that the “classful” … right … 🙂 … the classful routing scheme, with Class A, B, and C classes of networks, wasn’t going to cut it for really large-scale operations. Apparently, two of the biggest problems were (1) wasted increasingly-scarce ipv4 addresses and (2) routing tables getting too big in all those routers around the world.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Classless_Inter-Domain_Routing
So, for a while, it’s routers and routing tables and how they work.
Why not? as in wtfn?
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now we REALLY need that smart internet-savvy bartender. 🙂
tom
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Tom McMullen
On Thursday 31st December 2009, @tommcmullenjr said:
v021 rev003 – For Geeks Only – Wondering How The Internet Works – Still doing a little thinking (yeah, I know, very little) about internet issues like how browsers, the various nameservers, internet routers, and website servers use DNS, HTTP, TCP/IP, and cookies to make online web sessions work for us …
************** changes – rev 003 *************
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note: this is getting a little long, so i wouldn’t read it unless you’re really into this stuff (i.e., top quartile on most measures of boring technogeekaliciousness)
added: since dynect.com, twitter’s DNS hosting company, has a dozen or so data centers around the world, added pointing, whistling, and shouting by internet entities standing on their chairs in those parts of the world. added in the “what if we, our laptop, and our laptop’s browser are travelling overseas when we requests and gets twitter’s IP address?” section
new question: i wonder what the world record is for “most characters in a twitlonger post”? I’m looking at 15,432 or so for this one so far. 🙂
************** changes – rev 002 *************
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added: more pointing, whistling, and shouting by more internet entities standing on their chairs in the “our laptop’s browser requests and gets twitter’s IP address” section
corrected: a few more typos
restored: link to previous 20 posts at bottom of page
************** changes – rev 001 *************
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added: ISP DNS server leaps up onto its chair and shouts. later jumps onto same chair and whistles. in the “our laptop’s browser requests and gets twitter’s IP address” section
corrected: a few typos
************** version 021 ***************
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Online connections. Online sessions. Logins. Sign-ins. I think those words can be used to mean several different things, at different levels, in an internet context. The type of connection I’m focusing on right now is the kind you and I have when we sign into a system like twitter, youtube, facebook, myspace, or ebay. We get a sign in page, provide username and password (our “credentials”), and, without signing in again and again, request and get page after page after page of content from the website. I’m assuming we’ve already registered (created an account) with, let’s say, twitter, by providing basic information, associating the account with a valid email address/account, and chosen a username and password.
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I get the impression, mainly from wikipedia, that browser “cookies” are used to make these connections work.
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Let’s take it from the beginning. We logged out of twitter yesterday and we want to log back in today.
It’s a several step process.
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First, from our browser’s own IP address, we have to request and receive the IP address that’s the right one for Twitter at this particular moment of today.
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Then, using our own and twitter’s IP addresses, we need to request and receive from twitter (1) the sign-in page and (2) the browser “cookie” containing a brand fresh new randomly-generated unique online connection number.
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Then, again using our own and twitter’s IP addresses, our browser has to send our username and password — and also that connection number from the cookie — back to twitter for authentication, and then receive back our first page of tweets.
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Now our browser and twitter can go back and forth, and back and forth, and back and forth, using pretty much only the IP addresses at each end and the connection number from the cookie (and, not sure, but maybe a TCP/IP port number at each end) to provide mutual assurance of the validity of the connection’s messaging.
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I think most of that’s right so far. A lot of it comes from reading wikipedia’s “HTTP cookie” article and trying to apply the general statements made there and in other wikipedia articles to the specific situation of using a wireless laptop to access twitter.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HTTP_cookie
HTTP is the language and rules web browsers and websites use to “talk” with one another. It’s also the page description language that website authors use … no, correction … HTML is the page description language website authors use to write instructions for our web browsers to create the displays we see on our computer screens. (HTTP = HyperText Transmission Protocol. HTML = HyperText Markup Language. HyperText meaning something we’ve come to take for granted, the ability to click on a link and — at hyper-fast speed — suddenly be looking at a page of “text” on a different computer on the other side of the world.)
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Some of what comes next may also be correct, but, as usual, this is an exercise in figuring out how things work, not an expert lecturing on how things definitely do work. If you’re already an expert on this internet stuff, you already know better than this. If you’re like me, not an expert, but someone who knows a little, is interested, and likes to puzzle things out with concrete examples, you can maybe have some fun thinking along with me here.
So let’s take it down one further level of detail. After this level of detail, there’s two, maybe three, others that seem relevant from the view of the internet application (the http get/post level, the tcp transmission control level, and the ip packet level … ) Not sure if we’ll want to or be able to go there. We’ll see …
(As a side note: we’re running into the issues that are relevant to the “user” or “application” or “logical” or “end-to-end” or “online internet connection/session” level or view of the world. If you start from the other end of the spectrum, the “physical” part of the high-speed digital transmission network, where lower-speed channels of digital data are “multiplexed”/combined into higher- and higher-speed channels and sent out onto physical optical fiber, coax cable, radio, or satellite facilities/lines/media, there are point-to-point “line protocols” and line termination (node/hop) de-multiplex and cross-connect and switch and re-multiplex issues that are interesting to explore too. That’s my early-1980s long-distance digital transmission past speaking.)
Anyway, back to trying to figure out how the common everyday user-level things are working on top of all this high-powered long-distance digital transmission and switching gear …
Next level of nitty-gritty … giving it a try … this next stuff comes from reading and trying to connect, synthesize, and apply a lot of wikipedia internet articles like: nameserver, ISP, IP address, root server, top level domain, DNS hosting, ICANN, registry, and probobly others.
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subject: our laptop’s browser requests and gets twitter’s IP address
When we tell our browser to send our request to gain access to twitter.com, the browser knows the first thing it needs is the right IP address for twitter. The first thing it tries is to look onto the laptop’s hard drive, in the so-called “cache” memory area. “Cache” is as if the computer was in the habit of keeping a stack of well-organized notes in its hip pocket. If there’s a previous DNS system (domain name system) response for twitter.com that, according to it’s expiration date/time, hasn’t expired yet, the browser will use that IP address.
If an unexpired IP address for twitter is not in the local browser cache, the browser will send a DNS (domain name system) request for twitter.com’s IP address through the home router and modem to the ISP’s DNS nameserver.
~~ In your mind, you can visualize the browser jumping up onto its chair and shouting over the network toward the ISP’s DNS server, saying, “Hey, buddy, I need the IP numbers for twitter.com.” The server nods its head and shouts back, “Ok, pal. I may already have that one. Let me check my cache here. Just give me a few milliseconds … no … that won’t help. i have one, but it’s expired. Ok, just give me a few hundred milliseconds. I’ll make a few calls to the root, com, and DNS hosting servers and get right back to you right away.” ~~
In other words, this ISP DNS nameserver’s job is to find out for us what IP address we should use for twitter.com at this moment of today. It may have very recently requested twitter.com’s IP address for another user on the ISP, so it checks its own cache memory. If an unexpired DNS response for twitter.com exists, that IP address is sent back to our laptop’s browser very quickly.
If not, the ISP’s DNS nameserver polls (sends a request to) the nearest internet root server (to find the address of the closest or otherwise best-to-use internet top-level domain (TLD) nameserver for the .com (com or dot-com) TLD. That .com TLD nameserver has a lookup table that allows it, upon an ISP nameserver’s request, to go in with “twitter.com” and come back with the IP address, not of Twitter itself, but of dynect.com, the “DNS hosting company” that twitter pays to be available 24/7 under all traffic and loading situations to give out the IP address that’s best for Twitter to give out in any given current moment. If an ISP asks the .com TLD nameserver for walmart.com or amazon.com, the .com server sends the ISP server the IP address of their “DNS hosting company”, neustar.com.
When the ISP DNS nameserver receives the IP address for dynect (DNS hosting company for twitter.com) or for neustar (DNS hosting company for walmart.com or amazon.com), it quickly jumps up onto its chair, looks way over out over the network at our laptop’s browser, waves, and shouts, “hold on for just another few hundred milliseconds, i’m almost done getting that IP address you asked me for.”
Next, the ISP DNS nameserver sits back down on its chair and sends “twitter.com” to the IP address of dynect.com. Dynect has a lookup table for its customers, including twitter. It puts “twitter.com” into the table and gets the current IP address for twitter back out. (Twitter has more than one IP address and, depending on traffic patterns, server loading, and, I guess, other factors, different IP addresses are best to give out to requesters at different times. It’s dynect’s job to have software and smart people that watch conditions and work with smart people at twitter to program dynect’s DNS hosting computer to change from one one twitter IP address to another as the hours, minutes, seconds, and milliseconds go by 24/7 every day.) When that address pops out of the lookup table, dynect sends it back to the ISP nameserver.
~~ The ISP nameserver now jumps back up and stands on its chair, whistles over the network to our laptop’s browser, and says, “ok, pal, I have that IP address you were asking for; here it comes.” The ISP server sends the address over the ISP’s network, through cable modem, our wireless router, and into our laptop and browser.~~
So now our laptop’s browser has the IP address twitter — due to its current traffic and server loading situation and maybe other factors — wants dynect to tell people in locations like ours, coming from ISPs located in places like ours, to use for new online connections right now. That’s great for our location in the USA.
But what if … what if we, our laptop, our browser, and our ISP are somewhere else? (I think this is going to bring us back to one of the original questions: what’s a DNS hosting company, what do they do, why, and why don’t companies like twitter do it for themselves somehow?)
★✔★ #china
subject: “but what if we, our laptop, and our laptop’s browser are travelling overseas when we request and get twitter’s IP address?”
if you look at the websites for twitter’s DNS hosting provider, http://dyn.com and http://dynect.com , you can find somewhere that dynect has about a dozen data centers located around the world and it encourages global customers (like twitter) to use them and even to co-locate with them.
that makes a little more sense now. if we’re in china doing the same thing as before, starting the process of signing into twitter, all those same steps have to be accomplished to get the IP address that is best for twitter to have us come in on from china. our laptop’s browser has to consult with (shout at) an ISP DNS server in china. it has to consult with (whistle at) a root server in china which has to consult with (shout at) a dot-com top level domain server in china WHICH will consult with (stand on a chair and wave arms at) a dynect DNS hosting server in asia somewhere, probobly china, which will probobly send the ISP server (stand on its chair and point at) a very different IP address (location) for twitter than I would get in the usa. why is that good? well, china’s on the other side of world. 12 hours away. their night time is our day time. all twitter’s data center stuff, i think, is in san francisco. so with a few keystrokes, dynect’s people or twitter’s people could change the twitter IP address ranges in dynect’s us and asian DNS hosts. or maybe on a programmed timer basis. why is that good? well, during usa day time (which is china’s night time), dynect’s hosts in usa could have a LOT of IP addresses (twitter servers) and dynect’s asia DNS host could be given just a few IP addresses. Vice versa for USA night/china day time. might that not balance the incoming and outgoing load on twitter’s servers?
maybe … that’s enough for now …
new open questions … wonder if twitter has a point of presence/gateway … hmm … twitter’s ISP is NTT … wonder how the routing table work? … do the routing tables somehow know all of twitter’s servers and IP addresses can be reached by first reaching an NTT gateway in asia or somewhere in the world? … does twitter care how stuff gets routed back and forth from faraway places? getting way out of my depth here, but piece after piece keeps becoming more clear. we’ll have to see tomorrow if any of these questions have answered themselves, still seem interesting, are on track, off track, relevant, etc … finis for now …
……………..
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2
Next,, we request Twitter’s sign-in page. Twitter doesn’t need to authenticate anything to send out this public page, so it sends back to our browser at our IP address the HTML sign-in page that we see, but also a data item called, a “cookie”, that we don’t see. A “cookie” is a cute name for a very plain text-based data item that takes the form of something like, “connection_id = 459d87f083s34kq”. Nobody else has ever been given that connection id by twitter before. It’s a unique number created at random. When you and I type in our username and password and then click or keystroke to send it, the browser sends the information from the page on the display screen, but also sends the cookie back with its unique connection number. This way, twitter now knows that connection_id 459d87f083s34kq is us, good ‘ol OurUserName/OurPassword. Actually, I’ve noticed that twitter, unlike most systems, lets you keep your account while changing your username which means what it really does is think of an account as a unique account number, not as a unique username. Small point, but interesting. So when twitter gets our username and password, along with the connection id from the cookie it sent to our browser, it now knows that connection 459d87f083s34kq is user account 7878656787898 (or whatever our unique twitter account number is). So twitter’s willingess to send us …
that’s enough for now …
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where’s that bartender when we need him? 🙂
tom
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Tom McMullen
On Tuesday 22nd December 2009, @tommcmullenjr said:
v012 – For Geeks Only – Wondering How The Internet Works – Still doing a little thinking (yeah, I know, very little), about why “DNS records” exist in companies that provide “DNS hosting services” to customers like twitter.
I know that the “http://www.twitter.com” that we type into our browser needs to be translated into a numeric IP address like … wait … instead of making one up this time, let’s see if some of the IP addresses are public info …
Let’s try CNN. Googling … searching on “IP addresss cnn.com” … ok, it comes up as 157.166.226.25. let’s test it by typing it into our browsers like this:
Ok, that worked. It went to CNN’s home page directly from the IP address. Nobody, not my browser, not my ISP, not the internet “backbone”, not a company like Dyn, or cnn itself had to translate “cnn.com” into “157.166.226.25” for my data (sugar) packets in my page request to get to CNN’s data center and for CNN’s data (sugar) packets making up its home page to get to my laptop.
Let’s try two more, General Motors and then twitter. First, General Motors. Googling on “IP address gm.com” … hm … ok, let’s slow down a second. There’s that “whois” (who is?) thing I have seen all the experts using over the years whenever they’ve been working on some internet problem (with me standing there interested, learning what I could, but not really knowing what was going on as they so quickly with all their typing and reading worked the issues). The “whois” phrase was probobly there on the CNN address google search too, but I was looking for an IP address and the “whois” didn’t catch my eye.
So let’s slow down a bit and take a detour here to see what learning about the “whois” function might tell us. “WHO IS” is directly related to DNS translations. That’s what you do with “WHOIS” tools; you type in cnn.com and it gives you back the IP address. And I vice versa (I think that’s right). Plus a LOT more info about the website/domain like phone/fax numbers, people doing various roles, and a lot of stuff. Here’s a wikipedia article that looks interesting. One of the things it shows is the WHOIS output for the domain, wikipedia.org:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WHOIS
Ok, another quick scan says this wiki article’s nice history section describes how the WHOIS function in the internet has changed from the initial DARPA/ARPANET days (in the 60s when the inter-net was about defense department research, before the inter-net became commercial and for everything, including fun) to the current day. And that this story includes how the management of registrations for DNS translations (from domain names like cnn.com to IP addresses like 157.166.226.25) has changed from being in one central place (DARPA, then Network Solutions, when there were relatively few domains) to, well, I’m not sure yet how it works now that Network Solutions apparently doesn’t have centralized control of all of it. Geeks heavier and more up-to-date than I am in these matters already know all of this. Geeks at my level and less may be able to get some perspective and insight into why a company like Dyn exists. And why a company like Twitter hires a company like Dyn to “host DNS records” when twitter’s IP address, whatever it is, probobly doesn’t change much, like CNN’s that we just got in a simple google search.
I bet that smart bartender who’s been explaining the internet to that twitter user already knows all this stuff about how the administration of the internet domain names and IP addresses has evolved since the 60s. Maybe a little reading in this “WHOIS” wikipedia article will put us in a position to listen and learn from him next time we visit.
tom
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12/14/2010
Fair Use, Warner, Online Videos & Music, and other industry issues
Dec 2008 – Warner pulled its music because it wasn’t getting a big enough piece of the ads.
dec 2008 – hmm … the following article from wired does a very nice job of summarizing the viewpoint and situation of the major record labels circa december 2008. it also adds the detail that warner’s demands included a last-minute demand for additional compensation for covers of warner music, not just official warner vids and not even just youtube member use of warner music as background or other uses. i’m thinking that’s like somebody picking up the guitar and playing house of the rising sun? probably, warner’s not that petty. The article says there were declining music sales. there were also two failed online music ventures by the major record labels — MusicNet and PressPlay — apparently in the 2001 timeframe (there’s a link to a 2001 article in the below article). Also, at that time, dec 2008, NBC/universal’s hulu was considered successful and thought to be a model music could use. I think it later failed too.
http://www.wired.com/epicenter/2008/12/major-labels-mu/
Sep 2009 – Warner and Google/YouTube back together after 9 months. Resolution from Warner being able to have choice of (1) old way with google placing ads against official and user-uploaded music and google getting advertisers and (2) new way of warner getting own advertisers, placing own ads against official vids or user-generated vids. Around same time, Sony and Universal planning to launch vevo “with youtube support” and “maybe warner will put music there too.”
http://www.wired.com/epicenter/2009/09/warner-music-group-signs-youtube-deal/
July 2009 – During the Google/YouTube/Warner dust up, Warner pulls a Keyboard Cat/Helen Hunt / Hall and Oates vid : )
http://www.wired.com/epicenter/2009/07/warner-music-group-deletes-keyboard-cat-track-from-youtube/
Feb 2009 – YouTube testing paid downloads. mp4 said to be less protected somehow. but a few programs allow downloads already anyway. paid downloads could become part of music industry’s solution with youtube. vevo mentioned as hula-like for music
http://www.wired.com/epicenter/2009/02/youtube-to-beco/
Jan 2009 – wired says: in the january following the breakdown of negotiations between google and warner over youtube ad revenue shares, youtube apparently overshot and pulled audio from vids of artists outside warner. also, mashable’s take.
http://www.wired.com/epicenter/2009/01/warner-music-gr/
It looks like Google bought YouTube in October 2006. The link below doesn’t work anymore, but it contains the date.
http://www.wired.com//2006/10/google_buys_you/
jan 2008 – looks like the warner vs. seeqpod lawsuit is an important part of the story of how online music rules got created. there’s a law called, the digital millenium copyright act (DMCA), that’s part of the rules of the game. there were lawsuits called “DMCA safe harbor lawsuits” which meant music owners suing internet sites over whether DMCA’s rules for exempting search engines from suits over potentially-infringing search results. suits were in progress against sites that stored music content including youtube. seeqpod was unique in being sued without actually having the content on its own site (it had links to sites who had illegal copies). the article also mentions warner settled with imeem, an interesting data point. all of this reminds me of napster, metallica, but this stuff is, i think, after that. yes, the the napster / metallica / dr dre / riaa suits and shutdown was 2000 – 2002 timeframe. napster was sold at bankruptcy auction to roxio who turned it into a pay for music (vs free music) service. roxio later sold it to its current owner, best buy. shawn fanning had a pretty wild and exciting run with issues of freedom of various kinds vs copyright vs free file sharing as good for indy and underground bands with no money or record label or radio play (like radiohead and dispatch) vs supposedly bad for metallica or dr dre or madonna, congressional hearings, lawsuits. wonder what shawn’s doing now? looks like he’s doing ok. wikipedia mentions some good books about the time: “here have been several books that document the experiences of people working at Napster, including Joseph Menn’s Napster biography, All the Rave: The Rise and Fall of Shawn Fanning’s Napster,[3] John Alderman’s “Sonic Boom: Napster, MP3, and the New Pioneers of Music,”[21] and Steve Knopper’s “Appetite for Self Destruction: The Spectacular Crash of the Record Industry in the Digital Age.”[22]” anyway, also in the article, it’s clear The Electronic Freedom Foundation (EFF) is a player in these issues. Also, RIAA, Recording Industry Association of America, is a player on the big music company side.
http://www.wired.com/listening_post/2008/01/warner-music-gr/
It looks like SeeqPod got sued out of business by the 2008 lawsuit, got a later suit against individuals dismissed, and the founders are showing up with a new business:
Radiohead – http://bit.ly/e4rxLq – have heard radiohead mentioned several times in different contexts. don’t know them at all. most recently, radiohead and dispatch were mentioned as part of the napster / shawn fanning story from 1998 – 2002 as bands who didn’t have major label or radio support and benefited from the exposure they were getting from napster. meanwhile, the major music labels and some bands were upset with napster and sued it out of business, into congressional hearings, and into bankruptcy. anyway, giving a listen to check out the radiohead sound.
wb4all 
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