Technical Committee Report 15/09/01

Members: Andy Linton, Roger de Salis, Simon Blake, David Zanetti (Chair)

1. Media Contact

In mid August the Chair of the Technical Committee was contacted by a journalist for the New Zealand Herald, regarding a story they planned to (and indeed, did) run about the "discovery" of certain features of Internet Explorer.

Due to some confusion about exactly what features were being talked about, the Chair understood the issue to be about cookies, which are a cross-platform feature added to the specifications of HTTP by Netscape. However, in subsequent review of the item which appeared in the NZ Herald, the features turned out to be IE's caching and history.

In the end, the Society was not specifically quoted, but I mention it here to give some idea of some of the confusing requests that we sometimes encounter.

2. ISO 3166-1 Country Codes as names within the New Zealand Namespace

As directed by Council in the August 2001 meeting, the Technical Committee has reviewed the standing policy requring that names within the New Zealand namespace are not identical to ISO 3166-1 country codes.

The specific policy published by Domainz reads:

The origin of the policy comes from a number of places, from reducing confusion to working around bugs. Specific examples are:

• Some very old versions of the most common DNS server, BIND, were confused by the presence of a ccTLD code at a higher level, due to a method employed to find a matching name.
• The UK namespace also operated a reverse namespace, as a relic of the JANET mail system, in that sub-names were added to the right of the root, rather than the left as is normally the case. (eg, nz.co.myname vs myname.co.nz)
• "Smart" applications, which would try to apply some magic to the name presented.

In all of these examples, either the system or practice is no longer used, or is based on "broken" code - logic which should be fixed rather than worked around by policy in the namespace.

We also considered that there are a significant number of ISO 3166-1 names registered in the New Zealand namespace already. The impact appears to have been minimal.

Therefore, it is our recommendation to Council that the standing policy restricting ISO 3166-1 names from being registered within the New Zealand namespace be rescinded, noting that such a change should be publically advised before it takes place, to allow systems which cannot cope with the change to be altered to suit.

MOTION: That InternetNZ rescinds the policy preventing the registration of names within the New Zealand namespace as being identical to ISO 3166-1 country codes, and that the community shall be notified one month before this change takes place.

© 2001 The Internet Society of New Zealand
Last updated 8 September 2001