On October 1, 2016, ICANN finally got its own drivers license. It was on that day that the contract between the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) and the United States government Department of Commerce (DOC) lapsed. ICANN would no longer have to answer to the DOC. Instead, recommendations would come from the multi-national, multi-agency governing board. ICANN officials, and many in the IT industry have emphasized that this is a non-event. A simple administrative change that really just formalized an arrangement that was already in place. And besides, we are told, the new model will provide greater input and therefore greater responsiveness to the needs of the Internet community.
They might be right. I really hope they are right. But, I fear they are being overly naive. Like a newly minted 16 year old driver, I fear they overestimate their own abilities and underestimate the dangers they might face. As of now, October 2016, nothing is really changed. The internet is working, the sky is blue, things are good. However, just because the world didn’t fall apart on October 1, doesn’t mean that the severing of the parental oversight from the DOC won’t result in some very bad things for internet users.
Remember that ICANN enforces the Internet Assigned Number Authority (IANA.) The IANA covers not only how names and IP address are assigned, but how routing happens. ICANN controls the domain root zone file; the ultimate top of the routing pyramid when it comes to finding things on the internet.
Censorship
How bad could it be? After all, just because you control the assignment of names and addresses on the internet, doesn’t mean you control the content, does it? Yes, it does. Let’s suppose that you create a domain called fluffybunnies.com. You use your newly minted domain to create a blog. And your topic of choice is human rights violations in China. Today, nothing can stop you from writing to your heart’s content about the abuses that the Chinease government commits on its own people.
Obviously, the Chinease government wouldn’t appreciate your blog very much. But hey, you’re an American (or a Brit, or a Brazilian, or someone posting outside of China.) The internet has leveled the journalistic playing field. As you sit in your apartment in Oakland, CA in the United States, how could China even touch you? They can’t can they?
Under the new order, yes, they can. In order for people to see your content, they have to be able to find fluffybunnies.com. Suppose ICANN decides to dump fluffybunnies.com from the world’s Domain Name Servers? These are the servers that route names (fluffybunnies.com) to actual server IP addresses. All of a sudden, fluffybunnies.com is gone.
Much has been made of Google’s ability to blacklist a site and make it disappear from Google search results. However, even if Google puts you at the bottom of their search results, you still exist. ICANN has the ability to make your site completely disappear. You do not own your domain name. You lease it. ICANN is the leaseholder.
That’s crazy, Rodney. ICANN wouldn’t get involved in evaluating the content of your site. It’s not what they do.
Except they have. In 2008, ICANN pursued action against 10 registrars for not doing enough to prevent scammers and spammers from abusing the domain registry process.
Okay, maybe they could go after a site for their content, but that’s what the multi-stakeholder model is designed to prevent from happening. All of those countries being involved means that abuses like that can’t happen.
Except they have in the past. ICANN’s multi-national board is not the United Nation, despite Senator Ted Cruz’s suggestion otherwise. However, we can look to the UN as a model for how multi-national organizations might work. In 2003 Libya became chairman of the UN Commission on Human Rights. The UN decided that the best country to lead the Human Rights Commission was a dictatorship with a horrible track record of abusing not only its own citizens, but exporting terrorism around the world.
China or Saudi Arabia or Russia or any number of countries interested in censorship could certainly achieve a position of authority to use ICANN’s position to pursue an agenda of censorship.
Balkanization
One of the goals touted by those in favor of ICANN’s independence, is that only by expanding the groups that have input into ICANN’s operations can we ensure that the internet remains consistent across the world. We don’t want multiple organizations assigning duplicate IP adreesses. Only ICANN can give out IP addresses. We don’t want multiple rogue locations trying to route domain names. The danger is that a rogue DNS server could hijack your request for mybank.com and instead reroute it to a scammer’s site.
The DNS system that ICANN controls ensures that there is one address for each domain name and those names are consistent. In 1998, VeriSign challenged ICANN’s monopoly on routing names. ICANN forced VeriSign to abandon their duplicate name routing system. VeriSign sued. They lost. But, the reason they lost was because ICANN enjoyed antitrust protections from the US government. There’s an old saying,
The government prosecutes thieves. They don’t like the competition.
For better or worse, the government, the US government holds a monopoly on certain things. Some are state sponsered, like drivers licenses. We couldn’t have companies offering private drivers licenses, or license plates. We need the government to regulate them. I know if someone has a license from Vermont, the government has vetted them, just as much as if they have a license from New Mexico. Some state sanctioned monopolies are private enterprises. Major League Baseball, for example, enjoys antitrust protections from the governent. It means that the owner of the Los Angeles Dodgers cannot get together with a couple of his friends and form a new league in competition with MLB.
Because of the exclusive nature of its contract with the Department of Commerce, ICANN enjoyed antitrust protection. There is no guarantee that ICANN will continue to enjoy antitrust protection.
But, Rodney, who would want to go to the expense and trouble of setting up a competing name resolution system?
Lets start with the obvious: Google and Facebook. Both companies are trying to build a suite of apps and tools that will get you to enter their world and stay there. Facebook just started offering an auction site to compete with Amazon and eBay. Google, is involved in everything from self-driving cars, to mapping the world’s streets, and even walking trails. Either company would love to handle your request to go to a new site. Both already wrap other site’s content in a facebook or google wrapper. Handling the name resolution would be a natural next step and give either one of them a distinct competitive advantage. And both companies have the resources to fund such a project.
In addition, there are numerous small companies that would also love to have a piece of the name resolution process. Verisign did it when there was not a lot of money in resolving names. The potential payoff today is much bigger.
Privacy
The internet was designed to let people stay hidden. That’s a good thing if you are trying to avoid having your mailbox fill up with spam. It can be a bad thing if you are trying to track down the writer of a particularly troubling post on a comment section of a news article. You can wrap yourself in the blanket of anonymity and hide from the world. There is no guarantee that you can keep that wrap, or even any of your privacy going forward. Yes, the changes in ICANN’s governance could strip you naked on the internet.
As a domain owner, you have options for keeping a degree of anonymity. I own www.staging.rodneymbliss.com. I’ve hidden the address associated with my account. Spammers long ago figured out how to scrape the contact information from whois.com and contact domain owners with “a very exclusive offer just for you!”
Suppose, ICANN’s multinational governing board decides that anonymity is something that they will no longer respect? Do we care?
Consider a site named www.saudiarabia.gay. Homosexuality is illegal in Saudi Arabia. They throw people off of buildings if they are suspected of being gay. If you are a gay man in Saudi Arabia, or if you are gay and have family that are Saudi, you probably don’t want to come out to them. However, you might want to try to carve out a safe place on the internet where those oppressed by the Saudi government can get together and share their experiences. Naturally, you don’t want the Saudi Arabian governent to know your name. so, you register www.saudiarabia.gay and hide your contact information.
Remember that Saudi Arabia will also have input into ICANN’s governance. Could they pressure the organization to force registrars to reveal the owners of websites? If you think they will not, are you willing to bet your life on it? Are you willing to bet others’ lives on it?
Money
ICANN, is registered as a non-profit corporation. Non-profit does not mean “no” profit. It’s a legal protection that allows a corporation to avoid paying taxes in the United States. When ICANN was joined at the hip with the Department of Commerce, it kind of made sense for them to not pay taxes. While a private organization, they were providing a valuable service to the nation and the world. And with the oversight provided by the DOC, they were really a quasi-government agency. And of course, the government doesn’t pay taxes to itself.
That’s all changed. And while ICANN may remain a non-profit, they sell products and services. They have a budget and they have expenses. When you register a domain (fluffybunnies.com) part of the money goes to ICANN. In 2004, ICANN doubled their budget. The budget went from $8,000,000 to $16,000,000. ICANN raised the additional revenue by increasing the fees for domain registration and by offering new top level domain names (TLDs.) For $185,000 you can request your own TLD. You’ll have to pay $25,000 per year to keep it current.
This change, which was implemented in 2008 allowed many new domains. Originally, ICANN allowed
- .com for commercial entities
- .net for groups
- .org for non-commercial entities
- .edu for educational institutions
- .gov for US governments, state and federal
- .mil for US military
Today, there are literally hundreds of TLDs. They are no longer limited to three letters. (No, TLD never stood for “three letter domain,” although it looks like it should have.) ICANN earns money by the sale of domains. They get $185,000 for every new TLD. And they get a share of every single domain name sold (including staging.rodneymbliss.com, saudiarabia.gay and fluffybunnies.com.)
ICANN controls both the product and the price. In 2006 ICANN settled the remains of the VeriSign lawsuit and allowed VeriSign to bump their domain registry fees by 7%. The US House of Representatives objected. Today, if ICANN decides to push a fee increase, the US government has no claim on them.
And it’s not just new domain names and renewals that can potentially earn ICANN money. Speciality domains can sell for millions. The highest price paid for a domain name was $36M for insurance.com. Currently registrars will allow you to pay a premium (up to $25,000 in some cases) to secure a particularly attractive name when new TLDs are released. There is value in names and ICANN knows that.
But, Rodney, I have my domain, so it doesn’t really impact me.
Do you? Do you own a domain? I don’t. I lease the domain. There’s an understanding that I can renew my domain for a fee and I get to “keep” it in perpetuity. Who’s to say that understanding will remain? Suppose ICANN’s international board decides it is unfair that some companies (mostly American) get to own these really valuable online properties and pay essentially nothing for them year after year. ICANN could decide that your lease is good for a certain number of years and after that, the name goes up for auction. If you really want it, you can go buy it back.
While I doubt anyone would want to use www.staging.rodneymbliss.com, I don’t want to have to potentially pay a squatter to buy it back. Could it happen? Sure. will it happen? I hope not, but it’s completely up to the international board that is advising ICANN.
Trust
As I mentioned, currently .gov and .mil are assigned to United States governments and United States military sites. But, we’ve talked about the fact that this whole change in contracts is to introduce more globalization into ICANN’s governance and practices. Why should the US get to own .gov and .mil? Other countries have governments. Other countries have militaries.
Today, if you find yourself on a website that ends .gov, you are 100% guaranteed that you are on a government site. It instills a level of trust. Suppose, ICANN decides to open up .gov to other countries and entities? Here’s just one example.
I approach ICANN and announce that I want to encourage tourism. I’m want to register visit.gov to provide a place to talk about people visiting my country. That seems reasonable. After getting visit.gov the first subdomain I create is whitehouse.visit.gov. (I don’t have to register subdomain names.) Now, I’ve created a site that kind of, sort of looks like the site you’d go to if you wanted to visit the Whitehouse. But, there’s no guarantee that I would work with the US government on that site. Perhaps, I’d even set up this site to try to steal information about people who wanted to go to www.whitehouse.gov.
That’s a silly example, Rodney. People are smarter than that.
Do NOT do this, but if you were to type whitehouse.com into a browser, it would NOT take you to the offcial Whitehouse website. It would take you to a porn site filled with viruses. No, they are not that smart.
Likewise, if we open up .mil to non US military sites, it will destroy the trust that .mil addresses currently enjoy.
They Might Just Do The Right Thing
Okay, Rodney, there might be bad things that happen, but can’t we rely on their good intentions?
27nd Amendment
No law, varying the compensation for services of the Senators and Representatives, shall take effect, until an election of Representatives shall have intervened.
The 27th Amendment was proposed on September 25, 1789. It was designed to prevent Congress from raising its own pay. Eventually it was abandonded because many people felt that “No congress would be so bolden as to raise its own pay.” Except that eventually Congress did. And they scheduled the vote in the middle of the night.
The amendment was finally ratified by the remainder of the necessary states on May 7th, 1992 when Michigan became the 38th state to ratify it. Two hundred and two years after it was first proposed. We relied on Congress to “do the right thing.” But, given the opportunity and no safeguards, Congress didn’t. Congress answers to the American people every two years. ICANN does not even have that level of accountability. No, I don’t think we can build our belief around a corporation simply “doing the right thing.”
Trust But Verify
The horse has left the barn. We cannot go back to the way things were prior to October 1. However, we can hope that ICANN does the right thing. Tomorrow I’ll talk about specific steps that the US government can take to mitigate some of the worst of the risks I’ve listed.
This is the fourth in a five-part series on the ICANN contract that expired on October 1, 2016
- Monday – The Day The Internet Died (Introduction to the issues of ICANN’s change)
- Tuesday – Future So Bright, I Gotta Wear Shades (ICANN’s View of the Future)
- Wednesday – Did The Internet Really Start In Some Guys’s Garage? (A brief history of ICANN)
- Thursday – Bad, bad, bad – A dystopian view of the future of the internet
- Friday – How to fix it
Rodney M Bliss is an author, columnist and IT Consultant. His blog updates every weekday. He lives in Pleasant Grove, UT with his lovely wife, thirteen children and grandchildren.
Follow him on
Twitter (@rodneymbliss)
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LinkedIn (www.LinkedIn.com/in/rbliss)
or email him at rbliss at msn dot com(c) 2016 Rodney M Bliss, all rights reserved
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Internet users will see no change or difference in their experience online as a result of the stewardship transition. . .The proposals are aimed at enhancing ICANN’s accountability.
– ICANN Announcement about the Expiring Contract
October 1st, the contract between the Internet Corporation on Names and Numbers (ICANN) and the United States Department of Commerce expired. Supporters of this change have promoted it as a positive move. Today, I wanted to briefly talk about what ICANN thinks the future holds and go through their announcment in a little more detail. You can find the entire announcement here.
This historic moment marks the transition of the coordination and management of the Internet’s unique identifiers to the private-sector, a process that has been committed to and underway since 1998.
I’m a free market guy. I like private enterprise. And generally think government should stay out of the way. I’m not sure I would privatize the issuing of driver’s licenses though.
“This transition was envisioned 18 years ago, yet it was the tireless work of the global Internet community, which drafted the final proposal, that made this a reality,” said ICANN Board Chair Stephen D. Crocker. “This community validated the multistakeholder model of Internet governance. It has shown that a governance model defined by the inclusion of all voices, including business, academics, technical experts, civil society, governments and many others is the best way to assure that the Internet of tomorrow remains as free, open and accessible as the Internet of today.”
I’m not sure a single event validates their model. Let’s face it, we all hope this goes well, but the devil is in the details. ICANN seems to be suggesting that including all of these voices into the discussion making process will foster that spirit of openness. You might consider the model of ancient Greece, where Athens was governed by the voice of the people in a democracy. that would be the ideal. Democracy has also been described as “the tyranny of the majority.” It could be really, really good, or it could be very, very bad.
Internet users will see no change or difference in their experience online as a result of the stewardship transition.
Today, October 4th, the internet is still standing and the sun still shines. But, that should not be taken as evidence that all is well in Mudville. We have released the tiger from his cage and he is naturally going to take a moment to get his bearings in this new reality. It’s what will come months and possibly even years down the line that will determine if October 1st was the beginning of a new era or simply the end of an old one.
In managing the coordination of the Internet’s unique identifiers, ICANN plays a small but significant role in the Internet’s ecosystem. For more than 15 years, ICANN has worked in concert with other technical bodies such as the Internet Engineering Task Force, the Regional Internet Registries, top-level domain registries and registrars, and many others.
Here are some of those details inwhich lives the devil. An ignition key plays a small but significant role in the operation of your car. However, compromising that key is enough to compromise the entire car.
The final chapter of the privatization process began in 2014, when NTIA asked ICANN to convene the global multistakeholder community, which is made up of private-sector representatives, technical experts, academics, civil society, governments and individual Internet end users, to come together and formulate proposals to both replace NTIA’s historic stewardship role and enhance ICANN’s accountability mechanisms.
Something else significant happened in 2014. A man named Edward Snowden exposed a pattern of spying by the US government that was unprecedented to that point. The world looked on in horror as it came to light that the USA was taking advantage of its unique position as the keeper of the keys to snoop on traffic going through the internet. The world then demanded that the USA give up control.
The proposals reinforce ICANN’s existing multistakeholder model and are also aimed at enhancing ICANN’s accountability. The improvements include empowering the global Internet community to have direct recourse if they disagree with decisions made by ICANN the organization or the Board.
The downside of the pre-October 1 world was that if you disagreed with ICANN, and the USA government wasn’t interested in helping you, you were out of luck. The new proposal is that somehow the internet community in general will be the arbiter. More deviling details.
The IANA stewardship transition is a testament to the tireless work of the global community, and a validation of the multistakeholder model that frames that community.
The internet is truly one of the marvels of the modern age. It has allowed many third world communities to skip the industrial age and go straight from the pre-industrial age to the information age. It’s the great equalizer. Bill Gates made his fortune designing and selling software that had to be loaded on a computer. Mark Zuckerberg skipped over the necessity of physically manufacturing components and went straight to building a service for customers. They illustrate the pre/post interent worlds we live d in 25 years ago and the world we live in now.
It’s possible that the new ICANN charter is simply the next step in the evolution of the internet. It’s possible that the naysayers like me are all wrong. In fact, I hope I am, because the future that I envision given the changes in teh ICANN charter are dire indeed.
This the second in a five part series on the recent change to ICANN’s contract and governance.
Monday – The Day The Internet Died (Introduction to the issues of ICANN’s change)
Tuesday – What does the future look like (The good one)
Wednesday – How did we get here? A brief history of ICANN
Thursday – Bad, bad, bad – A dystopian view of the future
Friday – How to fix it
Rodney M Bliss is an author, columnist and IT Consultant. His blog updates every weekday. He lives in Pleasant Grove, UT with his lovely wife, thirteen children and grandchildren.
Follow him on
Twitter (@rodneymbliss)
Facebook (www.facebook.com/rbliss)
LinkedIn (www.LinkedIn.com/in/rbliss)
or email him at rbliss at msn dot com(c) 2016 Rodney M Bliss, all rights reserved
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You probably didn’t even notice. Many people who should know better declared it wasn’t a death it was a rebirth. But, make no mistake, over the weekend, the internet, as we know it, died.
ICANN, is the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers. ICANN is the private corporation that controls how things get named on the internet. And by “things” I mean domains. If you have a blog, or a website, it was ICANN that defined how you could name it. You might buy your domain from WordPress or GoDaddy, but, those domain registrars can only sell you a domain that ICANN allows. Ever wonder why companies have a .com at the end of their web address? Or, why you cannot have a space in your domain name? ICANN set those rules.
ICANN was formed September 18, 1998 to keep track of names on the Internet. It was the ultimate authority on what things were called and where they lived. ICANN made sure that when you typed www.microsoft.com you were routed to Microsoft Corporation’s website. And while ICANN is a private corporation (actually organized as a non-profit) for 18 years, it had a single client, the United States government, specifically the Department of Commerce. A contract, called the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority (IANA), gave ICANN the authority to control all the naming things on the Internet. That contract ran out on October 1, 2016, last Saturday and the US government chose not to renew it. And that was the death of the Internet.
Rodney, you’re being melodramatic. You’re posting this to your blog on Monday morning. If the Internet died, how is that possible? The world didn’t end.
If I were to contract inoperable cancer, or some other terminal disease, I might not die immediately. I had a good friend named Marty Hill. Marty had terminal cancer when I met him. He knew it, and was surprisingly sanguine about it.
How ya’ doin, Marty?
I’m upright. Any day you’re upright is a good day.
Marty’s was a slow moving cancer. Slow moving, but like a retreating tide, inevitable. Cancer finally claimed Marty this year, 10 years after he’d been diagnosed. However, his death was marked from the day the doctors gave him his initial diagnoses.
So, what’s the big deal? How can the expiration of a contract you’ve never heard of with an organization you’ve only slightly heard of, be so bad? ICANN still exists. The US Commerce Department still exists. But, the Commerce Department no longer can control what ICANN does. That is a very, very bad thing. Rather than being advised by the Commerce department, ICANN will now be advised by an international board.
But, being advised by an international board isn’t a bad thing, right? Supporters of this move talk about the benefits of more global involvement. ICANN is “advised” by several groups or committees, the Governmental Advisory Committe (GAC), made up representatives from 111 countries around the world; the AT-Large Advisory Committee (ALAC), is composed of individual internet users who have been chosen by the Regional At-Large Organizations and Nominating Committee; the Root Server System Advisory Committe, proovides input on the DNS root server system; the secuSity and Stability Advisory Committee (SSAC), which is made up of security experts; and the Technical Liason Group (TLG) which is made up of representatives from various international technical organizations that deal with the internet.
Okay, so what? A bunch of committees, many of which sound perfectly reasonable. The problem is that up until last week, those committees could make recommendations, but the Commerce Department could trump their recommendations. Maybe you think this gave the US government too much control over the Internet. After all, what gives the USA the right to dictate internet policies for the entire world?
Actually there are two really important reasons that the USA should fill that role. First, the USA built the internet. It’s easy to forget in the age of globalization, cloud computing and multi-national server farms, that the Internet wasn’t something that simply sprang into being fully formed. The USA, starting with the government DARPA project, birthed the Internet and saw it through the infant stages. Today, it’s grown up and no one can claim they “own” the Internet. But, the USA was there first and spent time and treasure to make it a reality.
Second, the Internet needs a traffic cop. Maybe you think it shouldn’t be the USA, but ask yourself what other country has a history of freedom to match the USA? Winston Churchill, the great British Prime Minister declared,
Democracy is the worst form of government, except for every other one we’ve tried.
The USA may not be a perfect caretaker, but it’s better than anyone else. But, why even have a caretaker? Isn’t the internet grown up enough to be free from its parent’s apron strings?
No. Not even close. This week I’ll explore exactly why this is a terrible idea and may lead to the death of the internet as we know it. I hope I’m wrong, but I think it’s irresponsible to blithely make this decision to sever the USA’s oversight role without considering the possible unintended consequences.
I’ll explore the following topics this week:
- Monday – Introduction to the issues of ICANN’s change
- Tuesday – What does the future look like (The good one)
- Wednesday – How did we get here? A brief history of ICANN
- Thursday – Bad, bad, bad – A dystopian view of the future
- Friday – How to fix it
Rodney M Bliss is an author, columnist and IT Consultant. His blog updates every weekday. He lives in Pleasant Grove, UT with his lovely wife, thirteen children and grandchildren.
Follow him on
Twitter (@rodneymbliss)
Facebook (www.facebook.com/rbliss)
LinkedIn (www.LinkedIn.com/in/rbliss)
or email him at rbliss at msn dot com(c) 2016 Rodney M Bliss, all rights reserved
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Do you sew?
Excuse me?
Does anyone at your house sew?
My friend Kerry had a coat he was trying to avoid throwing away. Kerry and I had both been scout leaders. We’d spent many weekends camping and hiking in Utah’s mountains with 12 and 13 year old boy scouts.
The coat he was trying to give away was a gorTex NorthFace winter coat. It was a great three-season coat for Utah’s climate, Fall through Spring. Tough as it was, it had become torn during a snowmobile trip. No one at Kerry’s house did much with sewing.
Sure, I’d love to take it off your hands. I’m sure that we can fix it.
My lovely wife is a brilliant seamstress. Thirty years ago she sewed her own wedding dress. And while she doesn’t make our kids’ clothes, she has plenty of opportunity to use her two sewing machines and serger to make Halloween costumes, alter dresses and repair ripped articles. I was sure she could fix it.
Kerry brought over the coat and the hole was in the right front pocket. It was an aggressive hole, but to my untrained eye seemed very fixable. The coat then sat in the mending pile. . .and sat. . .and sat.
I didn’t need a new coat. I continued to make trips into the Utah backcountry with my existing gear and coats. But, I really wanted to use that new coat. It was lighter, warmer and bigger than my current “camping coat.”
Finally I decided to take matters into my own hands. I got a needle, some black thread and I sat down to repair the coat. My wife smiled a bemused smile.
So, you’re going to fix it?
I thought I’d give it a try.
I was using a baseball stitch, where I sewed down through one side, brought the needle up the gap in between and then went down the other side and pulled the two sides together. It was NOT the right stitch. And even if it was, I wasn’t very good at it. I spent about an hour and had only managed to close about a quarter of the gap. Eventually, my lovely wife took pity on me and took the coat away from me. She placed it on the sewing machine and in about 10 minutes had sealed the rip in a way that was both effective and stylish. It still looked like it had been repaired, but only if you looked closely.
My lovely wife provided a very effective training example. She could have done the work herself from the beginning and she was probably planning to when she had time. But, by letting me attempt it myself, she both reinforced my belief that she had an amazing skill that I didn’t, but she gave me the opportunity to expand my skills.
We work with people like this all the time. Your employees want to learn and grow. If you only provide them opportunity and training for a narrow focus, they are not going to be as effective or as happy. It’s important to give them opportunities to take on additional tasks. Sometimes they will surprise you with their success. Other times, it will be obvious that they need additional training, or that they may be pursuing a task that is not a good fit.
Nothing was harmed by the hour I spent poking a needle through the front of that jacket. But, a lot was learned. If you are looking to expand your employees skill set and opportunities, a few sewing classes might be a good investment too.
Rodney M Bliss is an author, columnist and IT Consultant. His blog updates every weekday. He lives in Pleasant Grove, UT with his lovely wife, thirteen children and grandchildren.
Follow him on
Twitter (@rodneymbliss)
Facebook (www.facebook.com/rbliss)
LinkedIn (www.LinkedIn.com/in/rbliss)
or email him at rbliss at msn dot com(c) 2016 Rodney M Bliss, all rights reserved
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Ever notice when you are dreaming and someone calls you in your dream, but you cannot find your cell phone? And then you realize it’s because you forgot to dream yourself a cell phone and it’s your real life cell phone ringing?
Hello, this is Rodney?
We have a reported outage in Lincoln. Can you join the bridge?
My phone sits in the master bathroom at night. Sure, that’s where the charger is, but really I could put it anywhere. The real reason is so that if it goes off in the middle of the night, hopefully it only wakes up me and not my lovely wife.
Last night was one of those nights. Technically, I guess you’d have to say it was this morning: 2:57AM in fact. Yeah, there are lots of things I like about my job, the 24×7 on-call aspect, not so much. Part of the challenge is that during the day, I have a full support team to help with outage calls. Every department is staffed, every phone is answered.
At 3:00am, that’s not the case. My processes start to break down a little bit. I have agents working round-the-clock. If there is a problem in the middle of the night, they report the problem to a service desk. The Service Desk is also staffed 24 hours. The service desk calls me. (Yeah, I’m staffed 24 hours too.)
I have to decide if it’s a serious enough problem to start waking up other people who are also on-call. A funny thing happens though. If more than 10 agents are impacted, I ring the alarm and rally the troops. (I don’t have an actual alarm bell to ring, but that would be really a cool addition to my job.)
But, if there are less than 10 agents impacted, I do NOT ring that imaginary alarm bell. In fact, if there are less than 10 agents, I am not even supposed to be getting a call. Less than 10 impacted agents is not a major outage. More than five is. Believe it or not, I don’t enjoy getting calls at 3:00am. I’m typically busy at that time. . .REALLY busy.
But, I like it even less when there is an outage and I don’t get informed right away. First thing in the morning, when normal people are getting to work, they check their email and if something was broken overnight they reach out to me and want to know what happened. I hate it when that is my first indication of a problem.
So, if stuff is broken and they don’t call me, I’m not happy And if they call me for an issue that impacted less than 10 agents I’m unhappy. It leads to a very interesting emotional state when my phone rings at 3:00am. When I answer that call, I’m not yet sure if I’m angry or not.
During this morning’s call it was not immediately clear how many of my agents were impacted. I took the initial call and then had to start calling around to verify if it was an outage or not. During those calls, while also trying to wake up and sound coherent, I had to decide how I felt about getting woken up in the middle of the night.
It’s a strange feeling; a sort of limbo. If this turned out to be a false alarm, with less than 10 impacted agents, I was going to be annoyed that it was improperly escalated. If it turned out to be a widespread outage, I was going to be relieved that I was informed early. I got to decide to be upset or not.
The absurdity of that statement isn’t lost on me. If I can decide to be upset, can’t I also decide to not be? Apparently, I am self-aware enough to understand my motivation, but not actually aware enough to change it.
(It was a systemwide outage that impacted me and other suppliers. I was happy. Tired, but happy. . .ish.)
Rodney M Bliss is an author, columnist and IT Consultant. His blog updates every weekday. He lives in Pleasant Grove, UT with his lovely wife, thirteen children and grandchildren.
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Mike, HATED that.
What?
In the Riverton building we used to have a mini basketball hoop. Mike and I sat next to each other and this stupid basketball hoop was right on the other side of our cube walls. It would literally rattle our desks when people played it.
And don’t forget the noise!
Oh yeah, it had this annoying buzzer when the timer went off. At one point we switched to nerf balls to try to make it quieter.
And then the nerf balls started shredding, so I had nerf dust all over my desk!
I was recently at a work party. We’ve worked together for several years and many of us have moved positions or buildings. This party was a chance to come together and meet each other’s spouses and families. Even years later, the basketball hoop is famous.
Ironically, although Mike and I both sat by the basketball hoop, it never bothered me. I have 13 children. If you couldn’t get stuff done in a noisy environment, nothing would ever get done at my house. It was fun to rib Mike about it though.
IT, in fact the computer industry in general has a fascination with toys. Maybe it’s because many of us grew up in the video game era. Maybe its that we’re still kids at heart. For whatever reason, toys and computers seem to go together. I ran RESMARK a small startup staffed with twenty-somethings fresh out of college. The least productive week we ever had was when I bought some miniature RC cars and gave them to the team.
For the next week, the team went a little crazy with the cars. They raced them, of course. But someone figured out that you could buy an entire track. Then, someone else figured out you could upgrade your cars. He even called around the country to find a Radio Shack with the engine upgrades.
On the surface, this looks highly unproductive. We are at work to work, not play. And the boss in me sees that. But, I also understood that I was competing for talent. I couldn’t pay the most, I tried to make up for it with an enjoyable atmosphere. Also, IT work is unconventional. I work many weekends and nights, and am on-call 24×7. In that type of an environment, it helps to have a chance to play.
Think about your office. Maybe you work in a marketing firm, or a call center, or a production floor. I’m guessing you don’t race RC cars with your coworkers. At the same time, I would guess that you have a chance to relax. Maybe it’s a friendly poker game after work. Maybe it’s an office football pool. Maybe it’s a mini basketball hoop.
Whatever it is, the best workplaces provide an opportunity for employees to get together and have fun. Embrace it in your workplace. Just try not to have the desk next to the basketball hoop.
Rodney M Bliss is an author, columnist and IT Consultant. His blog updates every weekday. He lives in Pleasant Grove, UT with his lovely wife, thirteen children and grandchildren.
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or email him at rbliss at msn dot com(c) 2016 Rodney M Bliss, all rights reserved
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Here, hold this.
I stared at the pistol that my friend Dave had just handed me. It was a loaded Glock 9mm. This pair programming session was not starting out the way I had expected.
When I was 16 years old, my mother started a CPA business in our living room. After a career in state government and several other white collar jobs, mom had gone back to school and studied accounting. After successfully passing the CPA exam, she hung out her shingle and started Bliss CPA. As a small business owner, it wasn’t just mom who was working. All of us kids also got to share in the joys and pains that are a business startup.
I remember spending hours doing bookkeeping. This was in the early days of computers. I used a spreadsheet program to painstakingly input the transaction information for a client’s ledger sheets and then check to make sure that column A equaled column B. Often it was income vs expenses. The worst experience was when the two columns were off. If they were off by an even amount, say $1.50, you would look for an entry that was half that number. Did a $0.75 charge get put into the income column instead of the expense column? Then, it was a careful review of every.single.line. . .looking for the missing entry.
But, even worse than an even numbered mismatch was an odd number. The columns had to match exactly. Being off by $0.01 meant that I had to look at every entry in both columns to figure out if I had mistyped an entry. It was excruciatingly painful. I often thought,
I will just PAY the stupid penny out of my own pocket if it means I don’t have to go over this list one more time.
I learned two things. First, I learned to pay careful attention to detail. Second, and more importantly, I learned I never wanted to be an accountant. (My brother eventually bought the firm and it’s now Bliss & Skeen CPA.)
I studied programming in college. I discovered that, for me, programming is very much like accounting. I can do it, but it’s not something that comes easily to me. Recently, I decided to take a programming class as part of a continuing education program I’m working on. My friend David Brady, is a brilliant programmer. I asked him for some help.
Understand, I wrote the program first by myself. I created the classes. (The code is in Java.) I built my data models. I created my test cases and worked on formatting my output. I would say, I was 80% of the way there. I asked Dave to help me push it over the finish line.
Dave is a big fan of the Agile programming method. Agile involves many aspects, but one of the most unique is “pair programming.” In pair programming, both developers sit at a single keyboard and look at the same code base. This being 2016, we actually were using Dropbox to share the codebase and making realtime updates from two locations. But, those two locations were both in his home office. And that’s where the gun came in.
I had just finished explaining to Dave what the program needed to accomplish. This is included in a document called the Design Specification. It’s not a complicated program, but since it is for a training class, the grading criteria, called the testing rubric, is pretty specific. I had just finished with my explanation when Dave handed me his pistol.
What’s this for?
I just wanted to test the hypothesis that I would rather hand you a loaded gun than help you write code.
Okay. . .
Think about it, your friends might SAY they’d rather hand you a loaded gun than help you. But, they are just speculating. I have empirical evidence.
(No programmers were injured in the writing of this article. . .and I passed my class. Thanks Dave.)
Rodney M Bliss is an author, columnist and IT Consultant. His blog updates every weekday. He lives in Pleasant Grove, UT with his lovely wife, thirteen children and grandchildren.
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or email him at rbliss at msn dot com(c) 2016 Rodney M Bliss, all rights reserved
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The following is a monologue I wrote for a Toastmasters speech. It’s the story of an unnamed war hero in a future space war. I wrote it after a work experience best described as “No good deed goes unpunished.”
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The Hero of Penelope
The holder of the order of the sun and stars
So, today is the day, huh? Yeah, you lose all track of time in here. I guess they had to wait for the treaties to be prepared. How many worlds do you think will be watching this? It’s not every day they execute a war hero, huh?
Oh, I know, they stripped my medals and history. Can’t just kill the hero of the battle of Penelope and the holder of the order of the sun and stars. I’m sure you’ve heard the charges, huh? Battle of Hera: Dereliction of duty, cowardness, insubordination, unnecessary violence.
Unnecessary violence – – as if there is an acceptable level. Kill the bugs . . .just not too many of them.
Hera and Penelope, they always said that women would be the death of me. Have you ever been on a drop Sargent? Aphrodite? I heard that was pretty rough. Well, Hera was worse. It wasn’t that different from Penelope, you know. You never heard the story? Well, I’ll tell you the truth. In fact, I’m probably the only one who can. Even those idiots with the medal committee didn’t have the straight scoop.
The truth is, Penelope was a screw up. The thing is, screw up badly enough and they’ll give you a medal for it. We came in late. The bugs opened up on us almost before we hit the atmosphere. When you come out of those drop-ships in your steel coffin, you can’t see a thing. But, over the roar of reentry, we could hear and especially feel the guns. We did what any platoon does in that situation, we junked the flight plan and started juking all over the sky. We were blowing chaff and shedding armor as fast as we could work the controls. I landed about 15 klicks outside the city. . .on the wrong side. My men were scattered all over God’s half acre. Except God’s half acre was about 500 square miles.
The rally point was between me and the objective so I headed for that, picking up guys as I went. We hit their first patrol just as we hit the city. Well, I should say they hit us: projectiles, energy weapons, I think a few were even throwing rocks. We went to ground returning fire. Our blaze-rifles cut right through them, you know. Of course you know. But for every one we cut down, five more took its place. They were pouring out of that mound city like ants. We were in danger of being surrounded and overrun. Have you ever seen them capture a prisoner? Be glad you haven’t. They literally tear you limb from limb. I’m not ashamed to say I started to feel a little panic. We had no backup. We had little cover and they were coming for us.
Fall back? To where? The planet was theirs. The rally point and the pick-up point were our only way off that hellhole. So, I figured any death was better than being ripped apart. I called in an orbital lance strike. Yeah, they mentioned it in the commendation. Called it in on my own position. But the things is, I didn’t. I was trying to call it for the city. I screwed up. The lance killed more of my men than the bugs. But hey, I’m a hero. Saved the day. Turned the tide.
The war wasn’t going well at that point. They needed a hero to keep up moral. I was the guy.
But, wars change, right? We pushed them back, world by world, system by system. Eventually we recaptured nearly all our previous territory. They sued for peace. We switched. No more taking new territory, instead we were holding our positions. Just a few engagement still going. You know, we had to let them know we were willing to reengage if needed. Mop up.
Except the troopers on mop up duty can die just as easily. On a bugger world, if your helmet cracks, the foul air will cook you in your suit just as quick.
It was on Hera. The drop went fine. We were moving pretty good toward the rally point when it happened. We kicked over an ant hill. We hit a nondescript looking mound that they use as buildings. Before we knew it we were in the fight of our lives. These were crack troops, too. The bugs I mean; rigid armor, heavy weapons. We were cut off immediately. I formed a perimeter. That wouldn’t hold them for long. So, I called in an orbital lance strike. This time the targeting was spot on. We started taking out their buildings one by one. Dust was everywhere. Bodies, troopers and bugs were everywhere. It broke their lines. We scrambled through shooting anything that moved. I lost a third of my company. A success, right? Less than on Penelope. We turned the tide. Saved the day.
It was only later we found out that we had hit a kind of hospital. The entire complex was a nursery. It put the whole peace process at risk. The buggers were ready to walk out. We had to give them something. The Butcher of Hera, that’s what they are calling me. I’m the sacrificial lamb to save the peace. Saved the war and now saving the peace. Ha Ha. It’s what happens when politicians take over running the war from the generals.
Well, we’d better get on with it. They say more than five hundred billion will be watching. The treaties will be signed right after it’s done. Try to never be a hero, Sargent. You’re only good to them when you’re dead. And avoid those Greek goddesses.
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Rodney M Bliss is an author, columnist and IT Consultant. His blog updates every weekday. He lives in Pleasant Grove, UT with his lovely wife, thirteen children and grandchildren.
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or email him at rbliss at msn dot com(c) 2016 Rodney M Bliss, all rights reserved
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Allen was a bad manager. He didn’t mean to be. He was just new. He made some of the typical bad manager decisions.
- He told his people how to do things instead of telling them what to do and letting them innovate
- He sprung bad news on his people (like they had to work late) with little or no warning
- He assigned projects but then ended up taking over and running them himself
His people were frustrated.
People join a company because of the benefits package (Salary, vacation, 401K, etc.) They leave because of a single reason: Their manager.
We’ve all made management mistakes. If you’ve never made a mistake in leading your team, you aren’t really leading them. The trick, like everything in life, is to learn from your mistakes, fix them and continue on. The first step is to recognize that you made a mistake.
As a manager, I tend to overshare. Not that I share personal information, or break confidences. I tend to share as much information as I can with my teams. Especially if the information is going to impact them, I want them to be as involved as possible. We were moving buildings one time when I was working for Microsoft. I was in charge of the move map for my 6 trainers. Our office space was part of the bigger Exchange development team.
As we got closer to the move. The move map changed. Offices were added and removed. I would pass these changes on to my team. Finally, one members said, “Rodney, please stop. I don’t want to see another move map until it is the final one.”
As a manager, you manage to the team, not the other way around. This trainer wasn’t interested in being part of the process. I corrected it and moved on.
That’s a simple thing to correct. Allen had some more serious issues. It’s hard sometimes to “manage up.” Whether you are an experienced manager who now finsd yourself in an individual contributor role, or you just know what you like in a manager, providing feedback to your imediate supervisor can be challenging.
Fortunately, Allen was willing to make changes. Through a couple of suggestions from the team, he realized that he needed to loosen up a little and give his team some more control.
But, Allen then found himself at a critical juncture. It’s hard enough to realize you have an area of weakness. If you truly want to be an effective manager, you must acknowledge it. It’s not enough to simply stop the “bad” behavior. You have to replace it with “good ” behavior. You have to speak up.
Here’s why. If Allen takes the feedback to heart but never talks to his team about the issues, they will not know if he’s actually changed, or if he’s simply distracted. They will be constantly waiting for the other shoe to drop. It’s a natural tendency to not want to advertise our weaknesses. It’s easier to say, “Hey, I’ve fixed it. Let’s move on. We don’t need to dwell on it.”
But, it’s critical to your team to let them know that you “get it.” To let them not only see your actions change, but hear you explain your reasons. And it doesn’t have to be overly negative.
I realize in the past, I’ve been very involved in the day to day workings of many of your projects. I’m planning to make a conscious effort to disengage at that level. If you need me, feel free to bring me in, but otherwise, I’m going to step back and let you run your projects.
It’s important to not make it too much abou you. The reason you are changing is to help your team do better. Make sure that your explanation focuses on what is in it for them.
Allen realized that his own insecurities were creeping into his management style. He’d been a great engineer, that’s why he got promoted. But, the skills needed as an engineer were different than the skills needed as a manager. Once he recognized how his actions were impacteding his team, he was able to back off and give them more room to work.
Rodney M Bliss is an author, columnist and IT Consultant. His blog updates every weekday. He lives in Pleasant Grove, UT with his lovely wife, thirteen children and grandchildren.
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or email him at rbliss at msn dot com(c) 2016 Rodney M Bliss, all rights reserved
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Good news. Google has a program for non-profit volunteers. We can use a version of privately branded gmail and give our volunteers all over the world email accounts.
Do they understand we have 58,000 volunteers?
Absolutely. They don’t have any restrictions on the number of people we put on the system.
What’s the catch?
No catch. We just need to sign their standard contract for non-profits.
As you might imagine, there was a catch. The contract. I was working for a large non-profit managing their email team. We had both employees and volunteers. For the 30,000 employees, we used Microsoft Exchange. Even with Enterprise licensing, it was a significant cost of doing business. For the volunteers, we used an ancient email system called NetMail. It was extremely unstable, and our volunteers had to dial into a local computer in our datacenter in Utah. The licensing costs for extending Exchange to those additional 58,000 volunteers would have been prohibitive.
Google was going to not only improve the stability, but the features, and even lower our costs. It was almost too good to be true.
Okay, it was too good to be true.
Even though we were a non-profit organization, we were also a 30,000 strong business entity. We had everything a for-profit business has; IT (my department), Operations, Human Resources, Accounting and of course, Legal. Our lawyers took Google’s standard contract and started requesting changes. We sent our revisions from our offices in Utah to Google’s legal team in California.
The important thing to remember is that Google was offering a free service. We had to write code to link our identity management system to Google’s system, of course. But, the technical hurdles were really pretty simple. We had them all worked out and tested in just a couple of months. Meanwhile Legal continued to send and receive revisions for months.
I don’t know what our lawyers were making per hour, but I’m guessing that Google was paying their legal team even more. And we were forcing them to spend hours and hours and days and weeks working on a contract for a free service. We were costing them a whole bunch of money to offer a free service. Eventually, six months later, the two sides had finally reached an agreement.
Hey, Rodney, you know how I told you that Google had no limit on their non-profit email program?
Yeah.
I just looked. They’ve now capped it at 5,000 users.
Was that our fault?
I don’t know, but the timing lines up.
Neither we nor Google got everything we wanted out of the contract. We got any dispute discussions moved to Utah. They got a five-year period for the contract. After five years we would have to renegotiate. And given the new limitation of 5,000 users, the next time we talked to them, we would be paying for licensing.
I left the non-profit several years ago. In fact, it’s probably been about five years since we rolled out that email project. Sometimes, it’s better to keep your Golden Goose out of the gift-horse’s mouth.
Rodney M Bliss is an author, columnist and IT Consultant. His blog updates every weekday. He lives in Pleasant Grove, UT with his lovely wife, thirteen children and grandchildren.
Follow him on
Twitter (@rodneymbliss)
Facebook (www.facebook.com/rbliss)
LinkedIn (www.LinkedIn.com/in/rbliss)
or email him at rbliss at msn dot com(c) 2016 Rodney M Bliss, all rights reserved