Presentations, papers and video recordings from the name collisions workshop held earlier this month in London are now available at the workshop web site, namecollisions.net.

The goal for the workshop, described in my “colloquium on collisions” post, was that researchers and practitioners would “speak together” to keep name spaces from “striking together.”  The program committee put together an excellent set of talks toward this purpose, providing a strong, objective technical foundation for dialogue.  I’m grateful to the committee, speakers, attendees and organizers for their contributions to a successful two-day event, which I am hopeful will have benefit toward the security and stability of Internet naming for many days to come.

Keynote speaker, and noted security industry commentator, Bruce Schneier (Co3 Systems ) set the tone for the two days with a discussion on how humans name things and the shortcomings of computers in doing the same.  Names require context, he observed, and “computers are really bad at this” because “everything defaults to global.”  Referring to the potential that new gTLDs could conflict with internal names in installed systems, he commented, “It would be great if we could go back 20 years and say ‘Don’t do that’,” but concluded that policymakers have to work with DNS the way it is today.

Bruce said he remains optimistic about long-term prospects as name collisions and other naming challenges are resolved:  “I truly expect computers to adapt to us as humans,” to provide the same kind of trustworthy interactions that humans have developed in their communications with one another.

This article by Verisign’s Burt Kaliski was sourced from the Verisign blog here.