Archive for September 2002

Secret Service start War-Patrols

Secret Service in DC, getting hip to the security realities of Wi-Fi, have actively started "war-driving" in an attempt to increase the overall security of the area. One of the officers likened his war-patrols to the normal activities of a beat-cop. "It's part of crime prevention to knock on the door."...

Personally, I think its a good move in the right direction. All too often "establishment" tends to over-react to IP-phenomena like this and try to "outlaw" it. Its refreshing to see that there are still those that understand the fact that technology is neither good nor evil, but rather, the real impact all depends on how it is deployed and consumed...

Sharp Gets Depth

I absolutely can't wait for these devices from Sharp to hit the market. While I'm sure that 1G will cost an arm and a leg and suck, the fact remains that there is now a commercial product that will shortly be available to start to fulfill some of the promises that 3D has been making for 40 years or more. I personally can't wait to see how UI designers are going to start leveraging the extra space on the desktop ;)

This is funny

Everybody knows this is funny...la, la, la...

Poor donkey's.

Thu, 26 Sep 2002 21:47:49 GMT

Rather than focusing on the performance of individual companies on the market and delisting them, in a demonstration of typical German precision, Deutsche Boerse has announced that they are dissolving the tech-heavy Neuer market - Germany's answer to the Nasdaq (sorry NASDAQ).

You and three other Canadians might have read this

I had such unrealistically high hopes for the Internet back in 1994 :P

Be back in five minutes

Alejandro has been re-elected to the ICANN Board (a Good Thing™ in my opionion). As a side note, I'm left wondering why the NC continues to go to the trouble of attempting to hold a closed vote on the election of board members. On one hand, the NC closes their mailing list archive during the voting period, but the results of the individual ballots are archived in the NC Telecon recordings. To top it all off, the archives get re-opened days later with the complete contents of the list available for the period of the closure. I'm not one for conspiracy theories, I'm just saying that the artifice doesn't seem to make much sense. What am I missing here?

The dotMD dotCommunity

The "Internet Domain for Healthcare" has announced that they have released thousands of "premium" dotMD domain names that were previously (presumably) in the hands of speculators. Their release also notes that they are "under new management" that includes several of its original founders.

I still have a fundamental problem with the idea that the individual professional will place a higher premium on being identified with their "name" than with being identified with the more traditional associations or organizations that they have historically gathered under. For instance, it doesn't strike me that the legal eagles over at SAMSF are going to ditch lawyername@skadden.com in favor of lawyername@skadden.law.pro any faster than Joe Surgeon is going to open himself up to a slew of questions from "do-it-yourselfers" by going public with a professional email address.

While the obvious answer is that these registries are going to first concentrate on marketing to associations and organizations such as hospitals, this doesn't address the reality that the individual is where the money is. And if the doctors don't get online with dotMD, then the adoption of these vanity domains is going to be severely limited. And as Google proves, there are still great options in many more concise namespaces...

Which brings me to my final question - Why? I posit that individuals would rather identify with domain names that represent actual community rather than go it alone and use their own moniker - even if that means building their own community.

Open to all-comers, but anonymous...

An organization calling itself "eu-registry" is soliciting the assistance of participants that wish to assist in its formation in support of its pending bid to run the .eu registry. Europeans that are interested in self-selecting can fill out an on line registration form. While the eu-registry website is notoriously short on details, it is pleasing to see that self-organization and wide calls for participation are still part of the TLD processes.

I think therefore...what?

Yet another example of why it is a tremendously great idea to read between the lines... This completely reminds me of some of the things that we see from time to time out of the Anything-But-ICANN™ (ABI - see note below)camp - like last week's screed by the PFF. As Mueller said, "They argue, contrary to all reason and fact, that the REGISTRY market is "competitive", and imply that new entry is needed."

[Note: Sometimes I use generalized labels like ABI - don't read much into them, I find them more fun than anything else. I might be inclined to define them someday, but don't hold your breathe ;) ]

Open Sucks is not a Good Answer

Just finished reading through the latest bunch of questions posed to the .org delegation seekers by ICANN staff. One thing popped up that really hit the wrong buttons with me. Proprietary v. Open isn't the real question that needed to be answered here, but simply what RDBMS choices the applicants had made and why (amongst other things). Some of the answers left me scratching my head, most notably the one in which the applicant put forward that they had chosen Oracle because Open software wasn't good enough. Strikes me as being the worst way one could make a decision.

Not only does it make me wonder if they evaluated any other closed RDBMS or not, I can't help but wondering how they will make policy if actually chosen by the board. "We evaluated a number of more liberal dispute resolution policies, but liberal policy sucks, so we stuck with the status quo..."

From Mosaic to Mozilla and back again....

I had similar thoughts to the ones that Jamie had after I tried some of the toys Brett was talking about. I found Feedreader was a reasonable (read: free) first step although Newzcrawler goes much further in the right direction. This kind of talk brings me back to Andreesen's first exuberant vision for the original Mosaic - the browser, the entry point, the portal to the Internet - the client software that made things available in an organized manner.

"...it was a fairly simple application of just pulling the two halves together.  The networking works great.  The desktop user interface works great.  All we really tried to do was to pull them together" - Andreesen, 1995

Hmm...what's taking them so long.

60,000 Credit Card Numbers Stolen from Verisign Reseller

According to this story over at MSNBC, Spitfire Novelties, said its credit card transaction processor, Online Data Corp a Verisign reseller, approved some 62,000 of the apparently false charges, valued at over $300,000. “There wasn’t a system in place to say, ‘you’ve generated 140,000 charges, that’s more than your normal volume,’” the Spitfire CEO said.

I wonder if this has anything to do with some of the courses offered by Verisign in the middle-east ;)

A Chance Stamp in Chicago

I had originally intended to avoid any blog comments about my view of the world one year later, but I was quite taken that the Internet has demonstrated again that it's the human side of the packet interface that really matters. I was amazed at the depth and scope of the digital archives that have developed out of 9/11. It really is a testament not only to the pain and suffered casued by these brutal acts, but also a witness to the strength of the human spirit.

I wasn't directly affected by the events - I was fortunate not to have lost any family, friends or acquaintances, but it has affected me nonetheless. I suppose it has affected most people. I tend to stop and think about the world around me a little bit more often, smile at strangers a little more frequently and try my best not to let other people's irrational behavior change my frame of mind.

My personal contribution to the archive is the picture at the right. It was uncommon before 9/11/01 for a Canadian citizen to have their passport stamped by US Customs, but for some reason that morning in Chicago around 6:00 am, the agent on duty decided to stamp my book. I didn't actually remember that this had happened until many months after the tragic events and in turning to the back of my passport as I idly browsed through the customs stamps that I have accumulated while I waiting in line in Africa to get another, I came across this. It caused me to pause, and to think, and to remember.

And that's important.

I hope that we can all remember where are heads are at now that the outrage and anger has subsided to the point where we can each appreciate the significance of last fall and how it affected each of our lives - and that we can all take the time to smile at more strangers, take a look at the world around us and try not to let other people's irrational behavior get us down.

"I realize that patriotism is not enough. I must have no hatred or bitterness towards anyone."
            - Edith Cavell

Neustar's Sweet Deal...

According to a ZDNet report, everything isn't wine and roses between Congress and Neustar regarding the future of .kids.us. According to Shimkus, he's never seen a sweeter deal than the one Neustar received and that Creating and operating the .kids.us domain is a perfectly appropriate cost of doing business." Neustar is not quite in agreement and has taken the position that legislation will cause more harm than good.

Spam Spam Spam

A while back I was complaining about Spam Spam - a bizarre trend I notice where people wrote articles about spam. There was enough of it at the time for me to classify the articles themselves as Spam (Who said I have to make sense). Anyways, rather than writing about it, it seems that there are people that actually do something about it - and it too seems to be a trend - Warning - this stuff is funny.

Wed, 11 Sep 2002 20:22:06 GMT

Someone told me to update my blog. So I did.

Domain Names Now Taxable?

This comment came from a reader this morning (I love it...) regarding my previous post concerning the state of the dotCOMmonwealth... "Now that my crazy country's courts have ruled that domains are apparently property, and "located" (in the case of .com domains) in Fairfax County, VA, I suspect it is only a matter of time before the County Commissioners of Fairfax County start looking into subjecting all those .com domains to the County's property tax." Nothing, especially in this regard, would surprise me ;)

A few grains of sand...

Brian O'Shaughnessy, spokesperson for Verisign, indicated in the Washington Post that Verisign "objected to ICANN's saying that 17 violations established a pattern of abuse. VeriSign maintains more than 10 million Internet addresses, he noted" ... "calling it a pattern and dictating that it's cavalier is an unfair characterization." I wonder what would be a fair characterization then. Perhaps Brian should take a look at my post to the Registrar Constituency mailing list of March 29, 2002 outlining what I thought was a fair characterization.