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Nymwars
Watch as I cleverly avoid using G+ to comment on G+!
The "people are better behaved with their real names" argument is bunk. And we don't necessarily want people to be better behaved. I don't care much if HaXXoR15 is rude, because I can just block him.
What I do care about is HaXXoR15 creating hundreds of sock-puppets to escape banning. And I ( Read more... ) -
Replacing DNS
Lauren Weinstein lays out objectives for an alternate naming system. He calls the project IDONS: Internet Distributed Open Name System. I have some opinions on the matter, having thought about many of the issues for my (unfinished) PhD thesis. ;)
Briefly, though, I think his list of objectives misses two important ones:
- Low-latency lookups. ( Read more... )
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Comcast deploys IPv6, but gets largest ever IPv4 delegation anyway
Comcast recently received a /9 prefix from ARIN (50.128.0.0/9, to be precise) despite moving toward IPv6 for internal addressing since at least 2006. This is 2^23 global IPv4 addresses, about 8 million, which some commenters state is somewhat out of line with ARIN's policy to provide only a year's worth of allocations at a time--- Comcast has been ( Read more... ) -
WTF.biz?
An essay by Dan Greer, Chief Information Security Officer at In-Q-Tel, debases an otherwise thoughtful (if jargon-ridden) essay with this howler:
At the same time, the recent decision of the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) to wildly proliferate the number of top-level domains and the character sets in which domains can ( Read more... ) -
ICANN is undemocratic as usual
ICANN's Governmental Advisory Committee released a statement opposing any new top-level domains that "could raise national, cultural, geographic, religious and/or linguistic sensitivities or objections... so as to mitigate the risks of fragmenting the DNS that could result from the introduction of controversial strings ( Read more... ) -
Dangers of Specialization
Patent and policy junkies had been waiting for the Supreme Court decision in Bilski v. Kappos to provide some clarity on what "business processes" were patentable, and which were not. But it's a mess of a decision, striking down the specific patent but also the test which the Federal Circuit applied to reach that conclusion. Instead, the " ( Read more... ) -
.xxx TLD, like certain tennis players, experiences undeath
Via the International Business Times, ICANN is set to approve a .xxx top-level domain.In 2000, politicians complained that ICANN didn't add .xxx, because it would allow pornography to be filtered. In 2005, politicians complained that ICANN wanted to add .xxx, because it would allow kids to find pornography. Who knows what will happen in 2010 ( Read more... ) -
Me-Too-Ism
Minnov8 reports that the Minnesota legislature passed a 25% tax credit for angel investment. The motivation seems to be mainly that "Wisconsin already has one" rather than that the $10m allocated for it is sound public policy. ( or not, as I previously suggested.Incidentally, VitalMedix, which moved to Wisconsin in search of angel funding (and ( Read more... ) -
Referrer Logs Are Identifying Information
Every time I read an entry on the Internet Governance Project blog, using the RSS feed displayed in LiveJournal, I'm greeted by the ticker shown on the right, identifying me by name.
Now, I'm not ashamed of reading Milton Mueller's posts, but it just seems a little less than optimal for a blog about Internet governance, including privacy issues, ( Read more... ) -
iPhone Roulette
At least when Microsoft decides to screw independent developers, they have the decency to launch a competing product. When Apple decides to pull the plug on 5,000 iPhone apps... well, you're just out of luck, unless you happen to be Sports Illustrated or PlayboyHow long until poker apps are eliminated too? Violent games? Website blacklisting? ( Read more... )