Slashdot Mirror

MrClever writes "In this article over at the Sydney Morning Herald (AU), it looks as though ICANN may actually be doing something about the VeriSign changes to .com and .net TLD's. Apparently, while they have been noticably quiet, they have been reviewing community reaction and analysed data from a technical perspective. Here's hoping ICANN pull the plug on VeriSign's TLD administration rights!" And TALlama writes "RSS.com.com (dear $DIETY, will it ever stop?) is reporting that ICANN has asked VeriSign 'to voluntarily suspend the service' of wildcarding DNS, 'pending further study.' Calling it a 'service' is a little bit of a misnomer. If I punch people in the face, can I call that a service, too?"

dmehus writes "ICANN issued an advisory late today concerning VeriSign's controversial SiteFinder service. The advisory requests that VeriSign voluntarily suspend SiteFinder until various independent and objective reviews, which are now underway, have been completed. Interested parties should see the advisory for more details." I think most people here can agree it was a bad idea, although it's not generating revenue for most of us either. ICANN isn't alone here either. Nuclear Elephant writes "The Internet Architecture Board issued this response to an ICANN inquiry about Verisign's SiteFinder service."

dmehus writes "ICANN issued an advisory late today concerning VeriSign's controversial SiteFinder service. The advisory requests that VeriSign voluntarily suspend SiteFinder until various independent and objective reviews, which are now underway, have been completed. Interested parties should see the advisory for more details." I think most people here can agree it was a bad idea, although it's not generating revenue for most of us either. ICANN isn't alone here either. Nuclear Elephant writes "The Internet Architecture Board issued this response to an ICANN inquiry about Verisign's SiteFinder service."

Greedo writes "According to their press release, "Pool.com, one of the Internet's hottest new ventures (their words, not mine), has launched a lawsuit challenging the right of the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) to proceed with a monopolistic new Wait-Listing Service (Google cache) this fall." You can read Pool.com's Statement of Claim, if you like."

Greedo writes "According to their press release, "Pool.com, one of the Internet's hottest new ventures (their words, not mine), has launched a lawsuit challenging the right of the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) to proceed with a monopolistic new Wait-Listing Service (Google cache) this fall." You can read Pool.com's Statement of Claim, if you like."

Froomkin writes "ICANN's outgoing dissident Board member, Andy Mueller-Maguhn, has leaked the slate that ICANN's so-called NomCom (actually an appointments committee) has picked. The new public representatives are mostly a mix of incumbent ICANN Board directors who don't rock the boat, corporate executives, and ISOC members. Dissident Andy Mueller-Maguhn got replaced by a former member of the board of Deutsche Telekom. Dissident Karl Auerbach (who had to sue ICANN to get to see its documents) got replaced by the President of the U.S. Council for International Business. At least the Board Squatters are finally going to be history. Details at ICANNWatch." ICANN is an interesting study in how a ruling regime can usurp a democratic institution and turn it into an autarchy.

scubacuda writes "Akash Kapur of CircleID has written an editorial, Why ICANN Needs Fresh Blood: A Deeper View . Kapur writes, "ICANN was born amid the heady days of Internet euphoria. Its early promise to be the world's first global democracy (not to mention an entirely new form of governance) was a product of that euphoria. But like so many dot-coms, ICANN quickly succumbed to the hubris of its own vision. If ICANN has been a troubled organization from the start, then that is in no small measure because it over-promised at the start....What's needed is fresh blood -- new personalities, and new ideas to break the ideological impasse." Kapur lists cancelled at-large elections, the authoritarianism and secrecy of ICANN discussion, and the narrowing possibility that ICANN could represent a new model of governance as indicators that global democracy has failed."

SerialHistorian asks: "The commmunity college newspaper that I was once a staff member and webmaster of had its domain name expire recently without realizing it, and it was snatched up by a porn merchant from the Dominican Republic. Unfortunately, we found that the ICANN dispute fees -start- at $1500. For a college paper whose full annual budget is $10,000, that's not a realistic price... so is there any alternative to the ICANN dispute method so that they can get their domain name back?" According to ICANN's website, there are a limited number of approved UDRP providers, none of which will arbitrate for anything less than US$1100. Are there cheaper methods that one can use to challenge a domain name reassignment? Is it possible to challenge domain name transfers without invoking the UDRP? Why does the handling of such disputes cost so much?

babycakes writes "Yesterday ICANN unanimously approved a proposal to add a number of new TLDs, to be determined at a later date. Here's the story on InfoWorld and at the BBC."

SAH writes "Earlier today the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) and the United States Department of Commerce announced that they agreed to extend their joint Memorandum of Understanding for another year until 30 September 2003. Here's a link to ICANN's announcement, and here's a link to a statement from the DOC."

hesiod writes "Over at CNet News, there is an article reporting that VeriSign may lose their ability to sell domains. Evidently, ICANN is miffed because VS's WHOIS database has incorrect information. Not exactly news to most of us, but they have been given 15 days to fix the errors, or risk losing the ability to sell domains."

Joel Rowbottom writes: "After ICANN 'awarded' ISOC with the running of .ORG in the Draft Staff Report, public comments regarding the process are starting to come out of the woodwork. Eric Brunner-Williams has commented on the flawed scoring and ICANN allegedly using the process to financially shore up ISOC and Afilias; the dotORG Foundation have posted some comments and questions (quote: 'we are perplexed by the Academic CIO Team's rating of our bid's technology as marginal'); Carl Malamud has posted the IMS/ISC response; and Organic have posted a rather damning indictment of the process as well (disclaimer: I work for Organic Names). For the $27,000 it cost each bidder to 'participate' (and that's just the entry fee), we'd have expected a little more professionalism than just getting some 'free' t-shirts! Comment to ICANN today org-eval@icann.org and make a difference."

Joel Rowbottom writes: "After ICANN 'awarded' ISOC with the running of .ORG in the Draft Staff Report, public comments regarding the process are starting to come out of the woodwork. Eric Brunner-Williams has commented on the flawed scoring and ICANN allegedly using the process to financially shore up ISOC and Afilias; the dotORG Foundation have posted some comments and questions (quote: 'we are perplexed by the Academic CIO Team's rating of our bid's technology as marginal'); Carl Malamud has posted the IMS/ISC response; and Organic have posted a rather damning indictment of the process as well (disclaimer: I work for Organic Names). For the $27,000 it cost each bidder to 'participate' (and that's just the entry fee), we'd have expected a little more professionalism than just getting some 'free' t-shirts! Comment to ICANN today org-eval@icann.org and make a difference."

Joel Rowbottom writes: "After ICANN 'awarded' ISOC with the running of .ORG in the Draft Staff Report, public comments regarding the process are starting to come out of the woodwork. Eric Brunner-Williams has commented on the flawed scoring and ICANN allegedly using the process to financially shore up ISOC and Afilias; the dotORG Foundation have posted some comments and questions (quote: 'we are perplexed by the Academic CIO Team's rating of our bid's technology as marginal'); Carl Malamud has posted the IMS/ISC response; and Organic have posted a rather damning indictment of the process as well (disclaimer: I work for Organic Names). For the $27,000 it cost each bidder to 'participate' (and that's just the entry fee), we'd have expected a little more professionalism than just getting some 'free' t-shirts! Comment to ICANN today org-eval@icann.org and make a difference."

Joel Rowbottom writes: "After ICANN 'awarded' ISOC with the running of .ORG in the Draft Staff Report, public comments regarding the process are starting to come out of the woodwork. Eric Brunner-Williams has commented on the flawed scoring and ICANN allegedly using the process to financially shore up ISOC and Afilias; the dotORG Foundation have posted some comments and questions (quote: 'we are perplexed by the Academic CIO Team's rating of our bid's technology as marginal'); Carl Malamud has posted the IMS/ISC response; and Organic have posted a rather damning indictment of the process as well (disclaimer: I work for Organic Names). For the $27,000 it cost each bidder to 'participate' (and that's just the entry fee), we'd have expected a little more professionalism than just getting some 'free' t-shirts! Comment to ICANN today org-eval@icann.org and make a difference."

Amazing Quantum Man writes "According to ZDNet, ICANN has issued a report recommending that ISOC run the .org TLD. It looks like ISOC would run .org in conjunction with Afilias." mesozoic points out that ISOC is a non-profit organization composed of many for-profit heavyweights, writing "I'm not surprised; are you?" This preliminary report may be disappointing to those who hoped that Paul Vixie and Carl Malamud would be successful in their bid to head up .org.

Your intrepid reporter took a jaunt down to the H2K2 conference this past weekend, held in the lovely Hotel Pennsylvania. The conference had much more floor space than they had two years ago, and it seemed like more attendance as well. Wireless networks were available, though overcrowded, and if you didn't encrypt your communications, well, you've probably already paid the price. My notes on the conference and the sessions I attended are below, followed by a couple of reader submissions.

The conference took up the 18th floor of the Hotel Pennsylvania[1], with the second floor being devoted to network operations/music/gawking at the old computers. Unlike the last conference, both major session tracks were on the same floor, preventing the logjams that occurred in 2000 when hundreds of people decided to use the elevators every hour between sessions. Lesson learned for future conference organizers: don't split your major crowd-drawing events between floors if you can possibly help it.

Siva Vaidhyanathan was the first keynote speaker. He described the internet as a cynical technology -- a technology which promotes seeing things as they are, not veiled by smokescreen or corporate PR -- and noted the attacks on cynical technologies since Sept. 11, tying that in to the copyright wars with Valenti, the DMCA, WIPO, and so on. It was good, well-reasoned speech, but honestly, Slashdot readers have heard it before so I'm not going to spend much time on it.

Andy Mueller-Maguhn (probably best known to U.S. readers as the European At-Large ICANN representative) and Paul Garrin of Name.space gave a talk about ICANN and the DNS. Mueller-Maguhn described the attendance at ICANN's Montevideo meeting: about 450 people overall, of which 320 were representatives of the Intellectual Property community (RIAA, MPAA, many others), 100 or so from the world's various governments, and even a few technical people. He drove home the fact that the IP people have the funds and personnel to participate in these meetings, and that few other organizations do. Mueller-Maguhn was critical of the recent decisions by various U.S. civil liberties groups to stop trying to affect ICANN (nothing they've done has had any effect) and to start working on the U.S. Commerce department to cause change in the DNS -- Mueller-Maguhn prefers to work within the system, even when his efforts bear no fruit. Garrin talked briefly about Name.space's efforts to provide a free-speech alternative to the current DNS system.

Goldstein and Macki of 2600, and Robin Gross of the EFF, discussed the DeCSS case. Again, this a topic thoroughly covered on Slashdot, so I see no need to recap the talk. They noted that Jon Johansen is still facing charges in Norway, and that the EFF is still interesting in overturning various provisions of the DMCA, so if you have a situation that might represent a good test case, please contact them.

The next day, Eric Grimm and Robin Gross did a presentation on the DMCA, almost a continuation of the DeCSS presentation. Notice and takedown, ReplayTV, the Eldred and Golan lawsuits against the most recent copyright extensions; Slashdot covers these pretty well.

This was followed by journalist Declan McCullagh and cryptographer Matt Blaze, with a talk titled "Educating Lawmakers: is it possible?". McCullagh told his favorite anecdotes about Congressional stupidity, while Blaze described his interactions with the NSA during the dark days of crypto prohibition. Blaze described his work on the Clipper chip, which may be before the time of some Slashdot readers: in a nutshell, the U.S. government decided that they would promote a cryptographic solution which had a Federal backdoor, allowing users to secure their secrets against anyone but the government. Blaze expressed interest in it, and was invited to visit Ft. Meade, where he was given a sample Clipper chip by NSA techies -- except they weren't sure if he would allowed to take it out of the facility. The techies gave him a brown paper bag to carry out the sample -- a burn bag for *classified* materials. Which he successfully carried out, with Clipper chip inside. Blaze discovered major flaws in Clipper's backdoor, which would have allowed anyone to gain access through it, and which eventually helped torpedo the Clipper plan. (Of course, Microsoft's Palladium plan will accomplish much the same purpose: just as the Federal government had final control over the design of Clipper, Microsoft will have final control of your PC, making government wiretapping trivial, so saying "key escrow is dead" is not even close to true.) Blaze concluded by describing his testimony before the Senate Intelligence Committee: he noted that when he consulted with other witnesses after the testimony, each of them had independently decided to liberate one of the stationery notepads provided in the hearing chamber for a souvenir, and "one of us got the gavel".

Aaron McGruder gave a very interesting speech. I had barely heard of him before (not a Boondocks reader, sorry), so I wasn't sure what to expect. McGruder covered his experiences getting into cartooning, and described getting his thoughts into a few hundred newspapers daily as a "hack," which I suppose it is. His speech was mostly about his cartooning and recent politics -- suffice it to say that he isn't a fan of Bush and the current corporate government.

Philip Kaplan, best known for fuckedcompany.com, talked about the secrets of making money on the net. His secret is basically: when you scratch an itch for yourself, scratch it for others as well, since probably thousands of people worldwide have the same itch you do. He also described some of the trials and tribulations of running his dot-com deadpool site, the inevitable legal hassles, etc.

Jello Biafra wasn't originally scheduled to speak, but happened to be in town. His address last time with the refrain of "Become the media" brought the house down, and he gave a late-night wide-ranging ramble working from handwritten notes which again proved to be quite popular. The talk centered mainly on music, with a secondary helping of politics, touching on his legal troubles with the rest of his former band, current developments in digital music, and ad-busting counter-culture efforts (he was following Mark Hosler of Negativland). Biafra came prepared with some old vinyl albums of corporate morale-boosting and sales songs -- imagine songs composed at corporate retreats and sung by miscellaneous employees, extolling the joys of using company X's products, or a song about the joys of being a Ford employee's wife who (of course) stays home to cook him dinner and bring his slippers when he comes home after a hard day at work. Hilarious stuff.

On Sunday, Maximilian Dornseif gave a talk about digital demonstrations. Obstructive demonstrations and sit-ins are more popular in Europe than in the U.S., and they are branching out into digital versions, electronic sit-ins that attempt to slow down or DDOS targeted websites for political ends. Dornseif described several previous attempts: programs distributed to automatically reload a targeted website, for instance. Some of them were quite sophisticated, including one with smart date-checking to make sure it was used only during the designated protest time. Dornseif described his ideals for an electronic protest, to make it as similar as possible to a real-world one: persons involved should be identifiable, outside observers should be able to know the goal of the protest, etc. Overall, an electronic protest should have strong parallels to physical protests, so that if the judicial system examines the legality of what you are doing, the judge is tempted to find it a legitimate protest rather than an illegitimate attack by cyber-criminals. Dornseif suggested making "slow" connections to HTTP servers ("G" sleep 10 "E" sleep 10 "T" sleep 10 ...), as well as "accept flooding" -- completing the TCP handshake, but not actually making any HTTP request -- these are "slow" versions of regular connections, which make effective DOS's, but also mimic regular users and might find acceptance in the courts as part of a planned protest.

Finally we come to some of the most interesting presentations. The lockpicking presentation, by Barry "The Key" Wels and Mike Glasser, was given to an utterly packed room. Wels and Glasser described many common and uncommon types of locks, and proceeded to pick them with great success. Those combination Master locks that are so popular on high school lockers? Takes one second to open any of those with the proper tool, a bent piece of metal that allows the shackle to simply pop out. You might want to invest in better protection for your varsity jacket. Thought your bicycle U-bolt lock was too strong to cut? It only takes ten seconds to pick it with the right tool, a circular pick that mimics any key. This might help explain the two bicycles I've had stolen in New York City. Normal house deadbolts? Maybe 30 seconds. They covered an assortment of high-security locks, such as ones with side dimple keys instead of teeth, 3 or 4-edged keys, disk keys, locks with magnetic pins, and so on. It was a remarkable presentation, and Mr. Wels especially represents a true hacker in every good sense of the word. He suggested starting at locktools.nl or security.nl or lockpicking.org if you'd like to try your hand.

Douglas Rushkoff was next with a wide-ranging speech about the true role of hackers in modern society. I probably can't do justice to his argument - read through his website, which has a lot of various essays and articles, if you want to get a sense of it -- but essentially he made a very Matrix-like argument about hackers, storytellers, the media, and empowerment. Starting from a premise that stories control reality (as an example he used the Ewoks in Star Wars, who were convinced to die for the Rebellion by the stories told to them by C3PO), he said that recently we have been empowered to alter and participate in our own stories (empowerment through devices such as the joystick, remote control and computer keyboard, each of which allows us to control our experiences), but this time is now ending. We are currently in a Golden Age of interactivity, where most of the attackers that attempted to control computing and the internet in round 1 have been beat down (the dot-com bust), but they're coming back, and hackers are the only ones who have the ability to see through the veils (computer GUIs and the like) that blind us to true reality. Very fun to listen to, and way too full of information to summarize effectively. I'll leave you with one memorable analogy -- Rushkoff said business and government were like bacteria and fungus, they have to stay in balance and if you suppress one of them the other one grows out of control. Not a bad analogy at all considering the times we live in.

Eric Blossom gave another fascinating presentation about GNU radio, whose goal is to develop a Free software-defined radio system that runs on commodity hardware. Software-defined radios are a tremendous concept which are going to cause revolution when they are deployed. Think about a PC or other electronic device that has complete access to every bit of information in every radio-frequency wave passing through it, in constant wireless communications with any nearby similar device. Maybe if the devices are close, they adopt a high-frequency unlicensed band to communicate, if they're farther apart they pick a lower frequency ... Slashdot gets a lot of Ask Slashdot questions which say roughly "What open source software project should I work on?" or "I know I like computers, what should I do in college?" We delete most of them. Here is the answer for everyone who asks those questions: software-defined radio. Trust me. It's going to be big. The GNU radio people are concentrating mainly on television applications right now, because the tuners and such are readily available, and they have a lot of pieces which each work but still have a lot of work to do to create a turnkey system.

Ryan Lackey and Avi Freedman talked about the past, present and future of Sealand. We've covered this pretty extensively on Slashdot. Havenco is doing acceptably well, with their only significant problem being that the major European ISPs keep going bankrupt. They hinted that they are planning to do more things to promote free speech in the very near future - they already run an anonymous remailer and host a copy of DeCSS. An offhand comment by Freedman gave me a very good idea of what they're planning, but I'm not going to spoil their surprise by mentioning it here.

And finally, the time-honored Social Engineering panel. Again, the largest conference room available was packed with attendees. After a few funny stories about legendary hacks, Goldstein read the AT&T memo and noted, "If that's not an invitation I don't know what is." Coincidentally or not, the two lines which Verizon had installed in the conference room were mysteriously unable to dial long distance numbers or AT&T, though they had been able to yesterday. (Um, the phone companies are slow but they're not stupid - when a conference of phone hackers wants phone lines installed, it has to set off a few alarm bells somewhere.) When Goldstein eventually got an AT&T operator, she was suspicious and refused to assist him - obviously she had read the memo. :) Goldstein decided to hit easier targets, and starting paging through the phone book, eventually settling on a Starbucks outlet. He was able to get a Starbucks employee to provide him with customers' credit card information, without much difficulty. If you used an American Express card to make a $3.57 purchase at a Manhattan Starbucks on Sunday morning, you might want to check your next statement (although the A/V crew kept the card number from being heard by the crowd). Next up was the Russian Tea Room, a high-class restaurant in Manhattan, where Goldstein had no difficulty in changing some poor woman's reservations and getting her phone number, then calling her and notifying her of the changed reservations, due to a "health inspection". He said he'd call and change them back to the original time, showing the hacker's spirit: inquisitiveness without destructiveness.

Overall, I had a great time at the conference, and so did a couple of non-computer geeks that I dragged along with me. I'm looking forward to H2K4 already.

[1] That's the third time I've linked to that Dave Barry piece, and it's still funny.

Reader lokii202 takes a look at the Social Engineering presentation: lokii202 writes "I attended the Social Engineering panel discussion today at the H.O.P.E. conference, and thought it might be nice to follow up on the previous article about AT&T's Hacker Warning memo. The AT&T security number was tried and the attempt failed, although one of the members of the large crowd in attendence offered up an AT&T HRID number. The operator got suspicious and shut us down.

However, no fair 'cause they were ready for it. Starbucks, to our enjoyment, had no such warning memo circulating, and here are the results...

Our panelist made a call over a standard phone line to a Starbuck's store using a calling card. Asked the underling if they were having network problems. Underling, following the standard underling procedure, got the Assistant Manager. AM told us that yes, they were having problems with the credit card system. Oops. Within about 5 minutes he was reading off transaction times, dates, and more chillingly an American Express card number and expiration date. Our panelist stopped the guy before he exposed the whole number (the phone was hooked into a P.A. system for the conference and the experiment). The point was made very clearly.

Next, our guy called up the Russian Tea Room, which is a pretty classy joint in NYC, and posed as the flustered husband who needed to change dinner reservations for this evening. He had no names, no prior knowledge, etc. He managed to get some poor guys' reservations changed to 9pm and also got the guy's cell number. Next, he called the guy and posed as a Russian Tea Room host and apologized that his reservations were changed to 9pm, due to a health department inspection.

That was kinda funny.

High tech gizmos and uber-gear might get one pretty far, but when you come down to it security starts with the user. This demonstration, and others like it at H2K2, made it embarassingly apparent that to obtain sensitive data one only needs a little ingenuity and some acting skills."

Reader weave takes a look at the whole conference (this may seem repetitive, but it's good to look at things through others' eyes...) He writes "H2K2 (or HOPE 2002 or Hackers On Planet Earth 2002) was held this past weekend in New York City at the Hotel Pennsylvania. I've been to previous HOPE conferences and this one was much better than ones in the past, but it still had a few problems.

Aaron McGruder, the creator of Boondocks comic strip was keynote. Jello Biafra makes a repeat appearance as well as some other past favorites, such as the "former spy" Robert Steele, as well as some surprise guests such as former Taliban fighter, Aukai Collins.

This is my personal review of h2k2. There were so many things happening at once that one person can't obviously see it all. This is based on what I saw, experienced, felt, and my personal opinions.

Keynote Speaker: Aaron MgGruder, author of Boondocks, spoke on Saturday. This was my favorite speaker and worth the price of admission. He was invited because he did a short sequence of strips covering the DeCSS subject and, as Emmanuel Goldstein said, "the only person in popular media to get it right." Aaron was very articulate, intelligent, and of course, opinionated. What I liked most about him was his admitting that he does not know it all. He made fun of political experts who sit around and debate political topics based on what they are spoon fed by popular media. He says there is not much difference between us and people who live in censored countries except they KNOW they aren't getting the full story. We all think we are smart and know it all. His advice to people who love to rant about political topics, "Shut the hell up, you don't know anything."

McGruder thinks our society is falling apart and the only thing that can fix it is revolution. He has hope, but not much. He spoke about Bush's line that countries that hurt American are going to have to pay, which means we kill a bunch of their innocent civilians so they get to claim that we will then have to pay, where they kill a bunch of us. McGruder's solution is that people should just go kill the leaders of these nations. He then back-pedaled (remembering the place was probably full of feds) and disclaimed that he wasn't advocating that anyone go out and shoot Bush (who he has no love for). He reminded us that if Bush was killed, we'd be left with Cheney, who is far far worse in his opinion. "If Cheney was President, Afghanistan and Iraq would be glass, and we may give the neighboring countries 30 minutes of warning to get away from the borders."

Jello Biafra: Jello was keynote at H2K in 2000 and returned this year to speak late Saturday night. He was well loved by most people there, based on the reactions I saw that night. I didn't like him. He reminded me of Rush Limbaugh except on the left side. Loads of rhetoric, wild claims, and positioning himself as an expert. He was supposed to speak for one hour, and then the film "Freedom Downtime" was to be shown. He rambled on for two and a half hours, then took his shoe off and asked for donations for his legal defense fund involving his former record label. People flocked up and stuffed it full of money as he started to spin records. At this point it was 12:30am and I gave up and went to my room and and got some sleep.

Robert Steele : Former spy, and backer of a concept called "Open Source Intelligence" where countries share intelligence information freely with each other and their citizens. His speech on Hacking National Intelligence was, to me, frightening. He claims that 9/11 involved a serious failure of our intelligence network and Washington is trying to whitewash it all. He also claims that he has no doubt at all that New York City will be the target of another terrorist attack soon. "When foreigners think of the U.S. they think of New York City. It is the center of capitalism." He is an excellent speaker. I hope he returns next time.

During his talk, he introduced Aukai Collins who told us of his experiences fighting for bin Laden (during the 90s when we were paying bin Laden's salary and he allegedly was a good guy). When the embassy bombings started to occur, he went to the CIA and offered himself as an intelligence source. He worked for them and the FBI a few years and during that time was invited by bin Laden's runners to come work closely with him. When he bought this opportunity to get close to bin Laden to his superiors, they told him not to go. He feels we lost probably our only opportunity to get one of our guys close to bin Laden. He has written a book on this called My Jihad.

If this so far sounds like h2k2 was more politics than tech, I got the same impression. I skipped out on most of the DMCA updates and other legal updates. They were hosted by members of EFF and their lawyers. The small bits I saw sounded very informative and I applaud their works in these areas. Since I've kept up on all the news on these cases, I decided to skip these forums.

The best of the tech presentations was Fun with 802.11b hosted by Dragorn, Porkchop, and StAtic FuSIOn. (I sometimes hate silly handles). During the days before h2k2, they mapped out over 400 open wireless networks accessible from within three blocks of the hotel in midtown Manhattan. They demonstrated passive snoopers like kismet and showed us different directional high-gain antennas. Their recommendation for a good PCMCIA 802.11b card was Cisco's 352, which I of course didn't have. I ran out and bought an SMC card for my company laptop before the conference and had a tech load Linux on my laptop. I told him he could pick the distro of his choice, but unfortunately he picked the one I'm least familiar with, Slackware. I could not get the damn card working for the life of me. I wanted to scream.

A big disappointment was the Cult of the Dead Cow Extravaganza . It was to be held down on the lower level in the network room and broadcast up to the conference rooms on the 18th floor. Well, it didn't work. I was upstairs and they mucked with the equipment for an hour trying to get a a/v feed going. After all this time of wondering whether we should fight our way downstairs to watch it in person, we got an announcement. "Sorry, but we can't get it to work. Oh, by the way, they have already started downstairs."

Urge to kill. My friend and I wondered how they screwed this one up and traced the wires to a display table and behind a closed stairwell door. We looked at each other and said "Nooo". We popped into a neighboring stairwell as everyone fought for the elevators. We went down one floor then popped over to the stairwell that we saw the wires going down. Sure enough, they had run the wires down the open portion of the stairs so they were hanging by their own weight for a distance of about 22 floors (the hotel has 18 number floors, about 4 lettered floors like A, B, C, D, a mezzanine floor, and lobby floor). I'm not sure what the stress would be introduced by a cable hanging by its own weight for that kind of distance, but I bet the center copper core couldn't bear it and broke inside.

So we run downstairs and saw some talented but unwanted female singing about how great the CDC was. Then someone else got up and swung a black briefcase looking device around. Had no idea what it was because we couldn't understand squat in the back. Basically we said to hell with them all, and left.

So while the presentations were hit and miss, the overall best part of the conference were the attendees. Freaks, geeks, and misfits everywhere, all being good to each other, curious, intelligent, and sometimes a bit too paranoid. Of course it was mostly guys, but there were women as well as one person who had a male voice but noticeable breasts and a feminine face and shape. Many other guys dressed up a bit too flamboyant for my tastes as well. My point being, everyone was accepted for who they are and all got along great together. I didn't meet a single person who I talked to who was rude, or unwilling to strike up a conversation. The network room had wired and wireless internet access and was open 24 hours a day and the source for some of the most fun at the conference. But by all means, the best part of h2k2 was the attendees and they are the reason why I will want to go again in the future."

EyesWideOpen writes: "Salon has a lengthy interview with Cygnus Software co-founder John Gilmore about why he feels it's time for ICANN, the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers, to go. Gilmore, along with the Electronic Frontier Foundation, is currently helping to fund a lawsuit filed by ICANN director Karl Auerbach against ICANN. ICANN has denied Gilmore access to its financial information, providing the basis for the lawsuit. Gilmore states: 'I believe it's because there is information in there about how ICANN has misused its money, and/or has favored people who lent or gave it money.'"

ICANN is meeting in Bucharest next week, which means they're floating all their usual smoky-room schemes just prior to the meeting. leto writes "The three RIR's, ARIN, APNIC and RIPE-NCC have just released a joint statement that basically tells ICANN that their Evolution and Reform plan is unacceptable, and tells ICANN to go play elsewhere, and leave the address space in the hands of the well working bodies." An interesting mailing list debate has been going on between ICANN's critics and ICANN's extremely well-paid and extremely sleazy attorney: critic, attorney (sleazy!), critic again, another critic, attorney again, critic's response, still other critics. And finally, note that the .org TLD is up for bids - the New York Times has a story, Newsforge has another.

ICANN is meeting in Bucharest next week, which means they're floating all their usual smoky-room schemes just prior to the meeting. leto writes "The three RIR's, ARIN, APNIC and RIPE-NCC have just released a joint statement that basically tells ICANN that their Evolution and Reform plan is unacceptable, and tells ICANN to go play elsewhere, and leave the address space in the hands of the well working bodies." An interesting mailing list debate has been going on between ICANN's critics and ICANN's extremely well-paid and extremely sleazy attorney: critic, attorney (sleazy!), critic again, another critic, attorney again, critic's response, still other critics. And finally, note that the .org TLD is up for bids - the New York Times has a story, Newsforge has another.

JCallery writes "CNN is reporting on the plan drawn up by ICANN's restructuring committee after ICANN decided to abandon direct elections." We had a earlier story about the restructuring plan with some notes from one of the board members who attended. ICANN's plan is online and a must-read for anyone interested in internet governance issues. Below, I have some notes about why this restructuring would be terrible idea for regular internet users.

If you've followed the history of ICANN at all, you know that it was originally set up to have substantial representation from the general public (known as At-Large representatives) - 9 of 18 board members. The original unelected board immediately set about undermining that, only electing 5 members and keeping on four "board-squatters" from the original unelected bunch.

The elections of the five At-Large members had two flaws from the point of view of ICANN's unelected board:

1. There were assorted technical issues with the voting process, due apparently to incompetence from the contractor who handled it.
2. Two of the five new board members who were elected did not represent the same corporate interests as the rest of the board.

Of these two flaws, the second was by far the more severe. The board risked losing control of ICANN to people who might run it for the public good rather than for the good of the corporations represented on the board. They started backing away from having any sort of elected representation whatsoever. In February 2002 ICANN President Lynn floated a reform proposal which would eliminate the At-Large representation - or rather, it would keep something called "At-Large", that would no longer be elected by the general public but instead appointed by the Board itself. Instead of the general public picking new ICANN Board members, the ICANN Board would pick new ICANN Board members. This was followed by a vote which confirmed ICANN's commitment to eliminating elected representation.

Now the reform proposal is out. There would be two classes of board members:

• approximately eight ex-officio members (members holding the board seat due to some other title or position they hold)
• approximately five to eleven members picked by a Nominating Committee (the Committee to be chosen by the current Board) and perhaps confirmed by the Board

It is important to note how thoroughly captured this process is. Many of the ex-officio seats accrue from positions that are selected by the ICANN Board. So the ICANN Board picks someone to be chief dogwalker, and the chief dogwalker gets an automatic position on ICANN's Board.

The seats selected by the Nominating Committee are also extremely vulnerable to capture. Let me use a real-life example of how nominating committees work to show what I mean: my credit union.

My credit union has a board structure very similar to the one proposed for ICANN: several ex-officio members, and a number of seats elected by the general populace (everyone who has an account at the credit union). This structure is actually more flexible than that proposed for ICANN, since ICANN does not plan any direct elections at all. However, the credit union membership picks from among candidates selected by a Nominating Committee. Every year or two, I get a ballot in the mail. I can choose from among all the candidates selected by the Nominating Committee, and I can check boxes for the candidates that I prefer, up to the number of open seats available on the Board.

I never return these ballots. Why, you might ask? Because the number of candidates is usually identical to the number of open seats. Three empty seats, three candidates to choose from. Six empty seats, six candidates to choose from. I think one year they might have had more candidates than open seats, but it was an aberration.

This system apparently works well for credit unions: would you believe that they pay interest on my checking account? What it does guarantee is that all future Board members will represent the same biases that are present in the Board at the instant the system was instituted. In my credit union's case, this guarantees "fiscal responsibility" or "fiscal conservatism".

For ICANN, what it would do is institutionalize the biases currently present. Whatever biases are there right now, will be there forever, as the system becomes a self-reinforcing feedback loop with no external controls.

The Board's current biases are toward:

• expanding ICANN's mission from a purely technical body to one that is willing to govern the Internet - taking on assorted social/political issues as it sees fit
• running ICANN for private profit rather than public benefit

Neither of these two traits needs reinforcing. Karl Auerbach, one of ICANN's At-Large directors, has his thoughts on a possible ICANN structure.

JCallery writes "CNN is reporting on the plan drawn up by ICANN's restructuring committee after ICANN decided to abandon direct elections." We had a earlier story about the restructuring plan with some notes from one of the board members who attended. ICANN's plan is online and a must-read for anyone interested in internet governance issues. Below, I have some notes about why this restructuring would be terrible idea for regular internet users.

If you've followed the history of ICANN at all, you know that it was originally set up to have substantial representation from the general public (known as At-Large representatives) - 9 of 18 board members. The original unelected board immediately set about undermining that, only electing 5 members and keeping on four "board-squatters" from the original unelected bunch.

The elections of the five At-Large members had two flaws from the point of view of ICANN's unelected board:

1. There were assorted technical issues with the voting process, due apparently to incompetence from the contractor who handled it.
2. Two of the five new board members who were elected did not represent the same corporate interests as the rest of the board.

Of these two flaws, the second was by far the more severe. The board risked losing control of ICANN to people who might run it for the public good rather than for the good of the corporations represented on the board. They started backing away from having any sort of elected representation whatsoever. In February 2002 ICANN President Lynn floated a reform proposal which would eliminate the At-Large representation - or rather, it would keep something called "At-Large", that would no longer be elected by the general public but instead appointed by the Board itself. Instead of the general public picking new ICANN Board members, the ICANN Board would pick new ICANN Board members. This was followed by a vote which confirmed ICANN's commitment to eliminating elected representation.

Now the reform proposal is out. There would be two classes of board members:

• approximately eight ex-officio members (members holding the board seat due to some other title or position they hold)
• approximately five to eleven members picked by a Nominating Committee (the Committee to be chosen by the current Board) and perhaps confirmed by the Board

It is important to note how thoroughly captured this process is. Many of the ex-officio seats accrue from positions that are selected by the ICANN Board. So the ICANN Board picks someone to be chief dogwalker, and the chief dogwalker gets an automatic position on ICANN's Board.

The seats selected by the Nominating Committee are also extremely vulnerable to capture. Let me use a real-life example of how nominating committees work to show what I mean: my credit union.

My credit union has a board structure very similar to the one proposed for ICANN: several ex-officio members, and a number of seats elected by the general populace (everyone who has an account at the credit union). This structure is actually more flexible than that proposed for ICANN, since ICANN does not plan any direct elections at all. However, the credit union membership picks from among candidates selected by a Nominating Committee. Every year or two, I get a ballot in the mail. I can choose from among all the candidates selected by the Nominating Committee, and I can check boxes for the candidates that I prefer, up to the number of open seats available on the Board.

I never return these ballots. Why, you might ask? Because the number of candidates is usually identical to the number of open seats. Three empty seats, three candidates to choose from. Six empty seats, six candidates to choose from. I think one year they might have had more candidates than open seats, but it was an aberration.

This system apparently works well for credit unions: would you believe that they pay interest on my checking account? What it does guarantee is that all future Board members will represent the same biases that are present in the Board at the instant the system was instituted. In my credit union's case, this guarantees "fiscal responsibility" or "fiscal conservatism".

For ICANN, what it would do is institutionalize the biases currently present. Whatever biases are there right now, will be there forever, as the system becomes a self-reinforcing feedback loop with no external controls.

The Board's current biases are toward:

• expanding ICANN's mission from a purely technical body to one that is willing to govern the Internet - taking on assorted social/political issues as it sees fit
• running ICANN for private profit rather than public benefit

Neither of these two traits needs reinforcing. Karl Auerbach, one of ICANN's At-Large directors, has his thoughts on a possible ICANN structure.

JCallery writes "CNN is reporting on the plan drawn up by ICANN's restructuring committee after ICANN decided to abandon direct elections." We had a earlier story about the restructuring plan with some notes from one of the board members who attended. ICANN's plan is online and a must-read for anyone interested in internet governance issues. Below, I have some notes about why this restructuring would be terrible idea for regular internet users.

If you've followed the history of ICANN at all, you know that it was originally set up to have substantial representation from the general public (known as At-Large representatives) - 9 of 18 board members. The original unelected board immediately set about undermining that, only electing 5 members and keeping on four "board-squatters" from the original unelected bunch.

The elections of the five At-Large members had two flaws from the point of view of ICANN's unelected board:

1. There were assorted technical issues with the voting process, due apparently to incompetence from the contractor who handled it.
2. Two of the five new board members who were elected did not represent the same corporate interests as the rest of the board.

Of these two flaws, the second was by far the more severe. The board risked losing control of ICANN to people who might run it for the public good rather than for the good of the corporations represented on the board. They started backing away from having any sort of elected representation whatsoever. In February 2002 ICANN President Lynn floated a reform proposal which would eliminate the At-Large representation - or rather, it would keep something called "At-Large", that would no longer be elected by the general public but instead appointed by the Board itself. Instead of the general public picking new ICANN Board members, the ICANN Board would pick new ICANN Board members. This was followed by a vote which confirmed ICANN's commitment to eliminating elected representation.

Now the reform proposal is out. There would be two classes of board members:

• approximately eight ex-officio members (members holding the board seat due to some other title or position they hold)
• approximately five to eleven members picked by a Nominating Committee (the Committee to be chosen by the current Board) and perhaps confirmed by the Board

It is important to note how thoroughly captured this process is. Many of the ex-officio seats accrue from positions that are selected by the ICANN Board. So the ICANN Board picks someone to be chief dogwalker, and the chief dogwalker gets an automatic position on ICANN's Board.

The seats selected by the Nominating Committee are also extremely vulnerable to capture. Let me use a real-life example of how nominating committees work to show what I mean: my credit union.

My credit union has a board structure very similar to the one proposed for ICANN: several ex-officio members, and a number of seats elected by the general populace (everyone who has an account at the credit union). This structure is actually more flexible than that proposed for ICANN, since ICANN does not plan any direct elections at all. However, the credit union membership picks from among candidates selected by a Nominating Committee. Every year or two, I get a ballot in the mail. I can choose from among all the candidates selected by the Nominating Committee, and I can check boxes for the candidates that I prefer, up to the number of open seats available on the Board.

I never return these ballots. Why, you might ask? Because the number of candidates is usually identical to the number of open seats. Three empty seats, three candidates to choose from. Six empty seats, six candidates to choose from. I think one year they might have had more candidates than open seats, but it was an aberration.

This system apparently works well for credit unions: would you believe that they pay interest on my checking account? What it does guarantee is that all future Board members will represent the same biases that are present in the Board at the instant the system was instituted. In my credit union's case, this guarantees "fiscal responsibility" or "fiscal conservatism".

For ICANN, what it would do is institutionalize the biases currently present. Whatever biases are there right now, will be there forever, as the system becomes a self-reinforcing feedback loop with no external controls.

The Board's current biases are toward:

• expanding ICANN's mission from a purely technical body to one that is willing to govern the Internet - taking on assorted social/political issues as it sees fit
• running ICANN for private profit rather than public benefit

Neither of these two traits needs reinforcing. Karl Auerbach, one of ICANN's At-Large directors, has his thoughts on a possible ICANN structure.

mpawlo writes "ICANN President and CEO Stuart Lynn has announced his intention to retire from the position with ICANN effective around March 2003. Andrew McLaughlin also announced that he will be resigning as Vice President and Chief Policy Officer effective July 1, 2002. Andy Mueller-Maguhn has posted some unofficial notes from this weekend's ICANN board retreat."

The_THOMAS writes: "The company RealNames, which tried to make a buck off of the domain name gold rush by adding their own layer on top of the ICANN system, is going out of business (Full story here). To review, the RealNames system is a browser plugin which redirects a user who types 'cookies' in the IE address bar to Nabisco.com. The reason for the closure appears to be the decision by M$ to NOT renew their agreement with RealNames which expires in June."

Merry_B.Buck writes "ICANN, the US government-approved group that alternates between haggling over the DNS system and doing nothing, has issued a warning to domain name holders to beware of deceptive mailings claiming that the name is being disputed per the UDRP and asking for money to defend it. Slightly sneakier than Verisign sending deceptive domain renewal notices..."

Merry_B.Buck writes "ICANN, the US government-approved group that alternates between haggling over the DNS system and doing nothing, has issued a warning to domain name holders to beware of deceptive mailings claiming that the name is being disputed per the UDRP and asking for money to defend it. Slightly sneakier than Verisign sending deceptive domain renewal notices..."

Merry_B.Buck writes "ICANN, the US government-approved group that alternates between haggling over the DNS system and doing nothing, has issued a warning to domain name holders to beware of deceptive mailings claiming that the name is being disputed per the UDRP and asking for money to defend it. Slightly sneakier than Verisign sending deceptive domain renewal notices..."

Dr. Zowie writes "My ISP places an opaque (intended to be transparent) web proxy between me and the rest of the world. It is causing me problems due to misconfiguration or misdesign. My question is twofold. On the micro level, what can I do in the short term to work around the broken routing (in the long term, I switch ISPs if it's not fixed)? On the macro level, what can we as a community do to prevent breakage of the net on a global scale by poorly designed routing hacks?"

Dr. Zowie continues: "I use a regional ISP with otherwise-very-good policies. However, they seem to be intercepting anything that comes from my home net on port 80, so that they can ``transparently'' cache web requests based on the payload of those packets. The proxy seems to work rather well in most cases: I never noticed it until I started using OpenNIC. Then I found that some web pages that should have resolved OK through the OpenNIC system failed even though routing on different ports worked OK.

"I did some experimentation using ``telnet'' on port 80 directly, and found that packets are being routed based only on the payload regardless of the original destination address: I can (for example) retrieve the Slashdot front page by using ``telnet www.google.com 80'' and asking for "http://www.slashdot.org http/1.1". The tech support folks seem to be stonewalling me: the main contact tells me that the behavior is "not broken" even though it clearly violates RFC 1812, the standard set of rules for IP routing.

"The practice of ``transparent'' proxy routing seems to be growing more widespread. It appears to break the internet standard in a way that works for most folks for now, but that breaks port 80 usage in general. Looking ahead, this breakage seems like a growing nightmare waiting to happen. At the very least, I expect more instances of my particular problem to appear as folks give up on the corporate hegemony of ICANN. More insidiously, transparent proxy routers break the layered nature of the internet protocol and restrict the flexibility that made it work in the first place. One would hope that such proxies would at least act like routers when the fancier proxying fails, but at least my ISP's doesn't. What about your ISP's?"

According to an EFF press release (press release mirror) today, Karl Auerbach (the North American elected representative to ICANN's board) filed suit (petition mirror) today against ICANN itself to obtain financial and other records that he has been seeking to obtain since December 2000. As a bit of background, according to general summaries that ICANN has released, it now spends about $6 million per year (for a job that used to be done by volunteers); roughly half of all the money it spends goes to the law firm of Jones Day.

Pelerin writes "At its meeting in Ghana, ICANN has voted against the proposals made in the Final Report on ICANN At-Large Membership, which among other things proposed an At-Large Supporting Organization (ALSO), which would hold elections for At-Large seats on the ICANN board. Membership in ALSO would have been "based on individual domain name holders". In today's resolution ICANN says that it "is not persuaded that global elections are the only or the best means of achieving meaningful public representation or the informed participation of Internet users in the ICANN process" and proceeded to reject the proposals, while at the same time engaging in a bit of double-speak about its action according to dissenting board member Karl Auerbach. It looks like ICANN is leaning towards its presidents' reform proposal which argues that ICANN suffers from "Too Much Process" among other problems, and that seats on the board should be chosen by the board itself, from among nominations submitted by governments and a new Nominating Committee (NomCom)."

Pelerin writes "At its meeting in Ghana, ICANN has voted against the proposals made in the Final Report on ICANN At-Large Membership, which among other things proposed an At-Large Supporting Organization (ALSO), which would hold elections for At-Large seats on the ICANN board. Membership in ALSO would have been "based on individual domain name holders". In today's resolution ICANN says that it "is not persuaded that global elections are the only or the best means of achieving meaningful public representation or the informed participation of Internet users in the ICANN process" and proceeded to reject the proposals, while at the same time engaging in a bit of double-speak about its action according to dissenting board member Karl Auerbach. It looks like ICANN is leaning towards its presidents' reform proposal which argues that ICANN suffers from "Too Much Process" among other problems, and that seats on the board should be chosen by the board itself, from among nominations submitted by governments and a new Nominating Committee (NomCom)."

Pelerin writes "At its meeting in Ghana, ICANN has voted against the proposals made in the Final Report on ICANN At-Large Membership, which among other things proposed an At-Large Supporting Organization (ALSO), which would hold elections for At-Large seats on the ICANN board. Membership in ALSO would have been "based on individual domain name holders". In today's resolution ICANN says that it "is not persuaded that global elections are the only or the best means of achieving meaningful public representation or the informed participation of Internet users in the ICANN process" and proceeded to reject the proposals, while at the same time engaging in a bit of double-speak about its action according to dissenting board member Karl Auerbach. It looks like ICANN is leaning towards its presidents' reform proposal which argues that ICANN suffers from "Too Much Process" among other problems, and that seats on the board should be chosen by the board itself, from among nominations submitted by governments and a new Nominating Committee (NomCom)."

5arah writes: "ICANN is getting together to debate "plans that would help boost revenue to support the activities of the nonprofit Internet governing board, but would also decrease direct involvement by regular Internet users." What it really looks like is ICANN is restructuring its charter. The President of ICANN, Stuart Lynn, unveiled a proposal that cuts out Internet users from the ICANN board entirely and asks for government monetary support." I'd also like to remind people that the meetings are being webcast, and today's meeting is starting right when this story goes live. It's not exciting stuff - think "CSPAN" - but it is important stuff.

5arah writes: "ICANN is getting together to debate "plans that would help boost revenue to support the activities of the nonprofit Internet governing board, but would also decrease direct involvement by regular Internet users." What it really looks like is ICANN is restructuring its charter. The President of ICANN, Stuart Lynn, unveiled a proposal that cuts out Internet users from the ICANN board entirely and asks for government monetary support." I'd also like to remind people that the meetings are being webcast, and today's meeting is starting right when this story goes live. It's not exciting stuff - think "CSPAN" - but it is important stuff.

5arah writes: "ICANN is getting together to debate "plans that would help boost revenue to support the activities of the nonprofit Internet governing board, but would also decrease direct involvement by regular Internet users." What it really looks like is ICANN is restructuring its charter. The President of ICANN, Stuart Lynn, unveiled a proposal that cuts out Internet users from the ICANN board entirely and asks for government monetary support." I'd also like to remind people that the meetings are being webcast, and today's meeting is starting right when this story goes live. It's not exciting stuff - think "CSPAN" - but it is important stuff.

5arah writes: "ICANN is getting together to debate "plans that would help boost revenue to support the activities of the nonprofit Internet governing board, but would also decrease direct involvement by regular Internet users." What it really looks like is ICANN is restructuring its charter. The President of ICANN, Stuart Lynn, unveiled a proposal that cuts out Internet users from the ICANN board entirely and asks for government monetary support." I'd also like to remind people that the meetings are being webcast, and today's meeting is starting right when this story goes live. It's not exciting stuff - think "CSPAN" - but it is important stuff.

Froomkin writes: "ICANN CEO Stuart Lynn today released a plan for a "strong" ICANN that would have 5 of 15 Board members selected directly by governments and the rest by registrars, registries, plus a few Board-squatter-like ringers chosen by the ICANN Board or staff. The main justifications offered for this shift are that in order to be "strong" ICANN needs more money, more support, and less "process". Of course, promises Lynn, ICANN's "core values of openness and broad participation" should be "preserved". (Don't laugh. It's not funny.) "Meaningful participation" will be achieved by cutting out any direct representation for end-users. Oh yes, ICANN wants a much bigger budget, and to be independent of the US Dept. of Commerce, and to get direct control of the root server operators too, all so as to ensure that ICANN has unimpeded ability to execute its (undefined, growing) "mission". ICANN was supposed to save the Internet from governments; since major interest groups such as the ccTLDs and RIRs won't do what ICANN wants, and won't pay it, ICANN now turns to governments to save it from the Internet. See the Press Release here, and then look at entire plan, then visit ICANNWatch.org for updates and commentary." Yep. The proposal would eliminate any pretense of At-Large involvement in running ICANN - it would be solely a governmental and corporate body.

Froomkin writes: "ICANN CEO Stuart Lynn today released a plan for a "strong" ICANN that would have 5 of 15 Board members selected directly by governments and the rest by registrars, registries, plus a few Board-squatter-like ringers chosen by the ICANN Board or staff. The main justifications offered for this shift are that in order to be "strong" ICANN needs more money, more support, and less "process". Of course, promises Lynn, ICANN's "core values of openness and broad participation" should be "preserved". (Don't laugh. It's not funny.) "Meaningful participation" will be achieved by cutting out any direct representation for end-users. Oh yes, ICANN wants a much bigger budget, and to be independent of the US Dept. of Commerce, and to get direct control of the root server operators too, all so as to ensure that ICANN has unimpeded ability to execute its (undefined, growing) "mission". ICANN was supposed to save the Internet from governments; since major interest groups such as the ccTLDs and RIRs won't do what ICANN wants, and won't pay it, ICANN now turns to governments to save it from the Internet. See the Press Release here, and then look at entire plan, then visit ICANNWatch.org for updates and commentary." Yep. The proposal would eliminate any pretense of At-Large involvement in running ICANN - it would be solely a governmental and corporate body.

Froomkin writes: "ICANN CEO Stuart Lynn today released a plan for a "strong" ICANN that would have 5 of 15 Board members selected directly by governments and the rest by registrars, registries, plus a few Board-squatter-like ringers chosen by the ICANN Board or staff. The main justifications offered for this shift are that in order to be "strong" ICANN needs more money, more support, and less "process". Of course, promises Lynn, ICANN's "core values of openness and broad participation" should be "preserved". (Don't laugh. It's not funny.) "Meaningful participation" will be achieved by cutting out any direct representation for end-users. Oh yes, ICANN wants a much bigger budget, and to be independent of the US Dept. of Commerce, and to get direct control of the root server operators too, all so as to ensure that ICANN has unimpeded ability to execute its (undefined, growing) "mission". ICANN was supposed to save the Internet from governments; since major interest groups such as the ccTLDs and RIRs won't do what ICANN wants, and won't pay it, ICANN now turns to governments to save it from the Internet. See the Press Release here, and then look at entire plan, then visit ICANNWatch.org for updates and commentary." Yep. The proposal would eliminate any pretense of At-Large involvement in running ICANN - it would be solely a governmental and corporate body.

ddstreet writes: "ICANN now has a publicly-available At-Large survey that everyone should fill out. It basically only is to find out if people will pay a fee to be (or remain) an ICANN At-Large member. If you have disagreed with ICANN decisions in the past, you definately should fill this out to let them know you want to be (or remain) an ICANN member."

jeffy124 writes: "This article at ComputerWorld tells the story of how ICANN would like to replace the root DNS systems with secured servers. Lars-Johan Liman, one of the root operators, spoke about the concept at ICANN's annual meeting today. He discussed how the world's current redundant DNS system is vulnerable to DDOS attacks and yet-to-be-discovered root holes in bind that can ultimately undermine the entire Internet by taking away the name-IP mappings that are relied upon by just about everyone."

Cutriss writes: "The ICANN seems to be thinking about giving in to public demands. According to this article on Wired.com mentions that ICANN is considering allowing domain owners to elect their board of directors. It's a step in the right direction. I wonder if domain owners could collaborate and cast a collective vote of no confidence, absolving ICANN of its responsibilities..." I wouldn't call it a step in the right direction since each revision to ICANN's Board involves less individual representation and more corporate representatives. There's another story with some quotes from Karl Auerbach. The At-Large study that we talked about earlier has now been released in its final form. If you don't like the way ICANN is going, please consider attending their meetings. Next one is in Los Angeles next week.

Cutriss writes: "The ICANN seems to be thinking about giving in to public demands. According to this article on Wired.com mentions that ICANN is considering allowing domain owners to elect their board of directors. It's a step in the right direction. I wonder if domain owners could collaborate and cast a collective vote of no confidence, absolving ICANN of its responsibilities..." I wouldn't call it a step in the right direction since each revision to ICANN's Board involves less individual representation and more corporate representatives. There's another story with some quotes from Karl Auerbach. The At-Large study that we talked about earlier has now been released in its final form. If you don't like the way ICANN is going, please consider attending their meetings. Next one is in Los Angeles next week.

JoeGee writes: "Reuters is reporting that the quarterly meeting of ICANN got off to a very shaky start in Montevideo, Uruguay on Friday September 8th. Protesters claim that ICANN's domain registration policies are creating a "digital divide". A special telephone party line created for members who could not be present at the meeting went unused. ICANN seems to be internalizing the turmoil that has surrounded the non-profit corporation since its inception in 1998."

Dan Tobias and others wrote in about the disaster unfolding during the new registrations of .biz and .info domains. Both TLD's are - by mandate of ICANN - employing sunrise registrations where trademark holders can pre-register or reserve domain names that coincide with their trademarks. However, neither registry plans to check the validity of the asserted trademarks. Guess what? Most of the reservations in .info thus far appear to involve fictional trademark claims on highly generic words - I checked ten common words for trademark validity and was able to verify two and confirm that seven were completely invalid (.biz is doing things slightly differently, and will probably have fewer problems). The challenge process costs $300, so it's doubtful that most bogus registrations of non-trademarks will ever be challenged - register yours today, or just amuse yourself by checking common names. As usual, I should point out that if the root were run properly, allowing any TLD to be added, this squabbling over an artificially-limited resource would be eliminated.

Da_Big_G writes: "Newsbytes is carrying this story about how Verisign (owner of Network Solutions) is accusing other registrars (particularly register.com and Tucows/OpenSRS) of impropriety in transferring domains. This is in response to those registrar's complaints over Verisign's new transfer procedure which makes it nearly impossible to transfer a domain away from NetSlo." sally_tor supplied more URLs: Verisign's complaint letter, and a draft response in the making. So let's get this straight: Verisign charges 5 times more than other registrars do, provides much worse service (for instance, my preferred domain registrar provides DNS service, email redirection, prompt web-based changes - all for $12/year), is now interfering with transfers by requiring additional "confirmations" via a system that doesn't accept those confirmations, holds onto domain names after they expire so that it can a) sell the names themselves for inflated prices and b) sell the service of watching for the names to expire, and they have the gall to complain that people are leaving them for other registrars!

Contention writes: "The following policy was released by ICANN today (9th July), reiterating their commitment to 'A Unique, Authoritive Root for the DNS'. The document contains a stern warning to anyone '[working] under the philosophy that if they get there first with something that looks like a TLD and invite many registrants to participate, then ICANN will be required [...] to recognize in perpetuity these pseudo TLDs, inhibiting new TLDs with the same top-level name' while at the same time encouraging clearly marked, experimental alternate DNS roots." So ICANN says, unsurprisingly, that ICANN is needed to govern the domain system. Meanwhile, the Markle Foundation released a study of internet governance and accountability issues today. Read the study, or the NYT article about it.

MacRonin writes: "The ICANN Domain Names Supporting Organization (DNSO) is conducting a study of the Internet domain-name system's Whois system, which provides information about registrations of domain names. The DNSO invites you to participate by filling out the survey ... The questions are designed to focus on the purpose, use, and accuracy of the Whois service to establish the appropriate balance between competing interests. The comment period is open NOW until the 31st July 2001. ... Ever wish you could get them to not publish your phone number and address for the junk mail people to use?? Don't mind individual lookups, but bulk sale of the WHOIS data drives you batty. Now is your time to let them know how you feel. Just be polite so they will take you seriously."

MacRonin writes: "The ICANN Domain Names Supporting Organization (DNSO) is conducting a study of the Internet domain-name system's Whois system, which provides information about registrations of domain names. The DNSO invites you to participate by filling out the survey ... The questions are designed to focus on the purpose, use, and accuracy of the Whois service to establish the appropriate balance between competing interests. The comment period is open NOW until the 31st July 2001. ... Ever wish you could get them to not publish your phone number and address for the junk mail people to use?? Don't mind individual lookups, but bulk sale of the WHOIS data drives you batty. Now is your time to let them know how you feel. Just be polite so they will take you seriously."