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Domain: itu.org

Stories and comments across the archive that link to itu.org.

Comments · 6

  1. It is going to get worse, not better by geekwithsoul · · Score: 1 · on First Hand Look At Chinese Internet Censorship

    Take a look at the UN sponsored (and ITU run) initiative called the "World Summit on the Information Society [WSIS]. This is the group that is looking to replace ICANN.

    They have a working group called the "Working Group on Internet Governance" [WGIG] that is proposing IP address allocation by country. The stated reason is that it would be more "fair" but in truth, this would put control over the access to information in the hands of those we should distrust the most.

    What happens when you're a dissident in China (or gasp! the U.S) and can't even get an IP address? You won't even be able to "roll your own" as it were because it won't be routed.

    Yes, blocking access to websites and online content is bad, but giving governments direct control over IP addressing would be like them owning printing presses 230+ years ago. Not only would you not be able to read content, you wouldn't even be able to publish content without being on your government's good side.

  2. Sounds like an effort towards standardisation. by toesate · · Score: 0, Troll · on EU and US Agree on Galileo
    Under the terms of the agreement, the two sides agreed on key points including:

    - a common signal structure for so-called "open" services, and a suitable signal structure for the Galileo Public Regulated Service (PRS).

    - a process allowing improvements, either jointly or individually, of the baseline signal structures in order to further improve performances.

    - confirmation of inter-operable time and standards to facilitate the joint use of GPS and Galileo.

    This sounds like an effort towards standardisation. Something the EU and the rest of the world are pretty good at.

    See ITU and 3GPP. And of course IETF. ;)

    It is good to see that US is seeing the values and benefits of standardisation.

  3. Re:ISO is not alone by at10u8 · · Score: 1 · on W3C Objects To Royalties On ISO Country Codes

    In the same class is the ITU who have a similar model of charging. Among their standards is ITU-R TF.460 which defines coordinated Universal time (UTC). If you've ever wondered why leap seconds are so poorly implemented by your computer, this proprietary standard is part of the reason. It is evident that the original authors of the POSIX standard had not read it before they declared that a Unix time_t should indicate time in UTC.

  4. UN convening world conf on ICT and development by rikomatic · · Score: 1 · on UN Recommends WiFi for Poor Countries
    Kofi's remarks are only the preface for broader political debate on the relationship of ICTs to development.

    In December, the UN is convening the first ever world conference on the impact of ICTs on development, culture, and society called World Summit on the Information Society. It will take place in Geneva.

    As one of the reps for a non-governmental organization participating in the preparation for this summit, I know very well the background behind the calling for this meeting. It's an interesting melange of interests. Some developing countries, particularly from Africa, look to ICTs as a way to "leapfrog" their development forward, and thus are looking for increased investments and development aid in this area. Corporations are looking to create the infrastructure so that they can operate effectively in those countries and access their markets. Aid agencies and aid-giving governments (like Japan, Switzerland, Nordic countries) want to see their loans and grants put to more effective use.

    The US's sole interest so far has been protecting the existing intellectual property system from being reviewed and trying to keep out any references to the US govt's "Total Information Awareness" program and other hyper-surveillance activities.

  5. Re:Non-US People by the_great_being · · Score: 1 · on US Govt Wants to Control ICANN?

    Another (better?) idea: Why shouldn't the US take control of ICANN and then "donate" it to the ITU? This way it would be in the hands of an international organisation and couldn't be easily influenced by corporate and governmental interests. (Also I have to admit that the ICANN might start to suffer from bureaucracy then)

  6. H.263 vs MPEG4 - latency vs. compression quality by klapton · · Score: 5, Interesting · on Beyond The Cell -- Journalists' Video Phone

    First off, I watched one of the news reports via videophone and I was quite impressed by the audio clarity and the video quality. M$'s NetMeeting can't even compare at the same data rate.
    MPEG4 is an outgrowth of H.263.
    The reason H.263 is chosen over MPEG4 and other similar streaming codecs is because the latency from video capture to transmission of the encoded image is better under H.263. During some informal testing, latency of H.263 video conferencing on a LAN was well under 2 seconds. The best I could do with Real's RealProducer using their G2 codec was around 4-5 seconds. The best I could do with Microsoft's Media Encoder with the MPEG4 codec was around 7-10 seconds.
    Because of the way that MPEG2 and MPEG4 take advantage of the time domain to achieve higher compression also makes them unsuitable for 'live' 2-way video.
    Here are some links to chew on:
    http://myhome.hananet.net/~soonjp/vclinux.html
    http://archive.dstc.edu.au/RDU/staff/jane-hunter/v ideo-streaming.html
    http://mpeg.telecomitalialab.com/
    The H.263 spec is available at http://www.itu.org for a fee.