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World Summit On The Internet And IT
eegad writes "The Seattle PI reports on the upcoming first phase of the World Summit on the Information Society to be held in Geneva on December 10-12. 192 nations are involved in the effort to set some ground rules for the Internet (a little late, eh?) including ways to deal with spam, a possible "digital solidarity fund" to help developing nations, and discussion of UN regulation. The goal of this phase is to adopt a "Declaration of Principles" and "Plan of Action". Some countries plan on asking for a UN commission to study new ways of running the Internet aimed at the 2005 phase. The official website will provide coverage of the event. How come I wasn't invited?" The Washington Times also has a piece on it, as well. We had covered this a bit before.
Stay the fuck away from my Internet.
That said...
It might be nice to encourage people to use bittorrent to download porn. The bandwidth savings would be akin to quadrupling router capacity across the Net.
Or, maybe fix email by requiring everybody to send ciphered messages only. Require/encourage mail servers to permit a user to provide it a gateway public/private key through which all incoming email must satisfy (not the same as your personal public/private key.) Solve spam and nine-tenths of Echelon with one single kick in the balls.
Then, get over this self-inflicted trauma over raw sockets. Raw sockets are cool. Raw sockets + UDP can all but eliminate the nastier p2p problems, like how to work through firewalls, as well as how to send data anonymously. These are good things. Let good people do good things with good technology.
But we can do all of these things through education. We don't need the UN/Geneva/Britney Spears to tell us how this whole thing should work.
Is this truly the only Earth I can live on?
Actually, given the probable means of applying the death penalty in Nigeria (stoning), combined with the Nigerian government's efforts to crack down on 419 scams, I rather hope Nigeria *does* have a big say at the conference... I'll be right at the front of the queue for a bag of gravel, and some nice pointy rocks when the first spammers get marched out.
UNIX? They're not even circumcised! Savages!
"...Carlos Achiary, national director of Information Technology Argentina, said many governments are frustrated because the Internet is having a tremendous effect in their countries, but they have no place to submit their requests, complaints or suggestions...." /dev/null anyone?
I have family living in B.A. - I visited Arg. for a few weeks last November. After looking at miles of black and white marble columns and hand-worked wrought-iron that enclosed their WATER PROCESSING PLANT in B.A. - I felt no pity for the bureaucrats at this service arm who now cry poor. The unabashed "we are Euro, ergo better than the rest of [south] America, so let's have palacial water plants..." The whole place was shocking. (parts beautiful, yes) But the officials I met.... inept, corrupt, nepitistic, backwards - maybe they should get their house in order before looking to "suggest" some of their 'winning insight' to the rest of us.
(did you hear about the folks of B.A. suing a new (chilean owned) utility that, after months of written warnings removed the power-leacher-wires from the poles? Yep, they had the audacity to sue the company for cutting them off b/c they'd tapped in illegally. It's still in the courts, the folks there think "it is our right to have electricity" - just as it is this guys' "right" to have a say on riding coat-tails.)
build something, contribute, dont' back-street drive.
If she floats, she's a witch.