Month: August 2002

Bret Fausett, who is a member of the Names Policy Development Process Advisory Group, has posted some comments on that group’s current work.

You may have noticed that strange link to Jabba’s Trashcan. As you certainly have guessed, Jabba is a spam trap. I set it up last Thursday. The address was published in two ways: First, it’s included on that ugly web page, as a mailto link. Second, I went to the “remove” forms of some spams I regularly get, and entered Jabba’s address. Guess what, the first real spam to that address arrived on Saturday. Quite frankly, I knew things are bad, but this is really faster than I expected.

The DNSO has started the nomination process to find candidates for a successor for current ICANN director Alejandro Pisanty, whose tenure ends in September. The nomination process will be followed by a period of time during which GA members may endorse candidates. Ultimately, the Names Council will select the new board member.

One reader of the WHOIS Task Force’s report sent me a private comment about the statitsical considerations section of that report, pointing out that there is no reason to suppose that the statistics of a self-selected sample can be modeled by a Gaussion or any other random model. This is, of course, true: The fact that the respondents were self-selected can add any systematic bias, and we don’t know what that bias looks like. However, we know that this bias makes the results worse. Thus, error margins derived from a random model underestimate the errors. Put differently: If you couldn’t derive a conclusion assuming the sample is random, you certainly can’t derive it when the results come from a self-selected sample.

Don’t link to us is a blog worth an occasional look if you want to see how (big!) businesses are trying to make their own websites useless by nonsensical legal restrictions. The point of the site: Linking to stupid linking policies, blogging the unbloggable sites.

The DNSO’s WHOIS Task Force is taking comments on its report until August 14. The comments should be sent to <comments-whois@dnso.org>. They are archived on the DNSO web site.

The DNSO secretariat has posted draft minutes of the Names Council’s August 1 telephone conference.

The folks at ICANNatlarge.com have elected a new panel: Vittorio Bertola, Vivek Durai, Michael Geist, Satyajit Gupta, Richard Henderson, Hans Klein, Joanna Lane, James Love, Jefsey Morfin, Judith Oppenheimer, and YJ Park. The full results of the vote are going to be published on the DNSO web site.

John Berryhill has posted a pointer to patent applications by SnapNames. William Walsh says that he has prior art dating back to 1999.

The patent applications: Domain name acquisition and management system and method; Registry-integrated internet domain name acquisition system.

Over the week, there were some more WLS-related news showing up which I didn’t link to so far:

• Tucows posted a response to Susan Crawford’s comments. (Random Bytes)
• CENTR and Verisign sent a letter to the US Department of Commerce; David McGuire reports. (icann.Blog)
• Some US senators express their concern about ICANN trying to control the price of monopoly services. (icann.Blog)