Month: September 2003

Heise online reports about a judgment from a Hamburg court that would limit the availability of .ag domain names in Germany to “Aktiengesellschaften” (abbreviated AG), the equivalent of a corporation.

From NANOG: During the root zone (.) update later today, specifically with root zone serial number 2003090501, the entries for .org will be modified. Effective with the 2003090501 load, the entry will reflect the removal of the Verisign NSTLD.COM nameservers. The .org zone file will continue to be pushed to the Verisign nameservers for a short period of time.

The written testimony for yesterday’s WHOIS hearing is now available from the web page of the subcommittee on courts, the Internet, and intellectual property: Metalitz; Edelman; Farnan (FBI); Kassinger (DoC).

Florian Hitzelberger has interviewed Sabine Dolderer (.de; Google translation) on a number of topics, including ICANN reform — There is no new era. ICANN 2.0 is just presenting itself in a more friendly way than ICANN 1.0. –; ccNSO and the question whether .de will join — We’re currently assessing whether the possible benefits of joining the ccNSO would outweigh the problems. The problem is, we don’t find such benefits. –; possible government control over .de; whether or not .de will adopt the UDRP — There’s neither a reason, nor demand for doing this. –; international uniform WHOIS policies — A globally uniform policy would fail due to divergent privacy laws. –; and a host of other topics. Worth reading.

Heise reports (in German) about a preliminary injunction by a court in Hamburgt which found “be-mobile.de” to be confusingly similar to “t-mobile.de”, since both domain names sound similar. Previously, a lower court that apparently focused on the written form of the domain names had found no confusing similarity, and had not granted the injunction. Further discussion (in German).

Not ICANN-related, but aggregator-related: Library Stuff reports that My Yahoo now has a really nice RSS aggregator module. Current bugs mostly look like they’ll be fixed quickly: Currently, that aggregator can’t deal with description-only feeds (like Scripting News or (void *)), and it seems to have problems to properly digest time stamps in “non-funky” Userland or Blogware feeds. “Funky” Movable Type blogs work perfectly, though.

Here are the scripts that I use to send out daily “CVS repository changes” messages to the mutt-dev mailing list. Terse documentation inside.

A brief remark I wrote two years ago — I can’t access msn.com any more; MSN displayed a stupid IE advertising page for users of Mozilla and similar browsers back then — is gaining unexpected popularity thanks to Google. I can’t access MSN seems to be a common query there today — kind of comical, given MSN’s ambitions to compete with Google.(Maybe these people are looking for this information.)

Karl Auerbach (who doesn’t seem to believe in trackback) responds to yesterday’s notes on representativity, and tries to figure out what I meant.

Vittorio Bertola looks at the possible ways in which the ALAC could focus its work, and implicitly takes up some recent criticism.