No Such Weblog

While in Boston two weeks ago, I walked along the “Freedom Trail” and also visited the USS Constitution — a strange superposition of a commissioned warship, a national park, and a well-guarded national symbol. While Freedom Trail’s red trace runs straight to the ship, visitors have to pass by blocks of concrete, an armed soldier standing by a camouflage colored Hummer, and finally through security screening: Empty all pockets, remove the belts, and have some Navy soldiers hand-search all bags — while here is a metal detector gate in place, no x-ray device is available.These hand-searches are, on the one hand, intimidating, and ineffective on the other hand: The soldier who searched my laptop bag (used for tourist equipment that day), for instance, would play around with my mobile phone — apparently, he hadn’t seen a Siemens SL55 before –, but would both miss the front compartment of the bag, and the Palm in the main compartment, which — in a consistent security control — should have warranted the same kind of inspection as the mobile phone.Ultimately, one has to wonder what the actual point of this kind of control is, and what kind of attack model is behind it. Terrorists hijacking the Constitution and using it to attack the Fleet Center?Looks a lot like security theater to me.

The group of people formerly known as WHOIS Task Forces 1 & 2 met today for its first two-hour conference call after Council’s decision to formally merge the groups. The group received a briefing on what happened in KL, spent too much time on debating whether the two Task Force chairs should continue as co-chairs (they will do so), and finally addressed “prioritizing.”

On the GNSO Council list, Bruce Tonkin gives his summary of the WHOIS-related meetings from KL.According to Tonkin, there was agreement that priority be given to recommendations that can be implemented on a time scale of months, not years, and that the task forces start designing “reference implementations” for these policies, taking care of concerns about implementability, and enabling a cost assessment.The merged Task Forces 1 + 2 will have their next conference call Tuesday next week.

I’m sitting at Boston’s Logan airport’s Terminal E, and have been sitting here for too many hours now: My flight back across the Atlantic, NW 38, is delayed by no less than five hours. At check-in (where they could not accept checked luggage for the moment, because the transport tape was broken), I was told that the flight would be delayed by one hour, and would be operated by a KLM 747 instead the scheduled NW DC-10. Boarding passess were issued for the 747, of course. At the scheduled time of departure, we were told that, unfortunately, they had no crew for that KLM 747 waiting at the gate. Now, nine out of ten crew members are allegedly here, and (breaking news) a DC-10 has landed.By courtesy of NW’s unfriendly and arrogant personnel (what’s a five-hour delay for a six-hour flight, after all?), passengers were offered $10 in food vouchers as consolation for making an already-unpleasant red-eye even worse. Non-McDonalds dinner around here costs $20.Later, from Schiphol: NW 38 arrived in Amsterdam 6 hours late. KLM distributed 10､ food vouchers and a 50､ voucher to be used for future KLM flights (as if). They weren’t even willing to exchange that voucher for lounge access, which is worth 45､. “Lounges are not intended for service recovery.” The story behind the delay appears to be that the originally-planned DC-10 (the last of these machines were built in 1989) had maintenance problems in Amsterdam, and was replaced by the KLM 747 we saw. Unfortunately, nobody paid attention to the need for a crew that was able to operate the machine on the way back from Boston. So they brought another DC-10 from Memphis, and that’s the machine in which I spent last night.

The GNSO Council met in KL today; I’ve been watching part of the webcast. Vittorio Bertola was sitting on the podium for ALAC. During the part of the discussion I followed, Council agreed to merge WHOIS Task Forces one and two; Task Force three will continue to operate independently.On the .net redelegation process, Council suprisingly asked for comments from the floor, unfortunately without providing a meaningful opportunity for submitting remote comments. Bruce Tonkin plans to arrange for an opportunity for comment at the public forum, though.Jeff Neuman (Neulevel) and Chuck Gomes (Verisign) commented today. Among the things that were said, I found Chuck Gomes’ statement that retail prices for domain names are not correlated to registry-level pricing particularly fascinating; he sold this as a mathematical truth. I’d just love to see the proof for that.

I have registered several does-not-exist.* domain names. The people at nameauditors.com now let me know — by unsolicited e-mail to my WHOIS contact mail address — that does-not-exist.com has recently been dropped by its holder. While that’s true, I still count this one as another illegitimate use of my personal data as stored in the WHOIS database.Later: noncore.com is joining the club.

Susan Crawford is on the way to KL, and promises to send a report when she’s there. I’m looking forward to reading it, and hope for more news and observations from the meetings.I won’t attend the ICANN meetings this time, due to a clash with unrelated travel plans. So, no blogging from KL in this place.

From ICANN’s web page: Motion to dismiss; Renewed Motion to Strike.

This comment at ICANNwatch points out that there are two ccTLD agendas for the ICANN meetings in KL: ccTLD ICANN meetings in Kuala Lumpur (wwtld.org), ccNSO meeting agenda (icann.org).

… then make sure that you don’t have a confirmation request from ICANN sitting in your spam folder. That’s what happened to ALAC’s comments to WHOIS Task Force 3 which now have finally made it to the public comment archives.(To be a little more precise: The confirmation request was caught by a rule intended to catch delivery notifications generated in response to fake e-mails. My main address normally doesn’t get e-mail from mailer daemons, so these are discarded automatically.)