No Such Weblog

On its conference call earlier tonight, the GNSO Council re-elected Alejandro Pisanty to the board, with the votes of all council members who attended the call.Besides that, the council discussed various procedural issues, and approved the proposed time lines for the WHOIS Task Forces. These time lines now need to be approved by the board — a good example for the unhealthy board-and-bylaws micro-management that the new PDP has brought to the GNSO.Discussion of substantive issues was essentially deferred to Rome. There, the GNSO will hold workshops on all ongoing policy-development processes.MP3 recording here.

After last night’s blog spam attack has painfully exposed the lack of rate limiting in the version of movable type that I was using (and the lack of resource limits on my web server), I’ve gotten a little paranoic about my web server logs. One particularly remarkable feature that only seems to show up quite recently consists in “random” user-agent strings; there are numerous queries of this kind from a relatively small number of IP addresses, apparently DSL-connected machines.It’s relatively obvious that some kind of robot is behind this — does anyone have an idea what’s going on here, or does this sound familiar in any way?Later: Things should be somewhat more robust now. Resource limits are in place, the back-end has moved to MySQL, and blog items are automatically closed for comment after seven days.

WHOIS Task Force #2 (review of data elements collected and displayed) is still looking for input. Only few responses have been received so far.Input will continue to be useful when submitted this week. The plan is to have a report on the input collected ready by Rome.

The Washington Post reports that Sunday’s British Airways flight 223 from London to Dulles has been canceled again; the Department for Homeland Security says that cancellations for security reasons are going to be routine activities.The article has two quotes, though, that sound like BA believes their flights are being cancelled because of false positives: (1) The airline was able to accommodate all of the 184 passengers scheduled for Sunday’s flight to Washington on its two other daily flights from London to Dulles or at later dates. (2) British Airways officials, concerned that the focus on the flight has something to do with its number, are discussing whether to change the number or slightly alter the departure time, an aviation source said.Assume there’s really a terrorist that wants to board that flight. Then that terrorist isn’t a danger on one of the other flights the same day? And that terrorist isn’t a danger when the flight is given a different number, or the departure time is slightly altered?

Seems like someone complained to the bugtraq moderators about this message, claiming that it was spam, presumably abusing my e-mail address. Of course, the message was indeed legitimate, it was indeed sent by me, and it was not fake.

Washington Post, VeriSign Reconsiders Search Service (TechNews.com): Stratton Sclavos, chief executive of VeriSign Inc., told investors in a conference call last month that the company might relaunch its “Site Finder” service as early as April.(Link credit: IP.)

Implementation of the transfers consensus policy is getting closer; an update with a proposed implementation has been posted to ICANN’s web site. There’ll now be a two-week comment period for registrars, registries, and — through ALAC — the public at large. For details, see alac.info.(That said, it was a pleasure to serve on the Transfers Assistance Group that drafted the proposed implementation.)

The written testimony from yesterday’s WHOIS hearing is now available online: Timothy Trainer, J. Scott Evans, Rick Wesson, Fraudit Info Sheet submitted by Mr. Wesson, Mark BohannonRick Wesson, by the way, indeed testified what I thought I heared yesterday: I do support the proposed legislation as a step forward and hope it will deter those intent on registering domains with fraudulent contact data. While it might indeed have a deterrent effect, we cannot solely rely on industry regulation to prevent false and invalid registrant data from entering the Whois database. … Please add a requirement that registrars be involved in validating a potentially accurate representation of those they register. Don稚 miss this opportunity to evolve the Internet beyond the wild, wild west toward the safety of any civilized community.

As Kris Köhntopp points out over and over again, file sharing can give consumers a level of comfort and value that money, unfortunately, can’t buy these days.A friend points me to a great recording of Brahms’ German Requiem (Leinsdorf with the Boston Symphony). I want to buy that recording as a christmas gift for my father — it’s not available on this side of the Atlantic, I’m told.I order the sound track for Chicago (dozed through the movie on a trans-Atlantc flight some time ago, still want to get the sound track) from Amazon — it’s three weeks and counting now, and I was just told that it may take some more weeks.Add to this Kris’ observation that CDs often come with copy protection mechanisms these days which aren’t effective against determined attackers, but can break players; that digital music is either unavailable legally, or DRMed to the extent that it’s not portable across player platforms (and technology generations); add to this that MP3s are not so encumbered.Then, why on earth, should people pay money to be allowed to wait a month for a product that may quite well be inferior to what’s available almost freely and almost immediately, can be used across platforms, and is available in formats that are suitable for long-time archival?

Some preliminary notes from listening to the WHOIS hearing’s live webcast: Testimonial was heared from Tim Trainer (IACC), J Scott Evans (INTA; former GNSO Council member and IPC chair), Rick Wesson (registrar constituency CTO), and Mark Bohannon (Copyright Coalition on Domain Names). All witnesses supported the bill.

Besides the usual “whois is important” statements, Rick Wesson testified about his fraudit system, and pointed out that registrars have no business incentives to verify contact data supplied to them as long as they are paid. He seemed to suggest that additional lelgislation was needed in order to create such incentives. (I may have mis-heared him on that point, though.)

J Scott Evans repeatedly said that ICANN efforts on WHOIS accuracy were busy discussing procedure, not substance. I wonder how he came to that conclusion — Task Force 3 is, after all, chaired by a member of the IPC, and (I’m hearing) currently attempting to reach out and collect input on available accuracy verification mechanisms. Outreach seems stalled, though, because relevant contact information is lacking.I’m planning to re-listen to the webcast once it’s available; I may have more then.