No Such Weblog

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.

Writes Dave Wiener: After the recent email meltdown, I didn’t send today’s DaveNet out via email. He might have given up on e-mail — but why force others who are able to cope with its problems to give up on it, too? RSS might be a good additional offer for making content available. But for many things, it can’t replace e-mail.

(void *) (it’s pronounced “elsewhere”) is where I’m going to post those short little links without much of a comment. The main purpose of that blog is to make an RSS feed available which can be syndicated into the side bar of this one.

ALAC proudly presents: alac.info (aka: Blogging At Large), the committee weblog. The hope is that we can turn this into a place where you can regularly find first-hand notes from committee members on current topics.Of course, alac.info has the blogging software’s comment feature enabled, so please feel free to let us know your views.