No Such Weblog

Mailing list discussion about the search against the JAP anonymizing proxy is taking off on FITUG’s debate mailing list; a quickly-updated unofficial archive is here.

I just trackback-spammed another weblog, inadvertently: Movable Type believed the ping was unsuccessful when it had been successful, and trackback autodiscovery kept adding the URL to the list of sites to be pinged. I’ve now turned off track-back autodiscovery.Feature wish for Movable Type: Dedupe trackback pings.

The battle about the JAP anonymizing proxy continues: After a decision of the Lower District Court in Frankfurt to add surveillance features to the system had been suspended by the District court (details; code is law analysis), German federal police obtained a search warrant from the Lower District Court last Friday. The data captured while the surveillance measures were in place (a single record was collected) were turned over to police during a search conducted Saturday. The Lower District Court’s decision to issue the search warrant is believed to be illegal, and will be taken to a higher court. In particular, there was no obligation to turn over the data until a final decision is reached on the legality of the original surveillance measures.Press release: German / English

Ian Clarke — founder of the Freenet project — is planning to leave the US. GrepLaw serial interviewer Mikael Pawlo has talked to him.

A large collection of documents related to communications interception (and its implementation), air line passenger data transfer, and related topics has made it to the web.

Via EUpolitix.com: European commissioner with responsibility for data protection Frits Bolkestein will tell colleagues that the EU has failed to obtain key safeguards on information European air carriers are compelled to give to the US authorities.

Via Dave Farber’s IP list: Reporters sans fronti鑽es has published a worldwide press freedom index that attempts to assess the actual freedom of the press throughout the globe. Surprisingly, the US is only on place 17 — behind much of the EU, Canada, and even Costa Rica.

Alexander Svensson notes that .kids.us is going to be launched on Thursday. He takes a critical look (in German) at some of the questions that a kid-safe domain will have to face: Kid-safe content is a relative notion; a movie that’s R-rated in the US can be considered harmless here. Also, the policies in place in .kids.us are so restrictive that the only content available is non-interactive, static, and un-linked. “Families would probably be better off with a CD-ROM with kid-safe content”, Alexander writes.While the objections are well-taken, I have a problem with his final conclusion, that not delegating .kids in 2000 may have been the best decision ICANN has ever made. On the merits, he’s right. But should ICANN look at these merits? Shouldn’t it have permitted a .kids domain, and let it fail?

Via CircleID comes a pointer to Bob Frankston’s essay Implementing .DNS: We’re selling numbers. Big numbers and we promise that we’ll never sell the same number twice. The benefits: Stable URLs that don’t suddenly point to unrelated content, and domain names that come without semantic connotations and all the baggage these bring into the game.

The Hulk wasn’t as successful as anticipated due to illegal copies of an early version that made it to the Internet — at least that’s what a report on German TV tonight wanted to make viewers believe, in the context of some IP-perspective reporting about our localized version of the DMCA. I don’t buy that propaganda, though: The cinema trailer I saw earlier this year was certainly enough to keep me from watching that film.