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Nelly Kroes, a member of the EU Commission, and its current Vice President, comments on her blog:

• she lauds the multi stakeholder model, the attention to conflicts of interest, and the mention of the public interest;
• she does say "The contract is still not perfect; for example, it’s still restricted to US companies, which is a shame given that the Internet is a resource for the whole world";
• and she concludes "this is a big step forward in ensuring a fairer, global, transparently-governed Internet".

Solicitation Number: SA1301-12-RP-IANA
Notice Type: Combined Synopsis/Solicitation
Synopsis: Added: Nov 10, 2011 6:59 pm
November 10, 2011

SUBJECT: Request for Proposal (RFP) SA1301-12-RP-IANA

Dear Interested Offerors:

The United States Department of Commerce (DoC), National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA) intends to award a contract to maintain the continuity and stability of services related to certain interdependent Internet technical management functions, known collectively as the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority (IANA).

The anticipated period of performance of this contract is April 1, 2012 - March 31, 2015.

This solicitation utilizes a Statement of Work (SOW). The SOW describes the work in terms of the required results and reduces the inherent instructions regarding "how" to accomplish the work.

Please send questions regarding the solicitation electronically via email to mdunn@doc.gov. All written questions must be received no later than 4PM Eastern Standard Time, November 18, 2011.

The closing date for receipt of proposals is 4PM Eastern Standard Time, December 12, 2011.

Thank you in advance and we look forward to reviewing your responses to this RFP!

1. SF33 Page 1
2. RFP SA1301-12-RP-IANA Pages 2-34
3. RFP SA1301-12-RP-IANA Pages 35-66

Sarko has already won next year's presidential election, as Holland is channeling, through Pierre Moscovici, that "François Hollande a pris un engagement que je redis ici : s'il est élu président de la République, nous ferons l'EPR de Flamanville" and "Nous ferons Flamanville, c'est une décision de François Hollande, c'est un acte de fermeté, c'est une position de principe, à condition bien sûr qu'il n'y ait pas de problème de sécurité".

Joining Moscovici are Michel Rocard and Arnaud Montebourg, and the Mouvement Républicain et Citoyen (MRC) candidate, Jean-Pierre Chevènement.

The narrow defeat of Martine Aubry, who championed the 35 hour work-week, spreading millions of jobs rather than creating mass unemployment, and universal medical coverage rather than maintaining structural illness and ill-health, by the "centerist" Hollande, in the PS primary, was unfortunate.

47% of the French electorate is now concerned about the fundamental safety of nukes, up from 45% at the start of the year.

A good candidate prevails.

Re: a student critique of his intro class -- here and here.

A contributing factor was a bug in JunOS 10.4, which responded to a broadcast BGP route with an invalid attribute by restarting BGP sessions or dumping core and crashing. Joy!

A summary is available here: Time Warner Cable outage traced to Level 3 router glitch and the vendor note follows in gory detail.
1. View Bulletin PSN-2011-08-327
2. Title MX Series MPC crash in Ktree::createFourWayNode after BGP UPDATE
3. Products Affected This issue can affect any MX Series router with port concentrators based on the Trio chipset -- such as the MPC or embedded into the MX80 -- with active protocol-based route prefix additions/deletions occurring.
4. Platforms Affected
5. Security
6. JUNOS 11.x
7. MX-series
8. JUNOS 10.x
9. SIRT Security Advisory
10. SIRT Security Notice
11. Revision Number 1
12. Issue Date 2011-08-08
13.
14. PSN Issue :
15. MPCs (Modular Port Concentrators) installed in an MX Series router may crash upon receipt of very specific and unlikely route prefix install/delete actions, such as a BGP routing update. The set of route prefix updates is non-deterministic and exceedingly unlikely to occur. Junos versions affected include 10.0, 10.1, 10.2, 10.3, 10.4 prior to 10.4R6, and 11.1 prior to 11.1R4. The trigger for the MPC crash was determined to be a valid BGP UPDATE received from a registered network service provider, although this one UPDATE was determined to not be solely responsible for the crashes. A complex sequence of preconditions is required to trigger this crash. Both IPv4 and IPv6 routing prefix updates can trigger this MPC crash.
16.
17. There is no indication that this issue was triggered maliciously. Given the complexity of conditions required to trigger this issue, the probability of exploiting this defect is extremely low.
18.
19. The assertions (crash) all occurred in the code used to store routing information, called Ktree, on the MPC. Due to the order and mix of adds and deletes to the tree, certain combinations of address adds and deletes can corrupt the data structures within the MPC, which in turn can cause this line card crash. The MPC recovers and returns to service quickly, and without operator intervention.
20.
21. This issue only affects MX Series routers with port concentrators based on the Trio chipset, such as the MPC or embedded into the MX80. No other product or platform is vulnerable to this issue.
22.
23. Solution:
24. The Ktree code has been updated and enhanced to ensure that combinations and permutations of routing updates will not corrupt the state of the line card. Extensive testing has been performed to validate an exceedingly large combination and permutation of route prefix additions and deletions.
25.
26. All Junos OS software releases built on or after 2011-08-03 have fixed this specific issue. Releases containing the fix specifically include: 10.0S18, 10.4R6, 11.1R4, 11.2R1, and all subsequent releases (i.e. all releases built after 11.2R1).
27.
28. This issue is being tracked as PR 610864. While this PR may not be viewable by customers, it can be used as a reference when discussing the issue with JTAC.
29.
30. KB16765 - "In which releases are vulnerabilities fixed?" describes which release vulnerabilities are fixed as per our End of Engineering and End of Life support policies.
31.
32. Workarounds
33. No known workaround exists for this issue.

via TeleGeography's CommsUpdate for today (8 November 2011).

According to ComputerWorld NZ, Te Huarahi Tika Trust has revealed its commercial arm, Hautaki Trust, has borrowed NZD2.6 million (USD2.07 million) from 2degrees’s majority shareholder Trilogy International Partners to maintain its minor stake in New Zealand’s third largest mobile operator. The information was included in the Trust’s annual report, released last week. Previously, during the twelve months ended 31 December 2010, Seattle-based Trilogy, which has a handful of investments in telecoms companies around the world, increased its own majority control to 58%; in February 2010 Trilogy gained Overseas Investment Office approval to take 100% control of 2degrees should the circumstances arise.
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Interest on the loan, which is repayable in five years, is set at 10.5%. Further, the loan is secured by ‘the shares acquired from borrowed funds plus an equal number of existing shares’. The Trust’s accounts reportedly show that the book value of the Trust’s shareholding in 2degrees rose from NZD8.87 million in 2010 to NZD11.47 million, but 2degrees director and Hautaki Trust board member Bill Osborne said the value of shares was shown at cost in the accounts, admitting: ‘They are already worth a lot more than the first lot that we paid for … At the moment the asset is just sitting in the share register, you only know the value of it when you sell it’. When questioned how the new shares will eventually be paid for, Osborne commented: ‘It’s an issue that the trust has on the table. The plan is to get more Maori involved in shareholding. One of the objectives from the get go was to get Maori more involved in the telecommunications industry and one of the ways of doing that is to get them owning shares’. Since 31 March 2011 the Hautaki Trust has subscribed to a further 4,185,752 shares in 2degrees, bringing its holding in its own right to 4.72%. However, the trust also provides ‘custodial services’ in respect of a further 19,498,240 shares on behalf of other Maori groups, bringing the total Maori shareholding in 2degrees to 10.5%.
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According to TeleGeography’s GlobalComms Database, in early 2001 Hautaki (part of the Maori Spectrum Trust) was awarded both GSM and 3G frequencies. It went on to form a partnership with South Africa-based mobile group Econet Wireless International under the name Econet Wireless New Zealand (EWNZ). Plans for a quick launch failed to materialise however, with the cellco claiming it was being restricted by New Zealand’s unhelpful regulatory environment. Several name changes later, GSM services were finally inaugurated in August 2009.

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One of the striking differences in the conceptualization of "treaty rights" between the North American common law legal regimes and the New Zealand common law legal regime is that under the former, particularly Canada, define "treaty right" to the material cultural at the point of epigraphic contact. Indians didn't have radios, so Indians have no share in radio spectrum. Not the case under the terms of the Treaty of Waitangi (Waitangi Tribunal Site(.

This para made me chuckle:

... I can set to one side three of the components of the [Obama Jobs] program: extension of unemployment benefits, tax credits for employers who hire the unemployed, and financial assistance in refinancing home mortgages—the estimated cost of these three programs is $72 billion. They are losers. Extending unemployment benefits, while it will increase the income of the recipients, and in that respect have an effect similar [to] that a tax credit or refund could be expected to have on people who pay income taxes, will actually reduce the hiring of the unemployed by reducing the cost to them of remaining unemployed; generally, the intensity of job search by unemployed persons surges when unemployment benefits are about to run out, and that date will be postponed for the recipient of the extended benefits.

The inference that households that lost one (or more) incomes 6 to 18 months ago did not, and will not, pay income taxes adds to this gem, along with the apparent necessity of using a simile to to tax credits or tax refund to explain the effect of extended unemployment benefits -- as the average B & O reader requires special assistance to comprehend the concept of unemployment benefits.

In the next paragraph the author of "efficient breach" observes that "there is no labor shortage" -- so no jobs for those saved-from-a-safety-net.

The bottom-line-punch-line is that there are so few fully planned, and deferred public works projects that the $90bn proposed for public works -- if approved -- will sit idle for years -- and therefore "red tape" must be cut! To borrow the use of simile, and make a covert reference to my last network policy junket -- in 2008 the City State of Singapore had $2bn in fully planned and deferred public works -- so the aggregated public works needs and plans of the United States -- in the Po-verse -- is about 30 times the 286 square miles Singapore boasts -- or about the size of New Jersey.

Perhaps he has in mind the United States of Rhode Island, Delaware and Connecticut.

The original is here.