Wampum

A good chunk of my time since Mexico has been spent on this. I don't know if tomorrow will be a non-event, which is an event no matter what, or an event.

Posted by EBW at 09:25 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

I've spent the week in San Francisco, as an individual contributor to the IETF, which is all any of us are, at least in theory. We managed to both avoid a trainwreck, and surprisingly, make significant progress, in the IDNAbis working group.

Normal progress was also made in the trajectory towards signing the IANA root, though we'd considerable exchanges of notes when .gov was signed, and a larger user base began actually using a signed TLD than we'd experienced with .MUSEUM, or than Sweden, the Cezch Republic, or Brazil had previously experienced.

Today's political and policy news is that the administration has indicated its intent to nominate Larry Strickling to be the new head of the National Telecommunications & Information Administration, which has oversight responsibility for ICANN under the JPA and also the IANA Function contract, though most of the beltway and industry world is fixated on digital television at the moment, and broadband as the digital messiah, with "network neutrality" thrown into the feed-the-failing-telcos-and-cables mix somewhere.

I'm looking at the ACA's press piece, it concludes with this:

"ACA congratulates Mr. Strickling on his nomination, and we look forward to working with him in connection with NTIA's grant program and other matters related to broadband deployment, particularly in small markets and rural areas," said American Cable Association President CEO Matthew Polka.

One of the structures here, as at many campgrounds, was built in the 1930's by the WPA's CCC. It wouldn't be useless to restart the CCC and build more enduring structures (Grace just asked me about frame vs post-and-beam house construction, motivated in part by yesterday morning's tornado watch that had MB and the kidz and dog and cat in a reinforced cinder block structure before they were free to come and pick me up at Pensacola, where I flew in from California to a lovely line of T-storms and rain) in the current parks, and in new parks (population and economic contractions have some features that can be transformed from "bad" to "good"), and it also wouldn't be useless for the new CCC doing rural projects actually informed the administration back in distant Washington City, as the old CCC did, of the actual conditions in rural America, broadband delivery capabilities included.

There are copperheads up here on Weeping Springs Ridge, and down in the Apalachicola River, alligators. What I hope to see is the Apalachicola dusky salamander, so I'll walk to the spring between rainy periods. A sort of "go to water".

Posted by EBW at 08:37 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

The IETF schedule is finally reflecting the USG inflicted visa barrier. IETF-73 was at Minneapolis, IETF-74 is here in San Francisco, IETF-75 will be in Stockholm, and IETF-76 will be in Hiroshima, all per prior schedule ... but thereafter, excepting IETF-77 in Anaheim, no IETF for the next several years will be held in the United States. The North American meetings will be held in Canada, not the United States. The Atlanta meeting is scratched and that meeting will be held in Canada or Asia.

The IDNA work in 2003 would have had a different outcome if we'd had meetings in East Asia, or if Asians didn't have to scale legal mountains to get to the Minneapolis and London meetings where the die was cast.

The IDNA work in 2007-9 would have a different outcome if we'd had meetings in West Asia, or if Arabs and Iranians didn't have to scale legal mountains to get to the Minneapolis and San Francisco meetings where the die was cast.

It is a moment, like when we declined to accept the NIST requirement that no protocol specification mandate strong crypto.

Posted by EBW at 08:05 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Indianz.com has the full text of Ms. Cobell's take on the current actions of the Obama Administration in regards to Indian Trusts litigation. Generally, I excerpt, but I think broadcasting this speech is important:

As one of the many people in Indian Country who looked to the Obama administration for change, I am deeply disappointed with what it is saying about our 13-year-old lawsuit over the government's admittedly broken Indian Trust.

Interior Secretary Ken Salazar has stated repeatedly he wants to see our class-action lawsuit settled. That claim was repeated last week by his spokeswoman Kendra Barkoff who told Indian Country Today the secretary "is sincere in trying to find a resolution to this case."

Yet she then went on to maintain there is a reason why we should not have heard from the government's representatives on his wish for a settlement. "Given the fact that the matter is in litigation, any interaction needs to take place through legal counsel," she said.

The truth is that is not the way it has worked in the past when previous administrations made overtures to us about settlement.

Although those efforts never produced any productive results, there were efforts by the political leaders of previous administrations to talk to us about resolving the case. And that includes the Bush administration, which did so only weeks after taking office.

The talks must be at the highest level among people who have the authority to deal with the major, historic policy issues involved.

This case is not just about a mere trespass or contract breach or disagreement over a few words in a statute.

The vastness of this case and the implications for relations between Native people and the United States require that the talks must include officials at the highest level who can make those types of major decisions and not merely involve government trial lawyers.

Past history in this case shows that unless the highest levels of government are at the table, no resolution is possible. So they must be there and be there now. Anything less is insincere and more delay and another runaround.

I am also troubled by the language used the Secretary Salazar.

If he is sincere then he should not be accusing our litigation of taking money away from the needs of Indian Country. He should know that it was the Bush administration that deliberately cut funding to Indian Country and choose to blame our lawsuit for the cuts the cuts it wanted to make.

What seems so disingenuous about the secretary's sincerity is, as Indian Country Today put it, he "appears to be pinning lots of hope on the new" appeal of our case.

In short, what Secretary Salazar seems to saying is we will continue to fight through the courts the idea of giving any money at all to the Indian plaintiffs. And only after the appeals court rules, will we reluctantly talk settlement.

That's not the way change happens. All we seem to be getting is window dressing by the secretary. Interior is doing nothing more than following the old Bush line topped with a new PR claim of sincerity.

Why not settle now? Or at least begin to talk?

Given the trillions of taxpayer dollars being sent to Wall Street by this administration, our claim is small change. And the money at issue is, after all, Indian money that the government ordered placed in individual Indian Trust accounts.

We had no choice in the matter. Nor could we stop the government's acknowledged mishandling of our money. How hard can it be for the same administration, which quickly devised costly rescue plans for Wall Street and bankers, to come to the aid of the nation's first citizens? Native Americans are among the poorest people in this rich nation.

If our 13 years of litigation has produced anything, it is court decision after court decision, that the government violated its sacred trust responsibility to Native Americans. It should not take yet another court ruling for the Obama administration to begin to talk to us.

Posted by MB Williams at 08:01 AM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

George Walker Bush and Richard Bruce Cheney just keep on giving.

Dmitri Medvedev's re-armament speech at the Defense Ministry is not something to skip over.

... Any analysis of the military and political situation in the world shows that in a number of regions serious potential for conflict remains. There is always the risk of local crises and international terrorism. Attempts to expand the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation on the borders of our country continue. All this requires a qualitative modernisation of our Armed Forces to give them a new, forward-looking perspective. Despite the current financial difficulties, we can make all the necessary provisions.

In this connection, I will focus on a number of priorities.

The first challenge is improving the combat readiness of our troops, not just regular improvement but a quantum leap, most importantly in our strategic nuclear forces. They must be unequivocally ready to meet all the challenges necessary to ensure the military security of our nation. What is also on the agenda is the transfer of all combat units and formations to the status of permanent readiness. I want to stress that this is a key component of the new model or new image of the Armed Forces.

The second challenge is optimizing the structure and the headcount of the army. I want especially to stress that military planning must be based on the current situation and the nature of potential threats, and that long-term defence plans should be based on the Russia’s National Security Development Strategy through to 2020, which will soon be approved by the Security Council.

The third and most important challenge is to equip our troops with advanced weapons ... and in 2011 we will begin the large-scale rearmament of the army and navy.

Fourth, we need further improvement in military education: the network of military educational institutions must be brought into line with the real demand for officers. Military institutions as well as civil institutions should of course be actively involved in modernizing the system of higher education in our country and in the process of integrating education, science and industry in order to prepare highly qualified staff that are capable of creating new technologies.

Another objective or absolute top priority of our work is resolving the social problems of servicemen. In recent years, the state has paid a great deal of attention to enhancing their social status. Since 2000, the funds set aside for this have increased more than tenfold. During the same period the pensions of those who retire from the military have significantly increased. We have worked continuously on one of the most critical problems that exist in the army, namely the housing problem. In 2008 alone the Ministry of Defence has made more than 22.5 thousand apartments available as permanent housing for troops; in 2009 the Ministry of Defence is planning to purchase more than 40 thousand apartments.

Pity Venik's isn't where it used to be. I hope Jeff Lewis picks up on the strategic nuclear forces component in the near future.

Posted by EBW at 08:08 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

This morning Sam came back into the trailer after going to the camp's restrooms and reported excitedly that he'd seen deer. We went out to see Sam's deer and in the morning light saw what we'd missed the evening prior -- we were camped next to a mound. We spent several minutes watching Sam's deer walk away from us across the mound, and MB told us how the mound was made, and when it was likely to have been made, and why, cracking to me "those (mound builders) are your people".

During the drive yesterday Jonah asked for crayon and paper, and after a minute passed forward a note reading "do you want ice cream" with a picture of an ice cream cone.

Posted by EBW at 07:26 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Chief Justice Iftikhar Muhammed Chaudhry and nearly 50 judges were sacked by General Pervez Musharraf almost two years ago. President Zardari (PPP) refused to honour the promises and pledges made with Nawaz Sharif (PML-N) about the restoration of the deposed judges, during the election, in particular, the restoration of the Chief Justice.

Hence the Long March of the present week, and the mass arrests by the PPP in power of lawyers, human rights activists, and PML-N party officials.

There's still more to go to defuse this crisis, which has little if anything to do with the massacres carried out by the Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC) and the CIA in the Tribal Autonomous Region, or the semi-permanent force-on-force balance between the periphery (Baluchistan, NW Territories, Sindh) and the Punjabi state.

Posted by EBW at 11:24 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

This was published in the LA Times today. It is something of a milestone, not because it is a critique of Zionism, that has gone on since Theodor Herzl published "Der Judenstaat" in 1896, but because the LA Times published the piece as an OpEd contribution. The LA Times' resident agent provocateur targeting blogs, Wampum included, Ms. Nikki Brown, hasn't seen fit to alert us to its publication. The author is
Ben Ehrenreich, who also wrote the novel "The Suitors."

It's hard to imagine now, but in 1944, six years after Kristallnacht, Lessing J. Rosenwald, president of the American Council for Judaism, felt comfortable equating the Zionist ideal of Jewish statehood with "the concept of a racial state -- the Hitlerian concept." For most of the last century, a principled opposition to Zionism was a mainstream stance within American Judaism.

Even after the foundation of Israel, anti-Zionism was not a particularly heretical position. Assimilated Reform Jews like Rosenwald believed that Judaism should remain a matter of religious rather than political allegiance; the ultra-Orthodox saw Jewish statehood as an impious attempt to "push the hand of God"; and Marxist Jews -- my grandparents among them -- tended to see Zionism, and all nationalisms, as a distraction from the more essential struggle between classes.

To be Jewish, I was raised to believe, meant understanding oneself as a member of a tribe that over and over had been cast out, mistreated, slaughtered. Millenniums of oppression that preceded it did not entitle us to a homeland or a right to self-defense that superseded anyone else's. If they offered us anything exceptional, it was a perspective on oppression and an obligation born of the prophetic tradition: to act on behalf of the oppressed and to cry out at the oppressor.

For the last several decades, though, it has been all but impossible to cry out against the Israeli state without being smeared as an anti-Semite, or worse. To question not just Israel's actions, but the Zionist tenets on which the state is founded, has for too long been regarded an almost unspeakable blasphemy.

Yet it is no longer possible to believe with an honest conscience that the deplorable conditions in which Palestinians live and die in Gaza and the West Bank come as the result of specific policies, leaders or parties on either side of the impasse. The problem is fundamental: Founding a modern state on a single ethnic or religious identity in a territory that is ethnically and religiously diverse leads inexorably either to politics of exclusion (think of the 139-square-mile prison camp that Gaza has become) or to wholesale ethnic cleansing. Put simply, the problem is Zionism.

It has been argued that Zionism is an anachronism, a leftover ideology from the era of 19th century romantic nationalisms wedged uncomfortably into 21st century geopolitics. But Zionism is not merely outdated. Even before 1948, one of its basic oversights was readily apparent: the presence of Palestinians in Palestine. That led some of the most prominent Jewish thinkers of the last century, many of them Zionists, to balk at the idea of Jewish statehood. The Brit Shalom movement -- founded in 1925 and supported at various times by Martin Buber, Hannah Arendt and Gershom Scholem -- argued for a secular, binational state in Palestine in which Jews and Arabs would be accorded equal status. Their concerns were both moral and pragmatic. The establishment of a Jewish state, Buber feared, would mean "premeditated national suicide."

The fate Buber foresaw is upon us: a nation that has lived in a state of war for decades, a quarter-million Arab citizens with second-class status and more than 5 million Palestinians deprived of the most basic political and human rights. If two decades ago comparisons to the South African apartheid system felt like hyperbole, they now feel charitable. The white South African regime, for all its crimes, never attacked the Bantustans with anything like the destructive power Israel visited on Gaza in December and January, when nearly1,300 Palestinians were killed, one-third of them children.

Israeli policies have rendered the once apparently inevitable two-state solution less and less feasible. Years of Israeli settlement construction in the West Bank and East Jerusalem have methodically diminished the viability of a Palestinian state. Israel's new prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, has even refused to endorse the idea of an independent Palestinian state, which suggests an immediate future of more of the same: more settlements, more punitive assaults.

All of this has led to a revival of the Brit Shalom idea of a single, secular binational state in which Jews and Arabs have equal political rights. The obstacles are, of course, enormous. They include not just a powerful Israeli attachment to the idea of an exclusively Jewish state, but its Palestinian analogue: Hamas' ideal of Islamic rule. Both sides would have to find assurance that their security was guaranteed. What precise shape such a state would take -- a strict, vote-by-vote democracy or a more complex federalist system -- would involve years of painful negotiation, wiser leaders than now exist and an uncompromising commitment from the rest of the world, particularly from the United States.

Meanwhile, the characterization of anti-Zionism as an "epidemic" more dangerous than anti-Semitism reveals only the unsustainability of the position into which Israel's apologists have been forced. Faced with international condemnation, they seek to limit the discourse, to erect walls that delineate what can and can't be said.

It's not working. Opposing Zionism is neither anti-Semitic nor particularly radical. It requires only that we take our own values seriously and no longer, as the book of Amos has it, "turn justice into wormwood and hurl righteousness to the ground."

Establishing a secular, pluralist, democratic government in Israel and Palestine would of course mean the abandonment of the Zionist dream. It might also mean the only salvation for the Jewish ideals of justice that date back to Jeremiah.

Posted by EBW at 05:27 PM | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBacks (0)

The AP lede editors are casting the Long March as "... anti-government protests ... against the country's pro-Western president"

Please read Cole, or Dawn or anything that is written for readers in the 3+ age group.

Posted by EBW at 11:38 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Mehr and Fars are both reporting that Mohammad Khatami has decided not to run for president.

If today's round of reform candidate meetings confirms the rather eager conservative media outlets, this leaves Mir-Hossein Moussavi, who declared on Tuesday, and Mehdi Karroubi as the reform candidates.

Posted by EBW at 08:21 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

I took the kids out for a walk today, out through the oak and palmettos to the lake. Airboats are to florida as snowmobiles are to the north, a buzzing in one's head that occasionally goes away. We found a turtle shell about a foot long, and I picked it up and strapped it on the backpack, and not too long afterward Jonah puzzled out my secret plan and began keeping time to his walking song tapping the turtle shell. We timed our crossing back across the treeless plain to the trees and shade by the passing clouds.

Two fish eagles, or one seen coming from the lake with fish, and later returning for seconds, no gators, and when I saw two cranes I told Gracie it was her turn, like Kezzie days earlier, to stalk the cranes, with the advice not to signal "hunter", not to approach directly.

Sam, Jonah and I sat down in the shade, and after a bit through a gap in the leaves I could see Grace bob and then bob again. When she returned she described imitating the cranes' gestures and making up her own. I told her when she dances in powwows, this is the experience she has to work with, this dancing with cranes, is her original material.

As the day slipped into evening I read while Jonah sang and beat on a small drum with the handle of a jump rope next to the kayaks, and two male turkeys slipped through the brush only two boat lengths away.

Posted by EBW at 08:49 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

An armadillo was rustling around in the palmettos next to my dish pans when I left. Quiet rolling through the mossy oaks, stop, unlock gate, move truck, lock gate and turn on to the road, out through cow pastures and then the scent of orange blossoms for miles until I fetch up on the road north, towards Orlando, and dawn on the highway. Flight out of Orlando to National. At 10am I walked into Wilmer Cutler & Pickering Hale & Dorr and for the next two hours it was all Chattam House Rules (no quotes) with the Assistant Deputy Secretary of Commerce and her staff and "the domain name industry". Then I'd another half hour with ... people and then reversed my steps, starting at the WashLaw bookstore for Prosser, Wade & Schwartz on torts, a walk to Farragut West, only to find the metro closed, a man-meats-train event, so a quick cab ride to Foggy Bottom, and the Blue Line back to National, a jog through the terminal (people let me jump two security lines) to just make the 3pm back to Orlando, and the traverse from freeway to highway to byway to the scent of orange blossoms, the cow fences, and finally the gate and the road to camp.

Kezzie greeted me with the news that the hole next to my dishpans was the home of a gopher tortoise, which adds to the number of four-legged persons who rustle in the grasses and palmettos next to my kitchen.

I informed the United States that there would be a pan-tribal Indian application in the current ICANN new gTLD round, and the response was flattering (my 1999 work was known) and positive (could linguistic and cultural applicants, Indian and sub-state European public governments, enter into contracts with a 501(c)(3)? We talked about the UPU problem. From there the conversations became closer to the quick. I discussed what I think are serious problems and found myself asked for recommendations. These are non-Indian issues.

Posted by EBW at 10:38 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Tahira Abdullah: "They came very early in the morning just after dawn. They came in a huge truck full of police men, plus two police women, plus a plain clothes intelligence agent and a magistrate. They did not serve me any papers. They rang the bell, but I did not open the door. They picked up a brick and started hammering down the kitchen door."

She was threatened with 90 days in Adiala jail, but when the news of her arrest got out there was a panic in government -- her "crime" is to have been in the forefront of the lawyers’ movement, and human rights movements for more than a decade. She was released within hours, but it was a wake-up notice this morning that the "crackdown" on the lawyer's movement and/or the PML-N has the potential to remake Pakistan's democracy along the lines of Egypt's necrotic fiction.

Juan Cole's got a long piece up and I'll be reading him, and other than a technical glitch this morning, Dawn is still operating.

Meanwhile President Zardari was in the city of Mashhad in the northeastern province of Khorassan Razavi, Iran, on Wednesday to pay a visit to the holy shrine of Imam Reza, the 8th Imam of Shiite Muslims, and in Tehran the next day to attended the 10th summit of the Economic Cooperation Organization.

Posted by EBW at 05:18 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Benjamin Netanyahu (Likud, Cheney branch) and Avigdor Lieberman (Full-Tilt-Nutter, Russian criminal branch) met today and tomorrow the happy two shall announce their coalition to lead the { Zionist Entity | Jewish State | Israel } (pick one according to taste) into the next week-in-farce.

The bloom is off the rose as far as the Tzipi-Barak Blitzkrieg of Gaza last December and January, and The Medium Lobster's Life During Self-Defense is as good as it gets.

The Rafael Bollywood number is really making the rounds. The JPost has it on their front page, and there are lots of links to it.

Posted by EBW at 12:05 AM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

I suggest reading the coverage in the Jewish Telegraph Agency. Remember what's at stake. We have to see what we can't to know what we don't, not just interpret whatever the eight departments of Mossad find useful for the Americans to interpret.

The photo is of the sandstorm in Kuwait and Saudi Arabia. The storm is unusual, and there's been no rain in the area for the past three winters.

Posted by EBW at 08:51 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

It was almost as long as one car width of the just two car widths road, and I slowed the truck and opened the windows and called my serpent loving daughter forward to see the snake. As it moved, aware of the slowly approaching truck, I moved the truck into the left side of the road, so that any passing traffic would avoid the truck, and therefore the snake, rather than be forced to crush the snake.

It made several threat displays, and then gained the margin of the road and quickly slipped off several meters towards a palmetto thicket.

It was the biggest serpent any of us have seen in the wild, the biggest in four years of camping, and this specimen of Crotalus adamanteus was 4/5ths the size of the largest specimen on record.

At dusk when looking at the 4' gator in the canal we saw two whooping cranes following the canal between the lakes. That was unusual too.

Posted by EBW at 08:08 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Well, now that we've pretty much decided where to spend the next three-plus years of our lives, the time has come for me to decide what to do with my position here as a founding editor. Do I quietly ride off into the sunset, much as I have appeared to have already done over the past year, leaving Wampum to Eric, or do I continue here, but shift into Indian law student mode? My options, of course, are to start another blog dedicated to the latter, but I'm not sure if that's what I want to do. Then again, I don't even know if any of my original readers still follow the site as it's shifted its focus to Eric's interests.

Any thoughts on the subject out there?

Posted by MB Williams at 09:42 AM | Permalink | Comments (3) | TrackBacks (0)

The "Arabic Script" effort somehow proximal to both the IETF's IDNA activity and ICANN appears to be failing. Just to make things more amusing, the IETF's IDNA effort which less than seven days ago in Mexico City I said was not melting down is doing just that.

First, the problem domain of "Arabic Script" is not Arabic, in fact, only half of the writers and readers of languages which use Arabic Script are writing or reading Arabic, and the problem wouldn't exist, like others, if "we" weren't using Unicode, which smushed the Arabic, Persian (Farsi or Dari), Pashto, Urdu and Kurdish, character collections, among others, into one unwieldy blob.

A solution would be to simply abandon the fiction of "Arabic Script" and deal with Arabic without damage to the languages other than Arabic that use Arabic characters -- African languages, non-Semitic West Asian language, even East Asian languages (and as a plus for the truely obsessed, even Hebrew, as there exists one example of a merchant correspondence in Hebrew written in Farsi, an interesting example of commercial encryption -- from before Old World and New World peoples made their unhappy acquaintances.

Second, the problem is, lack of clue. Names in the DNS are simply thing slightly more persistent than ip addresses, or slightly more memorable than dotted quads, or both. Someone misinformed the Arab League's technical committee, and someone left them uncorrected in that state of misinformation, and so those two dozen national representatives have thought for the past three years that their job is to figure out what "names" are "necessary" or "correct" in Arabic. Not unsurprisingly, nuances in Farsi, Pashto, and Urdu are both outside their ken, and "incorrect" in Arabic.

Third, the Unicode character repertoire, less charitably the UTC glyph dump, a printer's wet dream, more friend of ink on paper than to the ordinary necessity of characters such as sorting and searching, contains many glyphs that look alike, and this "0" resembles "O" and "1" resembles "l" property which Latin Script readers and writers of domain names are mostly well past confused by, offers much, much more to the craft of construction of confusingly similar strings.

Again, a solution would be to simply abandon the fiction of a universal character set and go back to asking Moscow if they know how to encode modern Russian. Rinse and repeat for modern forms of traditional (Taipai) and simplified (Beijing) Chinese, and so on. A fundamental problem has been the rejection of national standards where present, by the IETF, about which I've written previously. I suppose I should grovel and find the links.

Fourth, surrounding all the real technical issues is the non-technical issue of "security and stability". The credit card model and all the fun and games that exist in the universe created by a VISA click and kwel tricks that make visually similar strings fueled by Google Ads ... profitable ... is just ... well ... a gamer's paradise, and rather than look intelligently at gaming, the "S&S mantra" has everyone looking at presenting problems, here, IDN, elsewhere, FastFlux, rather than at ... guess what ... the credit card model.

But what does it really mean, really, if the ASWIG effort fails due to X, the endemic disease of the ICANN gTLD registries, which simply stated, means that no matter how generous the hand, and no matter how sharp the knife, no ICANN gTLD pizza can be cut in more than one pieces?

Simply that Arabic in the DNS is intentionally damaged, and the damage extends to twice the number of users of Arabic -- the users of Arabic Script -- Farsi, Urdu, ... all the way to Malaysia.

And what does it really mean, really, if the IETF's IDNA2008 effort fails due to several causes but fundamentally the same cause present in IDNA2003, which is to say, racism manifested on the 7-bit / 8-bit barrier?

Simply that the partition we've all be carefully overlooking continues, unhealed, for the immediate present, and may grow larger.

I'll put the time I've been giving to the Arabic and non-Arabic script issues on getting Tsalagi and Cree localizations of Wikipedia. At least the outcome will be something some Indians can use, regardless of what happens to International Standards for non-Latin Characters in the DNS and applications.

Posted by EBW at 10:20 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

I took Sam and Kezzie for a walk. Kezzie found a pair of sandhill cranes and to my surprise she found the quiet to allow her to get to within a few feet of the female. Then Sam saw the alligator. A four footer noodling about the canal, sinking out of sight with each passing boat. A bit later, walking over the canal, we saw a second one, not quite twice the size. On the way back we took the fire road and flushed a fish eagle from a tree (yesterday evening Kezzie and I came across a large owl that watched us rather than flying off), and then a doe and her now spotless fauns, and then yet another armadillo, and then a pair of hawks.

And that was today's bag of fauna.

Posted by EBW at 08:13 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Over coffee I asked "where are the turkeys?", and we just looked out the window and saw four of them moving through the palmettos, the same that MB'd reported she and the kids saw the previous morning. But wait, as the Ginzu ad promises, there's more. More birds. And more birds. After a score of birds walked into our site, most working the ground like giant thrushes in search of leaf litter munchies, there were three males, one in display, all puffed out and tail up. Eventually it was there -- the gobble -- war cry of the Tsalagis. Later in the day we'd a pair of fish eagles dance overhead, white heads and tails and the flat broadness of their wings so very distinct from the ever-present (there's a wicked lot of them and they sit in the trees like they know something personal I don't) vultures.

Posted by EBW at 09:25 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

During the week there were two days when I was aware that there are mountains surrounding Mexico City, not much different from summer in LA, when the Santa Monica mountains, or the Miracle Mile, usually can't be seen from the distance of ICANN's office at Marina del Rey, and the San Gabrials behind Pasadena are mostly visible in Winter.

But there was a trash fire edge to the air in Mexico City, and I assumed I was developing a cold as my voice roughened, and I bought a half-dozen packs of lozenges and passed them out during staff meetings.

As the aircraft rose above the grayness that filled the Valley of Anáhuac I saw one, then another, then another of Ixtaccíhuatl, Popocatépetl, Matlalcueitl, Cofre de Perote, Citlaltépetl (Iztactépetl in the traditional orthography for Classical Nahuatl), and its dark and observant companion, the Sierra Negra.

A return to DFW and then Orlando, without incident. A girl greeted me at the airport, my daughter Grace. MB drove us all south in the darkness, into wilds of central Florida

Posted by EBW at 08:20 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

A simple day. The ICANN Board, most familiar faces, sits to deliberate issues. There are no real surprises, so our work was adequate. Afterwards we meet for several hours, the CORE Plenary, so a complete budget review, and then a review of our last day's work.

I've not written about so much.

Normand and I spend the evening shopping from the vendors who line the park and then walk out to the Zocalo and return. I'd heard he had gotten his room rate reduced from 800 pesos per night to 500 pesos, because of the noise, and I assumed his room opened on the Reforma, but no, it was on the interior, just four floors below mine. And indeed, the compressors did shut off at 9:45pm, I'd simply not been in my room that early, and they are noisy.

Posted by EBW at 10:56 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Today is the oddest day ever. Odder than Saturday, when we stopped doing every-ICANN-meeting work, and worked on how we work. Today we put some SO reps and the GAC reps and let them try to talk to one another.

Policy Development Processes (PDPs) are the means to improve contracts. One view. PDPs need not result, no matter how long their work or how demanding their purpose, in changes to contracts. Another view. We are here for the public good. Yet another view. What is the public good? Yet another.

It is an odd form of meeting, where people are encouraged to raise sheets of paper, green or red for yes or now, and white for questions. Unique, in getting more than just the usual broadside of shot exchanged between the GNSO and GAC chairs, instead there were rounds of grape and canister (the "public good" exchange between X and Y was rather interesting, given who X and Y are), with borders away and borders repelled by swashbucklers from the Intellectual Property mob and the Government mob.

In the evening we round up forty five of our closest friends and march down Juraez to the Torre Latinamerico and then up two elevators to the 41st floor to cocktails and dinner. Periodically I looked up and down the table and all I saw were smiles.

Posted by EBW at 09:02 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

An odd day. It began with breakfast with someone from the American Banking Association, and lunch with the operator of the national registry of a very small African country that's been the locus of civil war for 15 of the last 20 or so years and has no external connectivity (via landline).

In the evening the Gala took place in San Hipolito Convent. When the current Chairman of the Board started the standard stump speech I stepped out and slipped into the church next door where mass was being held and soaked in the quiet and calm after the cacophony and chaos of endless deal making. At the sign of peace everyone turned to shake the hands of those nearby, a ritual ICANN cannot imitate.

Posted by EBW at 05:26 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Cary Karp (.museum) was kind enough to make arrangements that lead to my having the kind guidance of a local academic through the public Mayan collection of the National Museum of Anthropology, and afterwards, to the restricted access library of the museum, where I was able to go, fold by fold, through the screenfold pictorial manuscript known as the Tira de la Peregrinación (the migration strip), also named the Codex Boturini.

The morning was spent with Registry Constituency business.

The one thing I'd hoped to get, the universe of diacriticals for Mexican Indian languages using Latin Script, was the one thing I didn't get. I did however get an hour long demonstration of reading Mayan Script, and that was more than fun.

I rushed back to the At-Large Summit to participate in a panel -- Dr. Heike Jensens' panel "Power Issues in New gTLDs: Gender, Development and Big Business". I've been making powerpoint (a tool I despise) slides in every semi-private moment since I arrived and I run over my allotted time but ... when I stop talking about development, in Indian Country and Africa ... there is applause. Not the polite stuff, but hands banging hands. A rare moment in my otherwise fairly private life. Afterwards Heike and I are taped for broadcast and we escape giggling like kids.

Posted by EBW at 05:37 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Meetings with customers. Back to back, all morning. What has changed in the Guidebook, what hasn't, how this affects reasonable people, in reasonable situations, attempting to cope with ICANN's presumption that everyone trying to get use the DNS is either a dangerous crook or a dangerous fool.

It isn't that surprising that mirrors reflect.

Normally I spend Monday's in the cc Tech Day. Today I was luck to spend an hour in public meetings, the rest was all private, and John and Cary spent their time at the pyramids, which had I gone to, I'd have had to dance on.

Posted by EBW at 10:02 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Sunday. Walking to the venue I notice the morning air is oddly quieter. Traffic police have closed Juarez street and the public park has merged with the street and the private space of the Sheraton. Through out the day, in the moments when I can get outside, I marvel at children on bikes in some video shoot, at carefree strollers, and the intermingling of ICANNistas, corporate and government, latin and non-latin, and the Sunday People, shoppers, tourists, and vendors of the historic district.

The day is filled with GNSO policy, a joint meeting of the GNSO and the GAC on fast track for IDNs, the meat of this ICANN. I can't begin to express how many strands of the web are tangled here.

In the evening John, Cary and I go towards the Zocalo in search of a restaurant at the Spanish Casino, which we find closed for the day, and so we have tacos at a small taquiria.

Posted by EBW at 08:42 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)