Wampum

The Chamber bluffed Hurricane Electric into shutting down, not just the Yes Men's fair use protected political satire site, but every stie managed by May First / People Link.

Via NANAOG, where the story in the HuffPo is covered.

The technical nuisance is whether HE null routed a /32 which hundreds of virtual hosting sites shared, or if HE dropped an entire downstream over a DCMA notice.

So ... if one were to dress up in a blue conservative pant suit or suit, and style oneself as the local Chamber of Commerce, say a name pin or carry some Chamber lit, or lit similar to Chamber lit, and appear at a town hall meeting to engage in protected speech, say to "announce the Chamber's decision to denounce the misapplication of the DCMA, or reverse its long-standing support for `clean coal', `safe nuclear power', or `climate change'", would it be lawful for the local Chamber enforcers to strip the "counterfitter" down to her or his underwear and put a bag over his or her gagged head?

Posted by EBW at 11:32 AM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

From: cec.elections [at] maine.gov
To: ebw [at] abenaki.wabanaki.net
Subject: Absentee Ballot Request Confirmation
X-UIDL: njD"!kf~!!6=,!!X

Thank you for submitting your Absentee Ballot Request online with the Secretary of State. Your request has been emailed to the municipality where you are registered to vote. Your request will be processed by your municipality and delivered by mail to the address you designated. If you have any questions regarding delivery, please contact your municipal office directly. Your confirmation number for this transaction is: XXXXXX-YYYYYZZZZ. Please print this confirmation for your records.

I'll be in Seoul, ROK, but I'm voting in Maine, against intolerance and obscurantism, and against the substitution of minority elected for majority elected in state taxation policy.

Posted by EBW at 11:02 AM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

At the first of two teleconferences arising after the first version of the Draft Applicant's Guidebook was published last October, Tom Watson of Bank of America argued that because "bank" was a term defined by US law, that objctions to applications for ".bank" ought to be included in the "legal rights" basket, created for trademark holders, and having the then-estimated cost to the objector of less than a grand. Compare, the other three basis for objection, "morality and public order", "community" and "similarity to an existing TLD or string applied for in the same round" were then estimated in the mid-five figures, cost to objector.

Equivalently stated, the Burmese Generals assert they own "baseball", and flash a pimp's bling, and the Phillies and Dodgers drop a quarter of a million in application prep and fees and have to play the best four out of seven games of ... "stickball".

The ABA's position is that ".bank" must be a rebranding exploit, domainer piracy, argh and a bottle of parrot ale.

But as the ABA meets this week in Chicago, to maintain all of its perks too numerous to mention, the ruin of the working poor and the middle class, we have a real question.

Should member institutions of the ABA be allowed, ever, at any price, to use the public DNS infrastructure to advance their ends?

It really is our choice. What guidelines are useful for defining high-reputation retail banking?

No. Skippy did not demonitize that bankers association, we all have.

Posted by EBW at 09:22 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Joe Klamar took this, on the left, Barak Obama, current President of the United States, on the right, a statue of Tomas Garrigue Masaryk, first President of Czechoslovakia, in fog. Via Le Soir.

Posted by EBW at 05:43 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Motivated by my friend Barry, the following:

---

LtR Scripts

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纽约市 Chinese (Simplified)
紐約市 Chinese (Traditional)
뉴욕시 Korean
ニューヨークシティJapanese

Νέα Υόρκη Greek
Нью-Йорк Russian

न्यूयॉर्क शहर Hindi

Nua-Eabhrac Galic

---

RtL Scripts

---

ניו יארק סיטי Yiddish
ניו יורק Hebrew
مدينة نيويورك Arabic
شهر نیویورک Persian

Posted by EBW at 01:31 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Former presidential candidate and current parliament speaker Ali Larijani said the United States was implicated in Sunday's bomb attack. ‘We consider the recent terrorist attack to be the result of US action. This is a sign of America's animosity against our country. Mr. Obama has said he will extend his hand towards Iran, but with this terrorist action he has burned his hand."

Iranian state television is citing informed sources claiming that Britain was directly involved in the attack.

According to Fars, the dead include General Nour-Ali Shoushtari, adjoint commander of the Revolutionary Guards' ground forces and a senior officer in the Quods force, General Mohammad-Zadeh, commander of the Revolutionary Guards in Sistan-Baluchestan province, and [rank unknown] Amir-al Momenin, commander of the Revolutionary Guards in the city of Iranshahr.

Collaterals include another 25 persons, a mix of lower ranking RG personnel and local tribal notables at the target site, and the same number of wounded. The targets were engaged with a man-pack munition, and Abdolmalek Rigi's Jundollah (God's soldiers) is credited with the primary operational role.

Keep in mind that Baluchistan has a nationalist movement of its own, see this, and Pakistan credits India with supporting opfors operating in Baluchistan, in addition to the well-known proxy conflict in Afghanistan, and US forces are present on Iran's eastern boarder, in Baluchistan, and a non-trivial amount of gas and oil is present, and the investment target of China's development of the port at Gwadar (part of Oman until 1958), and of course, "Baluchistan" for some includes the Sistan and Baluchestan Province of Iran, where the demographic is non-Persian and confessionally Sunni.

Posted by EBW at 07:56 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Sitting at my immediate left in a conference room at the Wilmer Cutler Pickering Hale & Dorr last December and scribbling on the back of what may as well have been an envelope, Jon Nevett, Senior Vice President, Network Solutions¹, came up with the 100,000 cap to toss back at the absent authors of the Charles River Associates, Inc. report, the pro forma stab at an economic analysis of ICANN's new gTLD program².

The bare bones: ICANN allows registrars to own registries, but limits the ownership in registrars by registries to 15%. ICANN thinks its about to see on the order of 500 registry applications (I'm working on dozens for CORE and CORE's clients, NYC included). The morons at CRAI came up with two really bad ideas. First, end the registry-registrar separation rule. Second, allow "single registrant" applications. The first means everything is tossed in the air, the second means every fool is a "TLD consultant" to the idle rich and corporate drones. Not the best way to start an expansion from 20+ TLDs, most of which are not doing that well, or maintain a focus on ending a monopoly which still holds 86% of the market, after 7.1% was divested, and 6.5% is ... competitive.

So, if you'd 100,000 blank checks, the right to sell at whatever the payer is willing to pay to be the first, last, and only buyer, for things like abc.nyc or cnn.nyc or nbc.nyc or pbs.nyc or 3m.nyc or ...

How would you loot the bank? I stayed across a narrow street from the Federal Reserve night before last, and had the tunnel not already been booked by Michael Moore and a bevy of moles, I'd have tried to make a withdrawal of bullion or soup stock or something liquid.

The City of New York would like to know ... cause ... it wants a cut of the vig. The City assumes that Jon's 100k cap will be in the ICANN contract, and the contractor has a duty to ... relieve the last virgin of her material encumberments.

On Monday we'll be discussing the registry-registrar separation issue. Steve Salop, Professor of Law and Economics at Georgetown will open. I found him to be a low information neo-liberal ideologue at Sydney, as did most of my peers in the trade. Apparently he's now got some domaintools.com data to support his "economist's conclusions". He'll be followed by Brian Cute, VP at Afilias who will be arguing for ... allowing Afilias to become a com/net registrar and go after the 85% of the market Afilias and NeuStar isn't competitive with as the org/info and biz/us, respectively, registry operators. He will be followed by Richard Tinsdale who will be making the regulation harms innovation case for Enom. He will be followed by Michael Palage and one of the InterTube's least useful units of biomass, a clown from Syracuse, making the regulation is harmful for children and green plants case for clients, in Michael's case, and for status at a school where orange rhymes with something, in the clown's case. They will be followed by David Sappington, who will address Jon's proposal (which he seems to think is the Registrar Constituency's proposal, showing serious lack of ICANN political clue), also for status at a school where there are (non-rhyming) oranges. I'm the last presenter, making the case for no change in the 15% cap rule, just fixing the brokenness in the .aero, .coop and .museum contracts. Joe Sims, senior anti-trust partner at Jones Day will be the moderator. My slides are here (.pptx). My PowerPoint is ugly too. I hate PowerPoint. I also hate Word.

Posted by EBW at 03:56 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Spent mid-day going out to Staten on the ferry and back, then walked up the row of late 19th and early 20th century sail tied up on the lower East River.

Posted by EBW at 04:11 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

I don't think my eldest daughter is old enough, at 13, to read this. Unfortunately, few adults who can read this work without being as harmed actually do read it, and so each year there is this foolish "holiday", and foolish "discussion" over the merits of non-issues.

This misses the fundamentals. A human isolate, from a point in time when the common human cultural kit included points, but not baskets, language, but not chiefs, no domesticants, no cultigens, to the 15th century after the assassination of Julius Caesar, experienced a population loss without parallel in human history. Further, European culture, European religion, was, after 40 years of barbarism, transformed, and Inter Caetera of 4 May 1493 replaced by Sublimus Dei of June 2, 1537.

Europeans should celebrate "Columbus Day", not because of the Discovery of the Indies, but because of the liberation of Europe from one belief:

... barbarous nations be overthrown and brought to the faith itself ...

... the said Indians and all other people who may later be discovered by Christians, are by no means to be deprived of their liberty or the possession of their property, even though they be outside the faith of Jesus Christ; and that they may and should, freely and legitimately, enjoy their liberty and the possession of their property; nor should they be in any way enslaved...

Germans celebrate their liberation from the National Socialist Regime, and from nationalism. European, and Euro-American civilization was liberated from cannibalism as theology forty years after the onset of the Conquest, the works of Christobol Colombo, Catalan navigator and slaver. Rather than defending Columbus, and ignoring the enormous step forward their culture accomplished abandoning human cannibalism as a theology and creating the basis for International Law and the protection of the rights, not of other European Princes momentarily defeated in dynastic wars, but of the most abject humans on the face of the earth, they would better appreciate the value of their culture by looking, not at a Catalan, but at two Bulls and what they meant, and continue to mean.

It remains important to the present day. At the core of the Marshall Trilogy, the "dependent" construct, was the removal of Indians, not from any place in particular, but from access to courts other than those of the state claiming to exercise the right of discovery, a claim made in Inter Caetera of 4 May 1493, and at its perverse bottom, Rehnquist's "Oliphant" of 1978 argues that because Indians are outside the faith of Jesus Christ, they ought not have jurisdiction over Christians, and their courts overthrown and brought to the faith itself.

Posted by EBW at 06:32 PM | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBacks (0)

The Bloomberg ads show up on all of the top of the fold (military and political) stories running in Ha'aretz.

What this means, "The stakes are high, the choice is clear" in voter motivation terms, is a fear push, so Bloomberg's running wicked negative, making the claim that Jews are about to be harmed by non-Jews. I hope that Thompson will use the debate to ask Bloomberg exactly what he means, exactly why are "the stakes high" and how the "choice is clear", exactly who is about to harm Jews, other than Bernie Madoff and other ultra-zillionairs enjoying OPM, in an ad targeting the low information Jewish non-voters (the high information voters are not reading Israeli papers for NYC issue analysis).

Ironically, I too am doing a sales and marketing campaign, in Israel, for a New York property, only I'm not trying to buy votes, only sell .nyc domain names, some 12 to 24 months out, or whenever ICANN's Greek Calanders falls due. I'm not selling existentialist fear, or violating federal, state or municipal election laws.

Posted by EBW at 09:29 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

The Pakistan media was mostly shutdown yesterday, including Geo, the popular television station. Oddly, there is little coverage of the attack on the media(there) in the media (here or there), so amongst the "journalists" the theory of embedding (or no media except uniformed media) continues.

Meanwhile, guess who made the following utterly unnewsworthy demands:

1. the state must charge and try former dictator Pervez Musharraf
   
2. the state must cease accommodating foreign military operations
   
3. the state must cease accommodating foreign mercenary operations
   

If you guessed the Lashkar-i-Jhangvi spokesperson sent these out on their letterhead in a presser yesterday, coordinated with the squad-level operation at a gate to the GHQ that managed to kill one Brigadier and one Colonel, or about 0.025% of the senior officer corps, where more than 50% of the senior officer corps are present, you'd be informed, by guesswork, better than by reading the MSM.

If you conclude that an operation that cost an entire 8 person operational group, undertaking a senior personnel targeting operation, which managed to inflict a cost of 2 targeted persons, in an area of operations where several hundred persons meeting the targeting criteria are present daily and accessible to any attacker with very modest means (sidearms and above), is either an astonishingly poor allocation of resources, or an astonishingly poorly executed operational plan, then you'll probably wonder why (a) the media was crushed during the op, (b) why the op is framed as state-shaking trauma, and (c) why anyone is talking nukes.

Oh, and (d) why Pervez Musharraf gets a media pass today, and why (e) foreign military and (f) foreign mercenaries also get media passes today.

Posted by EBW at 08:17 AM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

James Wimberley, writing at Mark Kleiman's The Reality-Based Community, has a very nice piece on the Tyndale Bible.

The translation into early modern English is contemporaneous with Elia Levita's Bovo-Bukh, the first non-religious book to be printed in Old Yiddish.

Posted by EBW at 09:51 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Personally, I think the better question is how will writers, and their readers, escape from for-profit corporate capture.

I suppose a litmus test for a "journal" or "journalist" to be able to register in .y!sctp is whether the "journal" or "journalist" provided factually correct, and timely, information on single payer during 2009. Of course, it is unlikely that NPR would meet that test, or Cokie Roberts, or much of anything or anyone using the public spectrum, other than micro-power FM, community radio, and the Pacifica Network, and the prospects for the major media market print outlets is ... coverage denied, palliative care only, do not do not resuscitate, pauper's field.

In comments someone rejected the possibility of the rue89 model taking root in the Anglo-Saxon Americas, as there are no journalists who are not already beyond the pale. Know any journals or journalists that aren't happier with single point of truth perveyor (rhymes with "failure") than with multiple sources of authority?

Posted by EBW at 01:40 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

So how does the Obama West Wing continue the meme of "fragility", that despite having both houses of Congress, and now the vote of what many take to be a part of the "conscious of the world", the Nobel Prize for Peace, that the Likudniks in Tel Aviv, the Bush/Cheney hold-overs, the privileged angry white men and their privileged angry white wives, living on the warfare dole in the "defense industrial congressional districts", the too big to regulate titans of what turns out to be mere multi-level marketing, the blue dogs and the opposition party, are too tough to take on?

At what point will "can't" become "won't"?

Posted by EBW at 01:27 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

The illegal belligerency against Iraq continues, and reparations are unmentionable. The belligerency against Afghanistan continues, and the legality for that does not appear to be as enduring as its original marketing. The GWOT marketing has been retired, as rhetoric, but the funding for totalitarianism it provided cover for largely continues.

Star Wars has been put down, finally, decades after mid-course intercept was proven infeasible. Illegal belligerency against Iran appears to have been unchosen, at least by the United States as a direct party to the planned act of aggression. Nuclear weapons inventories are unchanged, conventional forces are unchanged, for the present.

Development in Africa, development in West Asia, development in South Asia, development in East Asia, development in the Caribbean, development in Mexico, development in Central America, development in South America, all appear to be unchanged, for the present. And carbon waits ...

Its not Single Payer. Its not an end to Cheney's Executive Powers. Its not an end to wiretap. And its not enough to cinch the Iowa primary in 38 months.

Its not even a simple snow flake to the Secretary of the Interior "settle the Individual Indian Trust claims case on the plaintiff's terms, ditto for the Tribal Trust claims, and don't ever let anything like this happen again."

Posted by EBW at 06:21 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

I've been sentenced to write our proposal for New York City's top-level domain. Weeks of happy python coding lost to Word and Excel ...

The up side is that I get to go into town.

The down side is that I get to look at greed very, very closely.

Posted by EBW at 04:00 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

The respondents are Adobe, Amazon, Apple, Google, Yahoo, Sun, Google subsidiary YouTube, eBay, Texas Instruments, soon-to-be Dell subsidiary Perot Systems, Go Daddy, Staples, Office Depot, Blockbuster, Citigroup, Pepsi subsidiary Frito-Lay, JC Penny, JP Morgan Chase, New Frontier Media, Playboy Enterprises International, Rent-a-Center, Argosy Publishing and CDW.

The first claim is each willfully infringing a patent which enabled browsers to act as platforms for interactive embedded applications.

The second claim is each willfully infringing a patent which let web sites add interactive embedded applications by way of plug-ins and AJAX.

Each of the respondents is liable for damages "by making, using, selling, offering to sell, and/or importing in or into the United States, without authority: (i) web pages and content to be interactively presented in browsers...(ii)...software that allows that content to be interactively presented in and/or served to browsers...and/or (iii)... computer equipment that stores, serves, and/or runs any of the forgoing."

When I get the pleadings I'll update this to make it less readable.

The plaintiff is Eolas Technologies. If you haven't sat through Prof. Lessig's lecture, scroll down the page, get comfortable, and click.

Posted by EBW at 08:16 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Mohammad-Reza Ali-Zamani has been sentenced to death for participating in election protection activities in June in Tehran. More details as they become available. This from Le Monde's dispatches, citing mowjcamp.com, (Persian). A translation is not yet at english.mowjcamp.com.

The Death Penalty Project at Cornell Law is one of the factors that brought us here.

Posted by EBW at 05:56 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Larry, no longer at SLS but at HLS, makes three observations.

Enjoy. I did.

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

The line is from Michael Wolff's piece in Vanity Fair, in which Wendi Murdoch recounts her husband's recurring question to their guests, Larry Page and Sergey Brin.

Posted by EBW at 01:45 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

[for those clicking over from corrente, lambert was referring to the previous post, below, and a fist full of signatures is really all i need to take to the dance. ebw]

On this date, eight years ago, the government of Afghanistan offered to arrest and try Osama bin Laden. A week from today, eight years ago, the government of Afghanistan will again offer to arrest Osama bin Laden and transfer physical custody to a third country.

Neither offer was accepted by the government of the United States, which continues, without policy change, to identify that government with the Osama bin Laden group.

Juan Cole has a guest post up today that is mandatory reading, for those interested in the land war in Central Asia, as well as for those interested in the fact properties of the main stream media and individual bloggers. The piece is Nadine Gross' guest post Massive Fraud in Afghanistan Election, which interestingly enough, Juan characterizes as a op-ed for IC.

This gets to the fundamental issue around the Koufax Awards, which is not, as Avadon wrote "... so we could give each other credit for the good work we do ...," but because the work we do is not done elsewhere, that is, that without "this", our works, acts of malicious agency, from Bill Frist's attempts to get midnight ridders into defense appropriations bills to the US government and Karzai government's election fraud, would not be known outside of a very, very small set of individuals.

It is not so much that we gave each other credit, then, it is that what we had, which included that mutual cordiality, as well as otherwise unpublished works, frequently rising to the level of "news", or "effective advocacy", created in us, regardless of our intents, a surprising relationship with the main stream media.

The trial of Kevin Ring goes to its third day today. Is the narrative "a guy-cheated, ho-hum" or is the narrative "capture and looting of the Interior Department by gangs of co-conspirators described at length in a blog"?

Its what we do that makes the Koufax Awards worth while, not the awards. Today Cole published something important.

Posted by EBW at 08:21 AM | Permalink | Comments (4) | TrackBacks (0)

In comments to today's earlier post about the DoITT RFP for New York City's application to ICANN for a top-level domain, The ICANN Gong Show, Chris Clarke wrote:

All this does, of course, suggest the creation of ".y!sctp" as a blogs-only TLD.

There will certainly be a .blog. It won't be ours, unless we use the rules. I wrote the rules, so it is possible. Its just not easy or free. We do have choices, both without, and within, the rules.

But first, a detour, a necessary detour, because what I'm about, what we're about, for several, partially overlapping values of "we", is culture. Its preservation, and its creation, and because, as a blog, Wampum is Abenaki.

Gluskabe poured water into the maples because the Abenakis were fat and lazy, lying around sipping the syrup from the trees. Wood must be cut, sap collected, rocks heated and the sap boiled down to make syrup, that is the way Glusakabe changed the world.

Klosk8ba changes the Maple Trees

N8wad sen8moziak n'mildogonnawak p8gwizogalos8b8n.
Long ago maple trees us they gave pure maple syrup.

Kwanigadek chaga awani kadowesmo zogalos8b8n w'kiziba
All year round if someone was thirsty for syrup he could

boskweno beska8dwensis ta zogalos8b8n bagebatasen.
break off a twig and syrup dripped out.

Salakiwi Klozk8ba kiston wd'odokaw8kba aln8bak.
Once Klozk8ba decided he should visit them the human beings.

Chiga pai8n wd'odanaw8k zigwagen.
When he came to their village it was empty.

anigenop w'wiwnwigw8menow8l.
It had grown up with trees and vegetation between their homes.

"T8ni pm8zowinnoak?" Klozk8ba wd'elaldamop.
"where are the people?" Klozk8ba he wondered.

Niga w'nodamen msinasat8gwat sen8moziikok.
Then he heard it a sighing sound from in the maples.

wd'elossan kpiwik ta w'maskawanak pm8sowinnoak.
He goes to the woods and he finds them the humans.

Mziwik wd'elesinobanik nagwakwa w'kebasizekowal.
All of them they were lying under the trees their eyes closed.

kizi w'boskwenonowal beska8dwensisal ta
they had broken off twigs and

zogalos8b8n w'chigitow8 bagebatasen wd'al8mdonowal.
syrup they let it drip into their mouths.

Wikaoak!
They were fat!

wd'adebaodepkwanowal ta
They had tangled long hair and

anigon w'wiwniw8k.
the land it grew up with vegetation around them.

w'gwanosmin8p zogalos8b8n w'msinasaadit.
While they drank it the maple syrup they sighed.

"Nda wligen," Klozk8ba idamop.
"Not good is it" Klosk8ba said.

Klozk8ba maskwaka ta
Klozk8ba peeled the bark from a birch tree and

kiziton maskwainoda
he made it a birchbark container

W'n8daziban sibok.
He went to dip water from the river.

w'zogenadawan mziwik wskidsen8moziikok.
He poured it on all of them on top of the maple trees.

Zogalebihla majip8gwat ta pm8zowinnoak wd'abiidit.
The maple sap became bad tasting and the people they sat.

"Kagwi lla?" nadodemaak. "T8ni n'zogalimelassesembna?"
"what's happening?" they asked. "Where is our sweet syrup?"

"k'wikaohlab8p ta k'zazig8dahlab8p," Klosk8ba idamop.
"You have become fat and you have become lazy," Klosk8ba said.

"Wzomi k'negem8wzibnop wji ki8w8. Nikw8bi kd'achowiba melikaloka
"Too much your living was easy for you. Now you must work hard

k'waj8nemen8 zogalos8b8n.
in order to (so that you may) have syrup.

Kd'achowiba maanemen zogalebi al8mimsalinodaal ta
You must collect it maple sap in many containers and

k'zogenanowal al8mamasolemenikok.
pour them into dugout logs.

Kd'achowiba maanemenal awazonal ta k'wlitebiponsan8
You must collect it fire wood and make good fires

wji zogelozw8ganal senal
for cooking stones

enni iolil kd'awakanowal
which you use them

wji zigosan zogalebi
to boil it down the maple sap

wji zogalikaw8gan.
for maple sugarmaking.

Chiga k'paamizigosa ta noskito waz8li,
If you boil it down more and add snow,

k'waj8n8bnaji zigwan k'kizi zogalipi!
you will have left over (what is left after melting or boiling away) maple sugar you can eat!

Kanwa nikw8bi ibitta pazegweda negwejigadenewaiwi zogalebinji
But now only once during every year the maple sap will

lijowahazo zigwaniwi Zogalikasek,
flow in the spring (the melting away time) in April (the sugar maker moon),

wjiji kd'aibnaji alamizi wji magaw8gan sen8moziikok."
in order that you will be grateful for the gift from the maple trees."

Llaki ni nikw8bi.
So it is now.

Here are the fundamental rules. Terms first: "open" means without restriction, other than the unstated restriction of making enough to pay costs, like Verisign's .com, and "community", sometimes called "closed" means something else, a cut-out created to protect tribes and similar cultural affiliations, like .cat, for users who write and read in Catalan.

1. if the application is "open", then if the string has value, and "blog" does, though "b!sctp" does not, overlooking the awkwardness of the exclamation point, then the deepest pocket wins, via auction, else
   
2. if "community", then the "community" must be bounded, and large enough to support a registry, else
   
3. the string must be inobvious and hidden until the application is filed to escape the greed interest of speculators, which exist, and
   
4. it always costs $185,000, just to file the application.
   
5. not "in the rules", but wicked obvious, the applicant has to pass on offers of easy living lying under the trees their eyes closed, skimming direct, or indirect revenue from the abusers of the net, who also exist.
   

It is simpler than it looks, but to dance one must put one's feet on the earth and push. I can dot tees and cross eyes, but more hands than one must hold the pen.

Posted by EBW at 05:06 PM | Permalink | Comments (11) | TrackBacks (0)

There are several contenders for the 2009 ICANN Gong Show Awards. There's the .food adventure, which went from smashingly presented to smashed plates in just under one half of an ICANN inter-meeting cycle. From cater to crater in 6 weeks or so. A life cycle wicked close to that of a drosophila. Then there's the odd lot that keeps trying to sell us a .fam in which Father.Really.Does.Know.Best. They keep hinting they've Opus Dei money, but short of seeing them swing under a bridge I'm unconvinced by their offers of proof thus far. Abstractly, the policy model they'd like (if they knew how to draw a Venn Diagram using two or more crayons) is interesting, but I'm more interested in financial applications and their security than ensuring the knees of any teenage girl are securely fastened together. Then there's the guy who's going to leverage his full-contact modified martial arts studio (before he clocks out of the business on injuries to self or other) into .mma, with millions of mini-he's registering their bare knuckles behind his.

I'm fairly partial to the .green baby that NeuStar is going to deliver in which, well, coal could be clean, so Koch Industries really should be able to register its tending.towards.greenish.or.yellowish.decomposing.meats, and nuclear power could be safe, so Avrea really should be able to register its tending.towards.not.immediately.fatal.radiation.level.wastes, and ...

But the biggest, dumbest slow moving thing in ICANN space, the Gongliest Gong Show contestant evah, is the City of New York. They dumped an Idiot's RFP for .NYC into the digital Hudson yesterday. 60 plus pages of below average disjointed and uneven "borrowed copy", 15 of which are blank addenda, almost all of which any idiot in this business knows by heart, and not a thought provoking sentence from beginning to end.

Imagine, coming up with the idea of "blogs" and deciding that the blogosphere (skippy coined "blogtopia") should exist so that ... government and corporations could promote their goods and services (odd how well those two dance together), promote tourism and kwelism in teh nu media rez, and ... pick up a pantload of Google Ad Sense dollars. That is the City with the Same Name Twice.

The basis for contract award is the highest offer of revenue to the City. Not the greatest service, the biggest payout. It could just as well be a casino franchise, or a collateral marketing agreement for a toy, say .nyc, the mouse pad that ... doesn't do a damn thing except leak shredded plastic and icky goo. It makes the value claims of a Chia Pet look pretty damn forward minded in comparison.

There is an election in four weeks and I've thrown an "Attention Policy Director" memo over the transom.

The image is from Jaye P. Morgan's skit on the Gong Show in 1978.

Posted by EBW at 11:22 AM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

A year ago I was traveling to Cairo, my absentee ballot cast, and, since the September crash of Shearson, confident that the RNC's attempt to hold on to the Executive Branch would fail.

Little has changed since the morning I woke up in Cairo and saw candidates Obama and Biden taking the winner's bows in CNN-re-runs, with color commentary in Arabic.

Not Gitmo. Not Iraq. Not Wiretap. Not DADT. Not Single Payer. Not Finance. Not Executive Powers. Not Individual Indian Trusts. Not Afghanistan. Not Cuba. Not ...

Ok. Star Wars has been put down. The ARRA money is being spent ...

Seoul. Ticketed. The 3rd Draft Applicant's Guidebook. Redlined copy printed, highlighters at the ready (today wasted on the idiot NYC RFP that boils down to "DOT COM AND A BIG BIIG BIIIG BRIBE TOO"). La.

Posted by EBW at 09:54 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Juan Cole writes today

...
Meanwhile, Aljazeera English says that Pakistan is pushing back against American demands that Washington be allowed to hit Taliban targets in Quetta, the capital of Baluchistan, via drones firing rockets. The current drone strikes most target the no-man's land of the Federally Administered Tribal Areas, which are vaguely akin to US Indian reservations. But to allow a Western, Christian power to bomb a major Pakistani city and provincial capital is a different matter altogether.
...

I wonder what Juan had in mind when he wrote his post this morning.

Posted by EBW at 03:57 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Here's the (paywall link) article, Prevalence of Parent-Reported Diagnosis of Autism Spectrum Disorder Among Children in the US, 2007.

The reported increasing prevalence of autism spectrum disorder (ASD) and attendant health and family impact make monitoring of ASD prevalence a public health priority.

Posted by EBW at 09:40 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Some of us know there is a Wheeler-Howard Act issue at Hopi. Chris Clarke writes about the momentary Hopi Tribal Council vs Sierra Club thing here.

Yes, there is the Burns National Parks thing on PBS, and as a personal note, in 1969 the NPS burned down the cabins of the Ahwahnee still living on 10 acres of unsectioned land in Yosemite Valley, a half mile west of Yosemite Village, and told the Ahwahnee families to relocate outside of the National Park. That village was built during the NRA, and as a kid I played there under the eye of an Auntie when my mom was off walking. The NPS plan of record was that area from then on would be protected as an environmental restoration area.

Fundamentally, its about Crown Trees, and Dorothy van der Peet's $50 of fish (footnote to Crown Trees post).

Its about European pastoralism and the rediscovery of using fire to manage common land, for deer and agriculture.

Those with copies of Emily Benedek's The Wind Won't Know Me: A History of the Navajo-Hopi Land Dispute are encouraged to open the hymn book to where the book breaks first.

Posted by EBW at 06:41 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Its been 8 years now, and the NATO strategy appears to reflect the policy objective that suffiicent indigenous polities remain motivated to articulate counter-force and conduct area denial, logistic train, and point attacks on occupation forces present.

Today's news is from Nuristan, the Hindu Kush, far from the Pashtun area, were 8 enlisted men fell for the Bush-Cheney nonsense that showboating with cordite would get Ussma bin Ladin with some unspecified alacrity, a fiction resisted only by Congresswoman Barbara Lee (D-Oakland), and renewed, by incrementally smaller margins, every two years in the defense appropriations, and by the successor in interest, the "Change" administration.

The military policy appears to be a successful implementation of a political policy goal. What part of "change" constant militarism figures in is an open question.

Posted by EBW at 06:18 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Sam and I talk about Indy every day. Is he in Maine? Is he a ghost? Is he at his grandfather's house?

Monday we'll pick up Indy's ashes from the vet and start the conversation about where to take our dead.

Posted by EBW at 07:51 PM | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBacks (0)

Abstract: Print publications moving online have often failed, some for financial reasons, others through misunderstanding the new medium. A few still try to use the Internet as a broadcast medium; many, seeing the rise of blogs, "citizens' journalism" and other participatory structures, worry about the future for the professional journalist. Laurent Mauriac and Pascal Riché, members of the team behind French politics website Rue89, explain how they attempt to bridge the gap between print and the Internet by encouraging contributions from experts and web users, but using journalists to coordinate, direct and edit this participation.

An interview with Laurent Mauriac and Pascal Riché at www.eurozine.com. It is in English, and worth reading, if (and only if) the future of journalism and blogging are of interest. I've been reading Rue89 since it began, in a small part for technical reasons, mostly because it is somewhere "out there" with CurrentTV on the cutting edge. See also Street89 (English) and Calle89 (Spanish), and just this week (surprise!!!) on this side of the pond -- Québec89.ca (Québecoise).

Please read if interested in the future of the Koufax Awards. Note also the Coop block on the sidebar.

Posted by EBW at 09:42 AM | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBacks (0)

He was a Bundist, and one of the founders of Żydowska Organizacja Bojowa, the ŻOB. In 1976, during the mass arrests of striking workers, he joined Komitet Obrony Robotników, KOR, which became Solidarność in 1980. During peace time he was a cardiologist.

Posted by EBW at 05:34 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Via NANOG:

"As many of you may know, a router failed in the Verizon network this afternoon causing problems for some Verizon FiOS and High Speed Internet users. Here's what happened.

The router in question is in New York City and handles traffic from the Verizon network to the larger Internet. It is one of a number of such routers in our network.

When routers have problems, they are designed to report that they are sick. Internet traffic is rerouted to adjacent routers automatically and sent around the trouble spot. In this case, that didn't happen. The
router went into a hung state and did not appear to the rest of the network as though it was having problems.

That meant that some user traffic from the northeast continued to flow to the stalled router, but couldn't be processed. Presto - an outage for those users. Verizon FiOS, High Speed Internet and small business customers were affected.

The problem occurred at approximately 3:15 EDT and was detected and resolved :40 minutes later. Traffic began to flow normally and customers returned to service at that point.

Currently, we're monitoring the router and the network watching for any other problems."

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

John Michael McHugh accepted President Obama's request that he serve as the Secretary of the Army, giving up a very safe, even life-time seat representing the moderate Republicans of upstate New York's 23rd CD, for a stint in a policy and implementation hot seat.

So how does Bill Owen plan to galvanize broad and deep support in a off-year, off-cycle, special election?

He's not going to mention Single Payer, or much about a Public Option, so ... why bother? A Demo ... what?

I drive through the 23rd every time I go up the 87 to Quebec or the 81 to Ottawa.

Posted by EBW at 02:36 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

During the last primary cycle, one campaign messaged that party members who had insufficient enthusiasm for their guy, were not concerned by their guy's record, in so far as their guy had a record, on domestic policy issues, but were animated by the construct of race.

This week their guy is pitching Chicago, and the other serious choice is Rio. North of the grand, militarized fence vs South of the same racial and economic offense. Anglo vs Hispano.

I can't wait to learn yet again why selection of the better policy choice -- there have been no summer games south of Mexico, the US has been selected twice, for the XXI Olympics in 1976 in Los Angeles (hi mom!) and XXVI 1996 in Atlanta -- equity and inclusion, is proof of ... I suppose this time it has to be "unamericanism", though the campaign meme of "racism" is still the standard arm of choice.

Update: Chicago failed at the first ballot. The sins of 8 years of Bush do not go unnoticed.

Update: And its Rio. Hooray for the Americas, not just El Norte.

Posted by EBW at 05:46 AM | Permalink | Comments (4) | TrackBacks (0)

via Susie, at Chris Dodd's website:

Senators Chris Dodd (D-CT), Patrick Leahy (D-VT), Russ Feingold (D-WI), and Jeff Merkley (D-OR) announced today that they will introduce the Retroactive Immunity Repeal Act, which eliminates retroactive immunity for telecommunications companies that allegedly participated in President Bush’s warrantless wiretapping program.

“I believe we best defend America when we also defend its founding principles,” said Dodd. “We make our nation safer when we eliminate the false choice between liberty and security. But by granting retroactive immunity to the telecommunications companies who may have participated in warrantless wiretapping of American citizens, the Congress violated the protection of our citizen’s privacy and due process right and we must not allow that to stand.”

Senator Leahy, Chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee said, “Last year, I opposed legislation that stripped Americans of their right to seek accountability for the Bush administration’s decision to illegally wiretap American citizens without a warrant. Today, I am pleased to join Senator Dodd to introduce the Retroactive Immunity Repeal Act. We can strengthen national security while protecting Americans’ privacy and civil liberties. Restoring Americans’ access to the courts is the first step toward bringing some measure of accountability for the Bush-Cheney administration’s decision to conduct warrantless surveillance in violation of our laws.”

“Granting retroactive immunity to companies that went along with the illegal warrantless wiretapping program was unjustified and undermined the rule of law,” Feingold said. “Congress should not have short-circuited the courts’ constitutional role in assessing the legality of the program. This bill is about ensuring that the law is followed and providing accountability for the American people.”

“During the previous administration, telecommunications companies were granted retroactive immunity for violating the rights and privacy of millions of Americans,” said Merkley. “I am proud to join Senator Dodd and co-sponsor the Retroactive Immunity Repeal Act to help restore accountability and increase oversight to protect the privacy rights that have been central to our nation since its inception.”

Over the last two years, Senators Dodd, Leahy, and Feingold have led the fight against granting retroactive immunity to the telecommunications companies. However, last July, Congress passed FISA legislation that granted retroactive immunity over the objections of the Senators and others.

This bill seeks to reverse the mistake of the last Congress and repeal the retroactive immunity provisions. The Senators strongly believe that the courts, and neither Congress nor the Administration, should be the ones to determine whether these corporations violated the law and rights of Americans and whether or not they should be held accountable.

Posted by EBW at 04:47 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)