Decius wrote:

From the beginning, people have talked about building an Internet that wouldn’t depend upon the TLD hierarchy. It doesn’t mean there would be two or three Internets, but that you would have a domain name system that wouldn’t depend upon hierarchical naming. As long as there’s coordination across hierarchies about ownership of domain names, you wouldn’t necessarily produce any destructive results.

Lessig on UN on ICANN: Fragment it!

I actually don't think this sort of technical design is as simple as Lessig thinks. This would involve rewriting DNS and it would result in far slower queries. Furthermore, it wouldn't really eliminate the need for central authorities, as there would need to be some system that determines who gets to be a root and what rules they need to follow in order to claim domains. They aren't going to let just anyone do that. So we're back to where we started, with a bunch of technical bloat to add to our policy bloat.

If we could come up with a way to transition away from all of the non-country-code TLDs, then we might have a way out. Each country's diplomatic mission (to the UN or whatever) would disseminate that country's NS records and glue and the root zone would consist of the concatenation of those records. A federated root zone.

RE: Foreign Policy: Seven Questions: Battling for Control of the Internet

ORSN, European Open Root Server Network
The Independent DNS Solution with IPv6 support for the European Community.

Paul Vixie is involved with this ... I'm not sure what the point is. On that note, I've never understood why recursive nameservers don't just track the root zone and do away with the root servers altogether -- each nameserver would know about all of the TLDs and their authoritative NS.

European Open Root Server Network with IPv6 Support

Liferea is a news aggregator for online news feeds. There are many other news readers available, but these others are not available for Linux or require many extra libraries to be installed. Liferea tries to fill this gap by creating a fast, easy to use, easy to install news aggregator for GTK/GNOME.

liferea -- RSS Aggregator for GNOME

Rattle wrote:

Behemoth search engine Google signaled an even further climb to the top of the Internet mountain Thursday with its announcement that Vint Cerf, one of the founders of the Internet, is joining the company as its 'chief Internet evangelist.'

This is some kind of milestone.

At this point, Google has more brains in one place than anyone can possibly know what to do with. What are they going to do? I picture a situation where they become so dense they fall in on themselves in some giant think-tank black hole. Unless they can keep all these people busy, they are going to simply be well paid bored people. That might have unintended negative effects. Either that, or Google is on its way to become a monastery like church of technology.

I've heard both good and bad things about their culture. I don't buy fully into either take on it. Its going to be interesting to see what happens. I think they have the integrity to keep trying to follow their "don't be evil" mantra, but can they? Not doing what you are capable of is a form of evil, because you hold the resources back from the rest of the world. Its a page from Microsoft, and hopefully not the one Google is flipping to.

For everyone who hasn't heard otherwise, I'm starting at Google tomorrow. So I'll have the inside story shortly :)

RE: Google says `Cerf`s Up`

There are lots of jabber clients, even for cellphones -- Palm, J2ME, Symbian, WinCE, etc.

Jabber Clients

Japan's space agency plans to launch an arrow-shaped airplane at twice the speed of sound high over the Australian outback as early as next month in a crucial test of the country's push to develop a supersonic successor to the retired Concorde.

From what I've heard, the concorde was not very nice in the passenger cabin. Boeing seems to be betting that people would rather have a more comfortable ride than a faster one. Not to mention the huge premium you have to pay to build and operate a supersonic jetliner.

Japan to Resume Supersonic Jet Test

OMG! Its like a car. Except that its like a bike. Except that its like a fighter jet. Must be seen to be believed. This was featured on Top Gear on the Discovery Channel. Apparently, it costs €35K.

CARVER - The most athletic car in the world

Now when will they sell me one that lets me roam between the AP in my apartment and the cell network?

ZyXEL P-2000W_v2 - VoIP Wi-Fi Phone

MSH, or Microsoft Command Shell, is a command line interface and scripting language being developed by Microsoft. It is similar in usage to the Unix shells, but is based on object-oriented programming and the .NET framework.

For basically 20 years, bash has been the state of the art in
deployed interactive text-based user interfaces. That's pathetic. Its been taken as an article of faith that such things are inherantly difficult to use, have a steep learning curve, etc, and that GUIs are preferable. I have long wondered where we could go from the UNIX shell if someone devoted real resources to developing something. This is one possible answer.

Windows Monad Shell (msh)

Free software, despite the price, can be confusing and costly for corporations to use. A few freely distributed programs, like the Linux operating system and the Apache Web server, have become well known, but most are still unproved.

To address the problem, Carnegie Mellon University, Intel and SpikeSource, a company that supports and tests corporate open-source projects, have devised a rating system intended to reduce confusion and guesswork in evaluating such software. The initiative, Business Readiness Ratings, is to be announced today at the O'Reilly Open Source Convention in Portland, Ore.

Huh ... this is the first I've heard of this.

Rating System Will Evaluate Free Software