Internet and e-mail policy and practice
including Notes on Internet E-mail


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27 Jun 2011

The New gTLD Chess Game ICANN
On June 20th, the ICANN board voted to move ahead with the New gTLDs program, intended to add hundreds if not thousands of new names to the DNS root. Now what? Not even the most enthusiastic ICANN supporters think that any new TLDs will be added before the end of 2012, but there are other things going on that greatly complicate the outlook.

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  posted at: 14:48 :: permanent link to this entry :: 0 comments
Stable link is https://jl.ly/ICANN/tldchess.html

17 Jun 2011

Community Registrars Internet

In most parts of the world, people tend to use domain names in their country's top level domain. In the UK, it's whatever.co.uk, in Canada, it's whatever.ca, in Japan it's whatever.co.jp, and so forth. But in the US, most people use .COM rather than .US. Why?

Back in 1992 and 1993, the then-powers that be in the Internet (mostly Jon Postel) decided to arrange the .US domain in a tidy geographic way. As laid out in RFC 1386 and RFC 1480, all registrations had to be of the form <name>.<place>.st.us, such as IBM.ARMONK.NY.US (an example they used.) Government agencies had their own pseudo-places, e.g., WWW.STATE.NY.US. The place names were cities, towns, counties, and such, with reasonable abbreviations allowed such as NYC.NY.US.

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  posted at: 22:46 :: permanent link to this entry :: 0 comments
Stable link is https://jl.ly/Internet/commreg.html

16 Jun 2011

The gTLD Boondoggle ICANN

I've been watching at the excitement build in the domain community, where a lot of people seem to believe that at next month's Singapore meeting, by golly, this time ICANN will really truly open the floodgates and start adding lots of new TLDs. I have my doubts, because there's still significant issues with the GAC and the US Government and ICANN hasn't yet grasped the fact that governments do not defer to NGOs, but let's back up a little and ask whether this is a good idea.

I see four arguments in favor of new TLDs:


  posted at: 19:19 :: permanent link to this entry :: 2 comments
Stable link is https://jl.ly/ICANN/boondoggle.html

03 Jun 2011

Bitcoin and tulip bulbs Money

Bitcoin, for anyone who's not up on their techno-trends, is this year's hot trendy digital payment system. Its main claim to fame is that it is peer-to-peer, not depending on a central bank to issue or validate the "coins", actually blobs of cryptographically signed bits. This makes it both fairly anonymous and hard to manipulate (at least in the ways that real money is manipulated), making it a darling of anarcho-libertarians.

A lot of people have opined on its merits, most notably this Quora message.

I took a look at the design of Bitcoin, which is credited to "Satoshi Nakamoto". Nobody seems to know who he is (or who they are), but he definitely knows his crypto. As a piece of cryptographic software design, it's quite clever. As a system you might want to use to pay for stuff, it's hopeless.

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  posted at: 10:11 :: permanent link to this entry :: 9 comments
Stable link is https://jl.ly/Money/bitcoin.html

01 Jun 2011

Introducing the Inbox Project Email

For many years, the Cornell Legal Information Institute (LII) has been a premier source of reference information about laws in the US and elsewhere. It's been around so long that in its early days, they wrote the first Windows web browser, Cello, so non-Unix users could get to the site.

One day last year, LII director Tom Bruce and I were talking over breakfast, and noted that there was no authoritative online source of legal information about spam and e-mail, something that the LII and CAUCE are, together, uniquely qualified to create. The Inbox Project is a new section of the LII web site, meeting that need.

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  posted at: 23:00 :: permanent link to this entry :: 0 comments
Stable link is https://jl.ly/Email/inbox.html

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Spam trends update for Sep-Nov 2023
55 days ago

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553 days ago

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