Wednesday, June 6, 2012

New Net Name System Mired in Controversy


New Net Name System Mired in Controversy
By BEN ROONEY

If you want to own your own top-level domain you have until Friday to submit your application (along with the $180,000 fee). Once the deadline passes, that is it for the foreseeable future.
The original closing date was April 12, but this was extended had to be to be extended by the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers, or ICANN, the Web's names regulator, after it found "unusual behaviour" in its systems.
The most dramatic shake-up of the internet's naming system could see the introduction of over 1,000 new "top level domains". Top-level domains (TLD), as the name suggests, refer to the very top of the Internet's naming system and include the 22 generic TLDs such as .com, .org and .net. They also include the 250 or so country code TLDs (such as .fr for France, .de for Germany or .ru for Russia).
Last year, ICANN agreed to throw open the naming convention, so that anyone with the money, the technical expertise and the ability to prove their competence can own any new TLD. The plan is to allow the introduction of the so-called ".brands" so that, for example, Apple AAPL -2.82% could purchase .apple (rather than www.apple.com). More generic extensions, such as .music, .web, .beer, .pizza and .sport are also available.
When new registrations closed on March 29, there were 839 registered users on the system; a user can apply for up to 50 domains. ICANN will announce the details of the process in the week beginning April 30.
The plan to open up the naming system has been mired in controversy. The U.S. Association of National Advertisers sent a petition to U.S. Commerce Secretary John Bryson expressing "strong concern" about the proposals. "ICANN's action was taken despite widespread and significant objections raised throughout the process by many in the global community of internet users," the petition said.
Signatories to the petition included Adobe Systems, ADBE -1.10% American Express, AXP -1.31% Burger King, Coca-Cola, KO -0.39% Dell, Ford Motor F -1.24% Company, General Electric GE -2.18% Company, Hewlett-Packard, HPQ -2.11% Johnson & Johnson, JNJ -0.95% Procter & Gamble PG -0.42% and Publicis Groupe PUB.FR -2.08% .
However, Peter Dengate-Thrush, who was Chairman of ICANN at the time the organization was steering through the changes (he stood down in June 2011), stood by what ICANN had achieved. "It coming up to a year since I left. I don't think there is anything that we could have done, or should have done differently about the process. It was an unprecedented set of negotiations between the board and the governments of the world."
The move also angered the U.S. government. ICANN's application to the U.S. government's National Telecommunications and Information Administration to renew the contract to run the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority, which underpins the internet's numbering system, was rejected on March 9, even though ICANN was the only applicant. The contract has been temporarily renewed until September.
Although he no longer speaks for ICANN, Mr. Dengate-Thrush said the failure to renew the IANA contract was not a significant issue. "I am reasonably confident that ICANN will end up running the contract because ICANN has been built by the international community to do its job.
"[I] Just see it as a reasonably straight-forward commercial negotiation between parties to get to where they want to. It is not a threat to ICANN. The threat to ICANN would be if the global internet community said we no longer want to use the ICANN process as the forum for developing internet policy. ICANN's job is to make the policy for allocating addresses.
"One of the points the US Department of Commerce raised was functional separation, so they might want a bigger firewall between the policy work that ICANN does, and the implementation work it would do with the IANA contract."

Twenty Percent Of American Adults Never Use The Internet
Author: Jessica Grabert
With the Internet widely available for use in homes, schools, and in public spaces like libraries, one would think nearly all of the American population would have at least checked out the Internet at least once or twice. Turns out, reality is much farther from the truth: according to The Pew Internet Project, one in five American adults never go online.
If babies and maybe puppies were involved in this equation, the numbers would be a little less shocking, but since we are only talking adults, the figure is far more harrowing. According to the study, most of the adults who do not use the Internet live in households where no one uses the Internet. Even more problematic, most responders to the study have no interest in any online activity, stating the Internet is not useful or has no germane content.
The news is not all bad, however. Despite the issues still present with the digital divide, Internet use is increasing across the board. According to eWeek, in 2011, only about half of Americans had Internet access and now 62% have the much faster broadband access. Now, even lower income groups and those with no college education have been increasingly using the Internet, mostly due to the wide availability and easy access of mobile devices.
Despite the obvious presence of a digital divide, the numbers are certainly improving. If you flip them on the head, the glass is even half full.

As if Nokia Lumia 900 Windows Phone didn't have enough problems
Nokia has enough Lumia 900 marketing problems, without twitter making more. The photo with this post is pretty self-explanatory and shows how nasty promoted tweets can be.
The smartphone went on sale from AT&T April 8 for $99.99 -- that's quite a good price. Then almost immediately users started complaining about Internet connectivity problems, and Nokia quickly responded by making a magnanimous offer: $100 back to the people who already bought the phone and were willing to install a software update. Anyone else: Phone replacement. Meanwhile, Lumia 900 is free to new buyers until April 22. Okay, so why is there a promoted tweet in my feed on April 15: "That's right!"
Sure, it's a March 26 tweet, but there's no place for such an offer when the phone is free nearly three weeks later. Many people won't look at the date stamp. Small plus: Customers expecting to pay 100 bucks but finding the phone costs nothing once at AT&T. They should be happy campers. For others familiar with the temporary free offer, there could be confusion and reprehension.
I don't know how these promoted tweets work, so it's all a mystery to me. Would someone more knowledgable than me like to explain this?

Soldier Crabs Used to Create Computing
By David Murphy
No, the next computer you purchase isn't going to be powered by crabs. Nor will any physical computer on this Earth likely construct its logic from a series of slow-moving crustaceans.
But that's not to say that it's impossible to do so.
Researchers at Japan's Kobe University and the United Kingdom's University of the West of England have conjured up a system for defining computer logic based on the real-life movements of a bunch of crabs. Soldier crabs, specifically, whose natural tendency for swarming can be exploited in a maze-like environment to serve as living representations of AND, OR, or NOT functions.
Lost yet? Here's how the experiments worked: The researchers first built a series of gates – two "walled" tunnels that fed into a single walled tunnel. Crabs would be placed into each of these walled tunnels and, as a result of their natural movement, follow the walls up to the point where both combined into one. The crabs would then combine their individual swarms – and velocities – and continue down the new, single tunnel.
In other words, the crabs recreated an "OR" function: The two tunnels the crabs were first placed in are analogous to saying, "Show me pictures of kitties or puppies." And the merger of the "kitty" and "puppy" tunnel would be the direct result of the query, which the crabs – analogous to data – would walk down.
The researchers found it a bit trickier to replicate the experiment with an "AND" gateway – two paths converging into one, with the crabs ideally ignoring two other paths representing the outputs "NOT AND" as well as "AND NOT." They didn't go quite as great a job on the "ignoring" part of the experiment, but the researchers believe that results can be improved, "by creating a more crab-friendly environment," writes Wired's Olivia Solon.
The crab experiments are the biological equivalent of billiard-ball computing, or the idea that the collision of balls and walls (assuming they never lose energy) can mimic various computations. The crabs needed a bit of a head-start in their computational sessions, however. Researchers used shade, or the crabs' natural fear of birds swooping down to eat them, to encourage the crabs to get computing.

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