I am in Kuala Lumpur this wekend to give an overview of IDN to Government Advisory Committee of ICANN.

This ICANN meeting seem to be political charged, surrounding mainly on the 15M USD proposed budget for ICANN and heated discussion in ccNSO. There are also some discussion about new sponsorred TLD and and .net redelegation. Rumors also goes around that ICANN should consider auctioning TLDs in future to make up for their budget :-) (heck, why not just auction .net? :-)

Anyway, on the way back to Singapore now but will be coming back again on Tuesday…See you all at the IDN Workshop on Wednesday.

Just concluded a successful APEET meeting in Singapore (thanks you!) and I am getting to leave for Kuala Lumpur in 10mins time. But before I leave, I thought of leaving two interesting news I saw today.

First, is a report of Verisign SiteFinder by Steve Crocker (a representive of Security and Stability Advisory Committee of ICANN) titled Redirection in the COM and NET Domains, A Report from the ICANN Security and Stability Advisory Committee (SSAC). An executive summary of the report can be found at CircleID. Bravo! Bravo! I taken the same position which you can read here, here and here.

The second is this excellent contribution from SaudiNIC on their experiences in deploying Arabic Domain Names (via ITU-SPU). It is the best written report I seen from Arabic world..well-written, well-thought and technically strong. I actually learn a lot reading from the report. I am really encouraged at this work…and there might be hope for Arabic Domain Names after all. (Is it the same guy that show me the Etisalat Arabic Domain Name … I will know soon :-)

Bravo! (via Interesing-People)

From: Randall <4whp@insightbb.com>
Date: July 12, 2004 10:23:08 PM EDT
To: Dave Farber
Subject: Re: [IP] The Great IP Debate

On Mon, 2004-07-12 at 07:41, David Farber wrote:
> In addition, carriers have invested so much in their legacy voice
> networks that many hesitate to move voice traffic from the legacy
> network to an IP platform. “Circuit switched is not going away. It’s a
> legacy system that will be with us for a long time,” says John Marinho,
> vice president of marketing and offer management at Lucent’s Mobility
> Group. “But VoIP is the cornerstone that will enable a lot of things to
> be possible in the next several decades.”

In 1979, Dr. Jerry Maren stood in front of my CIS 100 class and said “Punch cards are Yesterday’s News, but if any of you hope to get jobs working with computers, you will be working for banks, governments or insurance companies, because that’s where the computers are. Those people have invested millions of dollars in punch card technology, and they’re not going to just throw those card readers away – so you’re going to learn how to use punch cards, even though they will be gone in twenty years or so.”

ps: The original mail is not written by Dave: he just forward it.

Here are Michael Moore’s extensive factchecking notes on Fahrenheit 911. (via Joiito). What it doesn’t say is how Michael strings the facts together in such a way to paint a reality he likes his audience to see. (No, don’t get me wrong…I watched the show in US and love it :-)

Incidently, the next few days will be pretty hectic for me, with APEET (Asia Pacific ENUM Engineering Team) meeting in Singapore and travelling up to Kuala Lumpur for ICANN meeting and also UNDP-APDIP’s Internet Goverance discussion. Oh, it would also be fun to catch up with friends … :-)

Just release Drupal for Bloggers V0.10.

There are several changes with this release: Mainly, this is brought up-to-date with Drupal 4.4.2 so all the bugfixes from 4.4.1 to 4.4.2 is now integrated into D4B.

Captcha is also rewritten as a separate module and can be enabled not only for comments but also user registrations, forums, stories books etc.

D4B v0.10 also provide a tool¹ for users who wish to migrate from 4.4.x to D4B. See UPGRADE.txt for more information.

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I don’t normally blog news in Singapore because there isn’t a lot of exciting news (and also I seldom read local newspaper anymore). But there are interesting two news in Straits Times today.

First of all, 24 bloggers will be blogging live from National Day Parade (9th Aug) on www.ndp.org.sg. While it is common for high-tech conferences to have a blog on the side, it is pretty cool for NDP committee embracing blogging as a media (together with TV and radio ;-)

Acting as ‘eyes and ears’ at the big birthday bash, they will send text and picture messages through their mobile phones to the parade website www.ndp.org.sg, to keep people in the thick of the action at the National Stadium.

Not only that, anyone can also moblog the National Day Parade *grin*

Mobile phone users, except those using pre-paid cards from M1 and StarHub, will be able to post their own comments on the mobloggers’ sites and chat via SMS with the mobloggers.

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I probably should blog about this earlier but forgotten until this reminded me: PostOne.com is shutting down.

PostOne.com started as a project (Pobox, which is why I have pobox.org.sg) I did for fun back in 1994. The idea comes from a discussion I have with Markus Ranum (of Firewall-1 fame). There was this cool thing called Mosaic and we were discussing what we can do with this new stuff called World-Wide-Web. Markus suggested ‘Why not merge WWW with Email?’¹. So 3 days of no-sleep hacking² later, PObox was borned.

PObox started as as Email forwarding service with the tagline ‘Email for Life’³. But it is because of a more selfish reason: Back then, the university issues us with a new account (and thus email address) every freaking year. Later, I added ability to read email and also netnews directly from PObox.
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Got the news that Michael Powell, chairman of FCC started a blog on AlwaysOn (via Interesting-People)

I am participating in Always On Network’s blog to hear from the tech community directly and try to get beyond the traditional inside the Beltway Washington world where lobbyists filter the techies. I am looking forward to an open, transparent and meritocracy-based communication— attributes that bloggers are famous for!?

Check out what he is blogging! Welcome onboard, Sire!

Just one comment: Why Always On, a supposingly blogging site “Powered by Geeks like you” yet operated just like a news site. (No, it is worst! It doesn’t provide any RSS feeds for each author and forcing you to register to do anything more). I can understand you probably want a hosted service but Typepad and Blogger.com would be so much nicer.

ITU and WSIS is organizing an Anti-spam Summit from 7th July to 9th July. Due to my already heavy travel commitment, I wouldn’t be able to attend but one of my guy, Khee Yoke, will be presenting a technical paper.

So if you are in Geneva right now and attending the summit, please say hi to Khee Yoke and Lawrence.

[Update 7th July: A modified version of this article is publish on CircleID.]

I receive some email from friends asking me if I know of the recent IPv9 news from China. I thought I should just blog about it and point them to this entry.

I heard of them first time back in 2001. The technology is developed by 十进制网 called “数字域名” which translate roughly to ‘Numerical Domain Name”. They call it ADDA (All Digital Domain Address) and then later IPv9. (Okay, I laughed back then too so don’t hold back yourself ;-)

The technology¹ as I understand can be summarise as follows: The 10 digits they refer to are phone numbers (China uses 10 digit local phone number). The idea is that you can navigate the web by using phone numbers in the browser. The technology is basically a modified DNS and the business model is to get you to registered your phone numbers with them.

So it isn’t really IP as you would think. But despite these, they seem pretty well connected in China and have support from Ministry of Information Industry (MII) among others. However, I have not seen any actual deployment anywhere. Lots of press release but thats about it.

¹ There is a article in Sina.com explaining the technology pretty well but it is written in Chinese.

² The whole hype maybe dying out on its own soon.