Internet

Postel Award goes to Dr Jianping Wu

by kierenmccarthy on August 2, 2010

Dr Wu - Postel Award winnerMissed this last week: the Internet Society (ISOC) has handed out its annual Postel Award, which honours those who have made outstanding contributions to, broadly, the Internet.

The winner this year – awarded at the IETF meeting in Maastricht on Wed 28 Jul – was Chinese technologist Dr Jianping Wu (left). Dr Wu received the award for “the pioneering role he has played in advancing Internet technology, deployment, and education in China and Asia Pacific over the last twenty years”.

Dr Wu developed the China Education and Research Network (CERNET), the first Internet backbone network in China. It has since become the world’s largest national academic network. He has also been building a large-scale native IPv6 backbone in China. IPv6 is a crucial but complex expansion of the current Internet system and it is large-scale rollouts that are making it possible to shift the Internet onto these new networks. [click to continue…]

Popularity: 3% [?]

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.UK is 25 years old

by kierenmccarthy on July 27, 2010

The United Kingdom’s dot-uk Internet domain is now 25 years old. Which in the Internet world is ancient.

The first dot-uk registrations were in 1985 – a decade before most of us had ever even heard of the Internet. As one of the oldest, dot-uk is also one of the biggest registries in the world. According the organisation that has run the dot-uk registry since 1996, Nominet, it is now the fourth largest registry in the world with 8.5 million registrations (I thought it was fifth after dot-com, dot-net, dot-cn and dot-de. Anyway…)

Of course there shouldn’t really be a “.uk” at all. According to the international standard used to create the “country code” top-level domains on the Internet (ISO 3166-2 (or is it ISO 3166-1?)), the United Kingdom should have been represented by “.gb”, denoting Great Britain. So how come dot-uk even exists?

[click to continue…]

Popularity: 3% [?]

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Calendar for ICANN ATRT meetings

July 23, 2010

ICANN is currently being reviewed by an independent Accountability and Transparency Review Team (ATRT). Their meetings are open, but I have only been stumbling on them by accident.
A closer look at the ATRT’s webpage reveals at the very bottom of the page a PDF that contains details of their future meetings. Not exactly the [...]

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Wordpress and Thesis: your upgrades are driving me mad

July 12, 2010

I love Wordpress – the software that this blog runs on. And I love Thesis – a clever piece of software that works with Wordpress to provide all sorts of clever customisations.
But the combination of them is driving me nuts at the moment. In particular, the fact that they keep bloody updating both too frequently, [...]

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Dot-xxx approved by ICANN Board

June 25, 2010

As flagged up yesterday, the ICANN Board has approved the dot-xxx Internet extension at its Board meeting just now in Brussels.
It did so almost unanimously (two abstentions) but rather grumpily, however, with several members saying they were “uncomfortable” with the decision and appearing the blame the “process” for forcing them to make a decision. The [...]

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Dot-xxx to be approved tomorrow

June 24, 2010

The domain name system’s overseeing body, ICANN, will approve the controversial Internet extension dot-xxx, designed for online pornography, at its Board meeting tomorrow.
The pre-announcement came in an extraordinary statement read out at the start of the public forum at ICANN’s meeting in Brussels by the organization’s general counsel, John Jeffrey.
The statement said that the [...]

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The ICANN Board by the ICANN Board

June 2, 2010

Self-evaluation paints picture of Board at odds with itself
A self-appraisal of the ICANN Board has just been posted on the organization’s website.
In it, Board members rate 89 different measures of their own performance according to a seven-measure rating from “strongly agree” to “strongly disagree”. Unfortunately, despite plenty of figures in the documents, there is [...]

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Summary/analysis of dot-xxx issue

May 18, 2010

I have spent the past week going through literally thousands of comments about whether there should be a new dot-xxx Internet extension for pornography. You won’t be surprised to hear it has brought out some strong feelings.
Anyway, the company behind the application, ICM Registry, hired me to write an objective summary of what was said. [...]

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My feedback to the Crown Prosecution Service re: Twitter joke prosecution

May 12, 2010

I have just send a complaint – or “negative feedback” as the website wishes to call it – to the Crown Prosecution Service in South Yorkshire for its prosecution of Paul Chambers for making a (stupid) joke on Twitter. I reproduce it below:
If you also wish to complain, you can do so at: http://www.cps.gov.uk/contact/feedback_and_complaints/index.html
No doubt [...]

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The future of the Internet is here: non-English extensions hit the Web

May 5, 2010

It’s taken far longer than it should but we are finally there – new, non-English extensions exist on the Internet as of a few hours ago.
The person who hit the button – my friend, Kim Davies – tweeted the news. Kim has already written a quick blog post on the launch, highlighting the Egyptian Ministry [...]

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