ICANN suffers from regulatory capture, mostly to the benefit of US-based corporations.
To cite the main episodes:
• Capture of International Forum on the White Paper (IFWP) (1998): The process
by which the Internet community was to design ICANN was captured by powerful
industry and technical stakeholders. They boycotted public meetings and successfully
proposed their own secretly-written bylaws for ICANN.
• Capture of ICANN Board (2002): The same industry and technical interests
eliminated user representation on the board. (This remains the case today.)
• Capture of the Internet Society (2002): In 2002 ISOC revised its bylaws to ensure
that the society would be governed by its largest corporate members. This has led to
two derivative acts of capture:
o Capture of .ORG registry. This registry is now managed by ISOC.
o Capture of ICANN’s At Large Advisory Committee (ALAC). Nearly 60% of
certified user-related organizations in ICANN are chapters of ISOC.
• Capture of .COM by Network Solutions. This US corporation has extended its very
profitable control of the most popular domain name.

The goal of legitimate private governance of the Internet has not been met. Powerful
stakeholders are able to bend rules in their favor, while the influence of users and civil
society groups has been minimized.

Hans Klien makes a solid arguement that ICANN needs to have a clear government charter and a judicial review process. The problem is that no one has the political legitimacy to establish this. I continue to beleive that this global taxonomy idea is going to come crashing down.

ICANN Reform: Establishing the Rule of Law

Security company F-Secure says it is expecting to see viruses exploiting the rootkit technology used in Sony's DRM software anytime now.

F-Secure's Chief Research Officer Mikko Hypp�nen said that the company was already in discussions with Sony before the news broke on Monday, but because of the huge security risks that this information poses those talks were behind closed doors.

'We didn't go public with the info at the time as we were worried with the implications (especially with the info on how outsiders can hide files which have names starting with "$sys$"),' he said. 'We're waiting for the first virus which uses filenames like that.'

[ And we move one step further... now Sony feels they have the right to root my box in order to keep me from ripping audio tracks. This is all going to end badly for everyone. There's gonna have to be a compromise at some point, because the road paved with heavy duty DRM leads to the utter destruction of the industry, in my opinion. And that's not just the music industry, but the better part of the entire entertainment industry unless lessons are learned. Ridiculous. -k]

PC Pro: News: Sony rootkit DRM to spark copycat viruses

Like a lot of monsters, zombies have their roots in folklore and -- according to some researchers -- in real events in Haiti.

Howstuffworks: How Zombies Work

You might have thought that the White House had enough on its plate late last month, what with its search for a new Supreme Court nominee, the continuing war in Iraq and the C.I.A. leak investigation. But it found time to add another item to its agenda - stopping The Onion, the satirical newspaper, from using the presidential seal.

The newspaper regularly produces a parody of President Bush's weekly radio address on its Web site (www.theonion.com/content/node/40121), where it has a picture of President Bush and the official insignia.

When two bit corporate lawyers make this mistake I'm not suprised, but the White House ought to know better... (This isn't illegal.)

Protecting the Presidential Seal. No Joke. - New York Times

Tim O'Reilly, Malcolm Gladwell, Clay Shirky, Mark Dery, Esther Dyson, David Brooks, and Moby.

TIME.com: The Road Ahead -- Oct. 24, 2005 -- Page 1

Nearly exact self-similar fractal forms occur do in nature, but I'd never seen such a beautiful and perfect example until, some time after moving to Switzerland, I came across a chou Romanesco like the one above in a grocery store. This is so visually stunning an object that on first encounter it's hard to imagine you're looking at a garden vegetable rather than an alien artefact created with molecular nanotechnology.

Coolest vegetable ever.

Fractal Food

Mr. Bush has said he wants to nominate someone in the mold of Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas -- a Supreme Court justice who will interpret the law, not make it. But what exactly does that mean?

In a new book Justice Stephen Breyer, often at odds with Scalia and Thomas, outlines his judicial philosophy, and makes the argument that his is in fact a more democratic philosophy. The book is called Active Liberty: Interpreting Our Democratic Constitution.

Strict Constructionalism makes sense to me as a legal theory. I'm interested in smart explanations of other approaches. Breyer has recently been poking at Scalia. Apparently he has written a book with the specific intent of presenting an alternate political philosophy. This link is to an hour long recording on it.

NPR : Supreme Court Justice Breyer on 'Active Liberty'

Now here's something curious: The Map from the NYT shows the various increases in bankruptcy rates on a county by county basis. The results were not exactly what I would have suspected, given how various counties voted in the last Presidential election:

Is it just me, or are is the map above surprisingly similar to those red/blue maps we saw so much of right after the election?

The really curious thing is that the Gore voters from 2000 are filing for less bankruptcies since 2000, while the Bush voters are filing for more. (Does that make any sense to you?)

The Big Picture: Insolvency Epidemic

Read this whole letter - and see if you can discern what's going on here. Leaving Iraq anytime in the next 5 years will be very very bad.

This is an odd letter. Basically:

Please don't get pissed off cause we think you're cool and all but you can't see the forrest for the trees, so stop doing what you are doing right away. Also, could you please document all your processes so we can fire you are take over your operation? Oh, and if you happen to have $100,000 could you help a brother out? BTW, we think your web site is totally COOL!!!11 I've enclosed a copy of my latest spoken word album. If you could host it that would rock.

The cryptic signoff must mean that they don't trust their couriers to keep their mouths shut about who they are delivering messages for.

I said last month that Zarqawi was undermining Al'Q's broder strategic interests by declaring war on the Shia. Al'Q's leadership agrees with ME?! Now THATS something I never thought I would say!

I must say I was impressed with this gem of wisdom:

Judiciousness precedes the courage of the courageous which is second. And when the two blend in one free soul it reaches everywhere in the heavens.

I might offer the same advice to the Bush Administration on Iraq... And Mr. Bush, if you are reading, and you happen to have $100,000 lying around, I could really use it.

All joking aside...

1. America is going to leave Iraq. Sooner or later, it will happen, and the result will be inevitable.
2. An Islamic theocratic state is going to be established there.
3. People involved with the state will be connected directly to Al'Q.
4. It may be a greater threat to the region then Saddam's Iraq was.

This seems the most likely outcome to me. I am not happy to hear that Al'Q is getting exactly what they want. But I don't see how this is going to pan out differently.

The question is how much power will Al'Q have in the resulting state. Hopefully little, and Al'Z will continue to screw it up. The character of the resulting state in Iraq will have a huge impact on the future of world, and while people like Al'Z and the Iranians and the Americans are trying to influence it, it really comes down to the Iraqis. I hope Bush has read them well, but I fear that three very different cultures are easy to tear apart.

Having said that, I detect weakness in Zawahari. He sees the future of his movement in Iraq. That puts Al'Z in a very powerful position vis-a-vis Al'Q.

Letter from Zawahari to Zarqawi

After laying out that post, its now clear.

Hamdi broke down with Thomas claiming the President is like a king, Scalia, Stevens, and Souter throwing the book at him, and the rest of the court scrambling to pull a rabbit out of a hat to give him what he wanted, which the press dutifully misinterpreted as a strong affirmation of civil rights.

They didn't make Scalia Cheif Justice because he laid them out in Hamdi. They couldn't make Thomas Cheif Justice because hes on the fringe of the court. They don't really want a "strict constructionalist" because the constitution gets in the way of their efforts. They want a loyalist who will defer to them and not get in their way.

The confirmation is really about whether Congress wants to have some control or not.