Negotiators from more than 100 countries agreed late Tuesday to leave the United States in charge of the Internet's addressing system, averting a U.S.-EU showdown at this week's U.N. technology summit.

Maybe the whole thing was a publicity stunt to focus attention on the meeting. In any event, the UN has decided to figure out whether or not they have a problem before they decide to cause one.

CNN.com - Deal averts Internet showdown - Nov 16, 2005

The rate at which individuals shed transactional data simply by living in a networked world seems to increase daily. The composite picture of individual activity that can emerge from such data is often of startling clarity, and will likely sharpen with in the future.  We don’t really have a coherent legal theory to address appropriately the growing privacy interests in this kind of data.
The full-scale judicial supervision accorded electronic surveillance and physical searches is probably overkill, and far too cumbersome for data for which basic investigative access is justified. On the other hand, the Miller view that the "consensual" delivery of this data to third parties strips it of any privacy interest looks untenable when one considers the effect of the information aggregated.

I'm disappointed that Rattle was the only one who rememed the Washington Post's recent coverage of National Security Letters, which is being hailed by people on both the left and the right as important journalism.

This commentary provides more of the debate. The main commentator seems to echo the modern conservative view that the legislature needs to be the final arbiter of civil liberties. Forgive me for being tactless, I think in the general case this view is stupid. The whole point of civil liberties is to limit the power of the democratic government with regard to the rights of individuals. Thats what the court system does. The legislature cannot be its own check and balance. The question here is whether this matter rises to the level of a civil rights issue. I think it does.

There is a healthy debate in the threads...

The Volokh Conspiracy - More on National Security Letters:

The cult TV series "Babylon 5," "Welcome Back, Kotter," and "Chico and the Man" are among the titles to be available on streaming video beginning early next year.

Wow now it looks like not owning a TV really wont matter...

AOL Launching Online Video Of TV's Favorite Oldies

At a recent computer conference, a colleague of
mine from a conservative academic institution chatted
congenially with another conference attendee. At a typical conference such a conversation would be nothing particularly
revealing, but this was DEFCON, and the young lady he was speaking with had a stainless steel spike tipped with a blinking green LED protruding from her lower lip. While some security researchers have described such conferences as “going to a graffiti convention expecting to see those who design spray cans”, I beg to differ.

I'm surprised that this is only getting memed now. Memestreams has one real academic reference, one recipricol reference, and one viewpoint reference, referenced here.

Why Computer Scientists Should Attend Hacker Conferences... (PDF)

Instead of our tradition of espousing peace as a national priority unless our security is directly threatened, we have proclaimed a policy of "preemptive war," an unabridged right to attack other nations unilaterally to change an unsavory regime or for other purposes. When there are serious differences with other nations, we brand them as international pariahs and refuse to permit direct discussions to resolve disputes.
Regardless of the costs, there are determined efforts by top U.S. leaders to exert American imperial dominance throughout the world. These revolutionary policies have been orchestrated by those who believe that our nation's tremendous power and influence should not be internationally constrained.
Even with our troops involved in combat and America facing the threat of additional terrorist attacks, our declaration of "You are either with us or against us!" has replaced the forming of alliances based on a clear comprehension of mutual interests, including the threat of terrorism.

Jimmy Carter expresses himself far more eloquently here then in recent interviews, and far more eloquently then Gore and Dean have in recent speaches. Reminds me a bit of Steve Wozniak's commentary at Hope. One of the things the left needs to have is a clearer voice.

This isn't the real America - Los Angeles Times

bucy wrote:
Is all this fuss just about the root zone or is there more to it?

There is a lot more to it, but a ton of people, like that author in Foreign Affairs I linked back on the 4th, seem to be under the impression that you can solve global problems with spam, computer security, inappropriate speech, hunger, and weapons poliferation by controlling the root zone. They basically have no fucking clue what they are talking about.

There are substantive international issues, but almost none of them is controversial. The only meaty ones are:

Whois privacy (something ICANN should never have stuck it's damn nose into in the first place).
Concerns about the nomenclature of the non-cc-tlds.
Concerns about internationalization/language support issues.
Concerns about monopolistic registrar practices and pricing (see Sitefinder).

The international community is involved in all of these discussions and no one who is talking about control of the root zone is concerned about any of these issues.

Thats it. Any sort of policy which outsteps this boundary is likely to be too coercive and will fragment the system. They very nearly did that with their inexplicable whois policy. Verisign very nearly did it with Sitefinder. You can rest assured that if the US pulled Iran's TLD the root servers would get a giant break on their transit bills that month. Any political or power oriented play in this space will break the system if it is successful. DNS can only function if it has nearly unanimous consent.

RE: Other Nations Hope to Loosen U.S. Grip on Internet

Acidus wrote:
A co-worker got a call from these guys today. Who did you contact in 1988 to even register? The US Commerce department?

Thats an interesting question. I didn't get to a point where I had a need for a domain name until after Network Solutions started in the early 90's (from an NSF grant, the domains where free until 1995).

I did some digging and found some interesting data but there seems to be little information from that time period. It might have been the University of Southern California.

These guys are in VA and seem to scream Feds...

Well, it was called DARPANET.

RE: WHOIS: Holy Crap!

Sony.

Sony has a rootkit.

The rootkit phones home.

Phoning home requires a DNS query.

DNS queries are cached.

Caches are externally testable (great paper, Luis!), provided you have a list of all the name servers out there.

Nice pictures of worldwide distribution of the rootkit.

Kaminski Analysis of Sony Rootkit traffic

A bipartisan group of senators reached a compromise yesterday that would dramatically alter U.S. policy for treating captured terrorist suspects by granting them a final recourse to the federal courts but stripping them of some key legal rights.

Congress finally decides to get involved in the debate.

Senators Agree on Detainee Rights

The consequences of the flaw are severe. It allows any web page you visit to download, install, and run any code it likes on your computer. Any web page can seize control of your computer; then it can do anything it likes. That’s about as serious as a security flaw can get.

Freedom to Tinker - Sony’s Web-Based Uninstaller Opens a Big Security Hole; Sony to Recall Discs