Within months of the government-run "Association of Kazakh IT Companies" getting control of Kazakhstan's internet domain, it shut down the website of British comic Sacha Baron Cohen (best known as Ali G). The site at www.borat.kz featured another of Cohen's comic creations, Borat Sagdiyev, a Kazakh journalist. It was removed from the Internet.

Why? The president of the organisation said it was so the comic "can't bad-mouth Kazakhstan under the .kz domain name". If you want an example of government-owned and run censorship on the internet, you'll be hard pushed to find a clearer example.

In principal I think governments should control their ccTLDs, but this is what happens. I think Kazakhstan is in the wrong, but its to be expected.

Linked in this story is another story about Iraq's ccTLD that is interesting. The previous owners of the domain were sent to prison for selling computer parts through a broker to Lybia and Syria. They really got nailed because one of their investors was Musa Marzuq, who is connected with Hamas. The U.S. alleges that this computer company was intended as a funding source for Hamas. Google provides a thick and interesting web here. The Council on American Islamic Relations called the convictions unfair, but there seems to be a number of direct links between them and the computer company. The people running the company also seem to have been connected to charities that were funnelling money to terrorist organizations.

Check this bio of one of the company's founders. A well educated technology guy who has been in the US for decades. Someone you could imagine doing business with... And apparently his business paid someone who planned terrorist attacks in Israel!

It is amazing and troubling to ponder how deeply integrated some of these people are into our society. Did this guy know about all of the activities of the charities he helped start? Did he realize his cousin and co-investor was married to someone who was planning terrorist attacks? Did he contemplate the fact that by generating money in his business he was helping fund her husband's activities? If this guy hired you to do consulting work would you have suspected this connection and turned him down? Why would someone who spent so much of his life developing communications tools that contribute to understanding get involved in business with someone who is killing innocent people?

ICANN and ccTDLs: For great justice?

A scam is something that generates revenue without providing value.

I'm quoting myself here. You can clickthrough for the context.

What is the resolution of ICANN's DNS Whois policy? You can have your personal privacy, but only if you are willing to pay for it. You can register a DNS name anonymously so long as you use an anonymizer service which doubles the cost of your domain. So we're not really worried about accountability per say. We've created a policy which is specifically designed and intended to generate revenue from people who don't want to comply with the policy. It serves no other purpose. Its a scam.

DNS squatting is also a scam. Squatters make money from advertisers and from sales. Registrars make money from the registrations. Verisign makes money from the Registrars. ICANN makes money from Verisign.

The reason you can't find a reasonable, available Internet address for your new project is that they have leveraged the artificial scarcity of the DNS system, largely a product of their own policies, to extort money from you. Everyone involved with the management of DNS is at the trough. Its an Internet Stamp Act! Before you can speak online you must pay all of the corrupt parties who stand at the door with their hand out. Its like doing business in a third world country!

DNS is corruption. There is no party involved who isn't bent by it. DNS must die. We must find another way.

DNS must die!

An online auction of a "brand new vulnerability" in Microsoft Excel had reached about $60 when eBay pulled the item late Thursday.

eBay halts auction of Excel flaw | CNET News.com

The term ambient findability describes a world at the crossroads of ubiquitous computing and the internet, in which we can find anyone or anything from anywhere at any time. It's not necessarily a goal, and we'll never achieve perfect findability, but we're surely headed in the right direction.

This is a brilliant article from a technological vision standpoint and an absolutely stupid one from a political perspective. Its worth reading for both reasons.

On the later point this is a reality which is coming and an attitude that will need to be stared down. A grand tyranny of the majority is called for here, in which one lives in an intolerant social sphere filled with busy bodies who shun and judge eachother using the latest high tech gadgets. Those who whine about personal privacy are called luddites and compared to irrational fundamentalists!

This is nuts. I'd much rather have the FBI breathing down my neck. They have limits, checks, and balances. My neighbors do not. Putting every private life under the microscope usually reserved for Presidential Candidates and Supreme Court nominees will result in a society that is far too conformist to be innovative or free.

You can accomplish most ubicomp applications while protecting privacy.

O'Reilly Network: UFOs (Ubiquitous Findable Objects)

“attacker can perform the aforementioned attack by deploying an uncooled microbolometer thermal imaging (far infrared) camera within up to approximately five to ten minutes after valid keycode entry”

interesting stuff from Michal Zalewski

Cracking safes with thermal imaging

This paper describes a technique that can be used to bypass Windows hardware-enforced Data Execution Prevention (DEP) on default installations of Windows XP Service Pack 2 and Windows 2003 Server Service Pack 1. This technique makes it possible to execute code from regions that are typically non-executable when hardware support is present, such as thread stacks and process heaps. While other techniques have been used to accomplish similar feats, such as returning into NtProtectVirtualMemory, this approach requires no direct reprotecting of memory regions, no copying of arbitrary code to other locations, and does not have issues with NULL bytes. The result is a feasible approach that can be used to easily bypass the enhancements offered by hardware-enforced DEP on Windows in a way that requires very minimal modifications to existing exploits.

This looks like it could be an interesting journal...

Bypassing Windows Hardware-enforced Data Execution Prevention

JS/UIX is an UN*X-like OS for standard web-browsers, written entirely in JavaScript (no plug-ins used). It comprises a virtual machine, shell, virtual file-system, process-management, and brings its own terminal with screen- and keyboard-mapping.

I have no idea what the point of this is, but its impressive anyway.

JS/UIX - Terminal

Tim Kehoe has stained the whites of his eyes deep blue. He's also stained his face, his car, several bathtubs and a few dozen children. He's had to evacuate his family because he filled the house with noxious fumes. He's ruined every kitchen he's ever had. Kehoe, a 35-year-old toy inventor from St. Paul, Minnesota, has done all this in an effort to make real an idea he had more than 10 years ago, one he's been told repeatedly cannot be realized: a colored bubble.

The 11-Year Quest to Create Disappearing Colored Bubbles - Popular Science

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

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)