This document reports the conclusions of an assessment of the current state and the future prospects of the DNS and its interactions with Internet navigation, including its uses as a means of navigation itself and as an infrastructure for navigation by other means.

The full text (284 pages) is available for online reading. You can also download a 31-page executive summary in PDF.

Signposts in Cyberspace: The Domain Name System and Internet Navigation

It added that the Domain Name System should continue to be administered by a nongovernmental body -- not turned over to an intergovernmental organization, as has been suggested by some nations and international agencies.

Key Internet System Faces Technical and Political Challenges

But there's another kind of scientist who never breaks through, usually because while his discovery is revolutionary it's also maddeningly hard to summarize in a simple sentence or two. He never produces a catchy hit single. He's more like a back-room influencer: his work inspires dozens of other innovators who absorb the idea, produce more easily comprehensible innovations and become more famous than their mentor could have dreamed. Find an influencer, and you'll find a deeply bitter man.

A classic error. Don't confuse the man with his memes. A man is more than the sum of his memes.

'Dark Hero of the Information Age': The Original Computer Geek

The big secret of lock picking is that it's easy.

The MIT Guide to Lockpicking

Hollywood once famously waged a legal battle against Sony's video recorders. That cultural divide separating hardware makers (who want to empower consumers with technology) from content providers (who are nervous about this empowerment) remains deep. Stringer's elevation seems to signal a profound choice by Sony to see entertainment as its future, possibly at the expense of the consumer electronics empire that became a symbol of postwar Japan's resurgence.

When the IBM-Lenovo deal was announced, some argued during the ensuing discussion that the standalone PC has become obsolete, its traditional functions coopted by other devices. "PCs are passé; consumer electronics are the new edge", it was said.

It is becoming increasingly clear that the new edge is in China and Korea, not Japan.

Sony's New Tune

Google Desktop Seach has been updated, and is now out of beta.

The company said Google Desktop Search would find photos, music and video files stored on PCs more easily, search the text of documents in Adobe PDF format and index Web pages surfed using Firefox and Netscape browsers, among other changes.

A more complete list of new features is at

http://desktop.google.com/whatsnew.html

Google Desktop Search

Vint Cerf, who was a graduate student working in Len Kleinrock's lab at UCLA when the first Arpanet link was installed there in 1969, is aware of the egos involved in this debate over legacy. He said he hoped the announcement of the Turing Award would not rankle colleagues.

I work down the hall / "next door" to Cerf's co-author on RFC 675, "Specification of Internet Transmission Control Program" and on a January 1974 conference paper which actually precedes the publication of the canonical and widely cited Cerf-Kahn IEEE paper of May 1974 cited in this Katie Hafner piece.

I haven't had a chance to chat with him about this NYT article, but he didn't seem at especially "rankled" this past week ... and while it's no fun to miss out on a chance to read your name in the Gray Lady, I should think that any inkling of rankling is more likely attributable to losing out on a share of the $100,000 prize.

Laurels for Giving the Internet Its Language

"A pathbreaking account of the threat to privacy in today’s digitized world."

Praise for The Digital Person:

Bruce Schneier: "An unusually perceptive discussion of one of the most vexing problems of the digital age ... a fascinating journey into the almost surreal ways personal information is hoarded, used, and abused in the digital age."

Publishers Weekly: "[T]his book is so refreshing ... it offers insights into the current state of privacy in America and some intriguing prescriptions for altering that state of affairs. ... Anyone concerned with preserving privacy against technology’s growing intrusiveness will find this book enlightening."

Chapter 1 is available online at

http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=609721

The Digital Person: Technology And Privacy In The Information Age

Rishab Aiyer Ghosh is Program Leader at the International Institute of Infonomics at Maastricht University. He was one of the founders and is the current managing editor of First Monday, the peer-reviewed Internet journal.

Collaborative Ownership and the Digital Economy, by Rishab Aiyer Ghosh

If railroads were IBM mainframes, then cars were like Linux PCs.

Think of "Make" Magazine in the 1920s.

In the first decades of motor travel, between 1900 and 1940, Americans were buying automobiles in record numbers. Cars were becoming more easily affordable, not only for high-income families but for middle-class families as well. And as they bought, they redesigned. By examining the ways Americans creatively adapted their automobiles, Tinkering takes a fresh look at automotive design from the bottom up, as a process that included manufacturers, engineers, designers, advice experts, and consumers, from savvy buyers to grass-roots inventors.

With the automobile came the possibility of touring; travel was no longer constrained by railroad service or availability of hotels. Consumers became tinkerers and, occasionally, inventors as they outfitted their cars for travel and to meet middle-class standards of comfort and economy on the road. Franz weaves together a variety of popular sources, from serial fiction to corporate documents to explore how Americans not only embraced the automobile but became fascinated with ingenuity in the early twentieth century. Some canny drivers moved beyond modifying their individual cars to become inventors, patenting and selling automotive accessories for a burgeoning national market.

Tinkering documents how the inventive dexterity of consumers was both practical and creative, from the addition of steel fenders for safety to the development of attachments that would allow motorists to use their cars as tents. Earl S. Tupper, an early and eager automotive tinkerer, would go on to invent Tupperware. Women were also extremely active in this reinvention, as the automobile had revolutionized the daily life of the American housewife.

Kathleen Franz takes us under the hood of American prewar automobile culture to reveal a vibrant enthusiasm and entrepreneurial spirit.

Tinkering: Consumers Reinvent the Early Automobile