While the ICANN Board considers these concerns, and until they are remedied, CIRA will as of this date:

* Suspend its voluntary contribution of funds to ICANN;
* Hold in trust CIRA's voluntary contributions to ICANN;
* Suspend consideration of any Accountability Framework;
* Decline to host or be a major sponsor of any ICANN event; and
* Cease chairing the ccNSO's IANA Working Group.

Canada is the only place in the official DNS system with what I would consider a reasonable whois privacy policy.

Canada suspends involvement with ICANN.

The last three questions of this CircleID interview with Vint Cerf came from MemeStreams founder Tom Cross. Read on...

Q14: Years ago it was often argued that consumers in the United States were confused by domain names in TLDs other than .com… Has the popularity of search engines, and particularly search bars in web browsers, changed playing field in terms of consumer’s ability to use alternate TLDs and the amount of traffic seen by sites in alternate TLDs from U.S. consumers?—by Tom Cross

Vint Cerf: That’s a good question. There isn’t much doubt that “.com” became a kind of symbol for domain name registrations in the US. My honest impression is that search engines have tended to diminish the importance of “guessing” domain names although I understand that a substantial number of people still try that—and if they fail, they likely turn to search mechanisms. A more serious problem has been that JAVA programmers for web pages often don’t know that there are more than seven gTLDs and that many of them have more than three letters. That leads to rejection of email addresses and other entries into web forms that make reference to domain names. We need some educational outreach to fix that.

Q15: Does ICANN view the bulk domain monetization business as a legitimate activity that contributes constructively to the Internet as a communications tool?—by Tom Cross

Vint Cerf: As an engineer, I must admit that this particular “business” has been a surprise for me. However, it seems to fit within the present framework allowed by domain name operation. Advertising seems to be the primary driver here and it is argued by interested parties that advertising is an important form of commercial communication and therefore qualifies as a constructive Internet application.

Tom Cross (CircleID comment): In particular, with regard to question 15, if you replace the words “domain name” with the word “email” you have an answer to why Spam is good for the Internet. One need not make a general indictment of all commercial speech in order to observe that a practice which increases the street price of domain names by several orders of magnitude while providing comparatively little value in return might not be the most effective use of an artificially scarce namespace. This is where your justification for broadening the number of TLDs lies.

Q16: How much of an impact does the bulk domain monetization business have on the revenue that registrars, registries, and ICANN generate from the domain name system?—by Tom Cross

Vint Cerf: That’s a good question and I don’t know the answer. Probably a key metric is the ratio of bulk domain registrations vs. registrations that are related to resolvable addresses leading to web pages, email boxes, etc. Perhaps some of the registrars and registries who are reading these Q&As would be willing to respond to that question.

At the time of this posting, none of the registrars or registries have chimed in.

Answers from Vint Cerf: The Road Ahead for Top-Level Domains

MemeStreams user Jello is setting lose some code for an idea he was working on. If you have legal expertise and want to get involved in developing software for lawyers, this is something to look at:

Screenshot #1 - Screenshot #2 - Screenshot #3 - Screenshot #4 - Screenshot #5

While living in India I made a little prototype for a process-flow based system for lawyers. Its a Java SWT/JFace app, using the Eclipse Graphical Editing Framework. I love GEF. It boggles my scrotum. Anyway, its not much, but I'm not working on this anymore and so I've decided to set it free. Someone with more legal expertise and more devotion than myself could create something very cool along these lines, and probably will, someday.

Source requests to source@lucision.com until I clean that up and post it too.

Process Flow Based Legal Reasoning and Document Organization

Years of radioactive waste water spills from Illinois nuclear power plants have fueled suspicions the industry covers up safety problems and sparked debate about the risks from exposure to low-level radiation.

The recent, belated disclosures of leaks of the fission byproduct tritium from Exelon Corp.'s Braidwood, Dresden, and Byron twin-reactor nuclear plants -- one as long ago as 1996 -- triggered worries among neighbors about whether it was safe to drink their water, or even stay.

"How'd you like to live next to that plant and every time you turn on the tap to take a drink you have to think about whether it's safe?" asked Joe Cosgrove, the head of parks in Godley, Illinois, a town adjacent to Braidwood.

"The president's plan is misguided. It presents health risks, creates additional nuclear waste that we have no long-term solution for, creates additional terrorist targets that we do not adequately defend, and costs an enormous amount of money. (Bush's) phrase 'clean, safe nuclear power' is oxymoronic," he said.

The problem isn't nuclear power plans. The problem is nuclear power plants built on 60's technology operating way past their design lifetimes.

Every nuclear power plan currently in operation in the United States should be scrapped and rebuilt using modern technology. They would be safer, more efficient, and produce more output. We don't need to create new plants. We need to update the ones we have.

The old reactor cores can be stored on site. Just incase them in plastic and concrete, or something that should last for a few hundred thousand years. Give it a nice external layer of granite so it looks pretty. Put a statute on top of whoever actually manages to make it happen. Have the statue holding an old school lantern in one hand and a bundle of electrical cable in the other.

All these plants already have waste storage on site. In many cases the waste storage facilities have been the only thing these plants have changed over the years. They have been augmented to store more waste from inefficient plants that have been operating for too long. Plans like Yucca Mountain cannot be counted on. A distributed approach is necessary, and we already have it to a certain degree.

Start with this plant, please.

Reuters | US nuclear plant leaks fuel health concerns

Despite protests from other countries, the United States is expanding a top-secret effort to kill suspected terrorists with drone-fired missiles as it pursues an increasingly decentralized Al Qaeda, U.S. officials say.

Current and former intelligence officials said they could not disclose which countries could be subject to Predator strikes. But the presence of Al Qaeda or its affiliates has been documented in dozens of nations, including Somalia, Morocco and Indonesia.

"We have the plans in place to do them globally," said a former counter-terrorism official who worked at the CIA and State Department, which coordinates such efforts with other governments.

"In most cases, we need the approval of the host country to do them. However, there are a few countries where the president has decided that we can whack someone without the approval or knowledge of the host government."

Well, for better or for worse, the age of Nintendo warfare has arrived. Not only are NSA robots conducting searches, but CIA robots are conducting air strikes.

CIA Expands Use of Drones in Terror War - Los Angeles Times

Behemoth search engine Google signaled an even further climb to the top of the Internet mountain Thursday with its announcement that Vint Cerf, one of the founders of the Internet, is joining the company as its 'chief Internet evangelist.'

This is some kind of milestone.

At this point, Google has more brains in one place than anyone can possibly know what to do with. What are they going to do? I picture a situation where they become so dense they fall in on themselves in some giant think-tank black hole. Unless they can keep all these people busy, they are going to simply be well paid bored people. That might have unintended negative effects. Either that, or Google is on its way to become a monastery like church of technology.

I've heard both good and bad things about their culture. I don't buy fully into either take on it. Its going to be interesting to see what happens. I think they have the integrity to keep trying to follow their "don't be evil" mantra, but can they? Not doing what you are capable of is a form of evil, because you hold the resources back from the rest of the world. Its a page from Microsoft, and hopefully not the one Google is flipping to.

Google says `Cerf`s Up`

On the day *I* go to work for Microsoft, faint oinking sounds will be
heard from far overhead, the moon will not merely turn blue but
develop polkadots, and hell will freeze over so solid the brimstone
will go superconductive.

ESR got an email from a Microsoft recruiter who was told by a Microsoft research team that he be would be a good candidate for employment. The recruiter neglected to do any background research on Eric before sending out the email. Something tells me that the research team didn't like the recruiter much and wanted to see something funny happen. It did.. As expected, Eric's response was nice, but in a way with teeth.

Read Eric's response and have a good laugh.

Armed and Dangerous » Microsoft tries to recruit me

The following is from a transcript (via Cryptome) of Roscoe Bartlett (R-MA) speaking about the threats posed by nuclear weapons being used to create EMP pulses:

Iran has conducted tests with its Shahab-3 missile that have been
described as failures by the Western media because the missiles did not
complete their ballistic trajectories, but were deliberately exploded
at high altitude. This, of course, would be exactly what you would want
to do if you were going to use an EMP weapon.

Today we are very much concerned, Mr. Speaker, about asymmetric
weapons. We are a big, powerful country. Nobody can contend with us
shoulder-to-shoulder, face-to-face. So all of our potential adversaries
are looking for what we refer to as asymmetric weapons. That is a
weapon that overcomes our superior capabilities. There is no asymmetric
weapon that has anywhere near the potential of EMP.

Iran described these tests as successful. We said they were a failure
because they blew up in flight. They described them as successful. Of
course, they would be, if Iran's intent was practicing for an EMP
attack.

Iran's Shahab-3 is a medium-range mobile missile that could be driven
on to a freighter and transported to a point near the United States for
an EMP attack. I might state that an early use of EMP is a common
occurrence in Russia and Chinese war games.

The DPRK is also an entity we would have to worry about attempting an EMP attack, although the likely target would be Japan.

I found this speech very interesting. I have thought about EMP before, but I only considered it a threat that would come from the more advanced nuclear powers, such as Russia and China. Bartlett makes it expressly sound like that is not the case. I decided to do a little research, so I started flipping through the Industrial Memetics rolodex.

After speaking to a friend who is an expert in Nuclear Physics, it doesn't look like this is something we would have to worry about coming from Iran, DPRK, or Al-Queda. In the situation Bartlett used as an example, a nuclear weapon detonated 400-600km over the United States, the EMP charge released would be measured in the millivolts-per-meter range, assuming the weapon had a yield of around 30 kilotons. That yield is a best guess for what we could expect of a first generation weapon from an entity like Iran, the DPRK, or Al-Queda. That's a far cry from the type of weapon that created the 5 kilovolts-per-meter pulse experienced in Hawaii during the Fishbowl Series of tests in 1962. Its safe to assume that Iran and the DPRK do not have tritium production and are not working with thermonuclear bomb designs yet.

I did not think to ask what the EMP strength would be like for a 30kt device detonated at 100km. Enough to take out civil communications/power somewhere like NYC or Washington? Given the discussion I had, I'm assuming the EPM created would still be of negligible strength. At that point, nukes start to look more useful in the context of traditional style tactical delivery.

Bartlett on EMP

flynn23 wrote:

Despite the fact that the inFlow DC was taken down because an *external* transformer to the building caught on fire is sufficient enough to worry about, but then I think to myself that it could've been worse - the sprinklers(!) inside the DC could've went off too!

I would love to get the full story behind the handling of this outage. Coming from the perspective of trade craft, I'm highly interested. From what I was able to figure out by talking to people, the IDC's backup systems all functioned after the transformer exploded, but the Nashville Fire Chief told them to pull the plug on the facility. The one fellow I spoke to at Inflow didn't want to give me any details, and I didn't really press him on it. After I got the information I required, I just wished him luck and told him I hope the rest of their day goes better.

I'm guessing that Inflow does not have much equipment/sq footage. In some cases, taking a machine room filled with equipment and pulling the plug is about the best way you could come up with to create a fire hazard. Computer, storage, and networking equipment, when tightly packed, have an amazing quality for holding energy in the form of heat. Once the air stops flowing, regardless of if the equipment is powered down, the temperature can rise rapidly. From what I've been told in my past DC experience, exceeding 120F isn't that unheard of. This has caused DCs to burn down before. This is the type of thing I wonder if the Fire Chief was aware of.

Do you know if their fire suppression system is water or gas? That matters when determining how/if to pull the plug. The equipment can sit and cool down if the environment is (or can be) flooded with gas. If its water, the best way to handle it is to kill the equipment and keep the cooling going, unless of course there is an actual fire within the facility.

I'm guessing Inflow's Disaster Plan does not connect with the city in the way it should. A transformer blowing up should not lead to a DC being shutdown unless its pouring smoke into the facility or something that poses a direct life safety threat.

The Fire Chief's job is to be paranoid, so I can understand the call he made. It just begs a larger question: What do Fire Chiefs need to know about Data-Centers when it comes to these types of decisions? If every time something goes wrong such as an external transformer blowing up, it requires the facility to be shut down, it would be impossible to build a carrier class facility capable of getting past 4 nines without its success grounded on luck rather than design..

While pondering that question, you could watch this music video of the Nashville FDP-EMS doing a training exercise.

What do Fire Chiefs need to know about Data Centers?

This post on the Defense Tech blog covers a few articles related to STRATCOM drawing up a response to a 9/11 style attack based from Iran. Click through for more links..

The plan includes a large-scale air assault on Iran employing both conventional and tactical nuclear weapons. Within Iran there are more than 450 major strategic targets, including numerous suspected nuclear-weapons-program development sites. Many of the targets are hardened or are deep underground and could not be taken out by conventional weapons, hence the nuclear option. As in the case of Iraq, the response is not conditional on Iran actually being involved in the act of terrorism directed against the United States.

The real amusing stuff has to do with the shorfalls of the planning systems for targeting:

For example, of the 12,500 targets in the SIOP at that time, one of them was slated to be hit by 69 consecutive nuclear weapons. It seems superfluous to say that this is crazy, but it is important to understand how the planning process could result in such a figure. At the level of a presidential directive, a document of a thousand words or so, you will have the reasonable-sounding requirement--if you're thinking about war-fighting at all--to, say, target the political and military leadership. That guidance goes to the Office of the Secretary of Defense, which in a 15- or 20-page document called a NUWEP (for "nuclear weapons employment policy") adds some detail: for example, what sorts of leadership facilities should be targeted. The NUWEP then goes to the Joint Strategic Target Planning Staff of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, which in hundreds of pages of a document called Annex C to the Joint Strategic Capabilities Plan lists specific facilities to be struck and damage requirements to be met. Annex C then goes to STRATCOM, where the targetting staff figures out which weapons, and how many, to apply to each target to meet the required level of damage.

When I mentioned Butler's 69 weapons to Dr. Bruce Blair, a former Minuteman missileer and acknowledged expert on the operational aspects of nuclear warfighting now at the Brookings Institution, he found in his notes a statement by a high official at SAC in the late 1980s that the highest kill probability for the United States' best weapon against deeply buried, sprawling, hardened command posts was less than 5% (how they calculate this is a whole other matter, but the short answer is, they guess). Blair got out a calculator, assumed a kill probability of 4% for one weapon, and started multiplying. To attain a 50% confidence in destroying the target required 17 weapons. When Blair got up to 69 weapons, the "kill probability" had reached 94%.

Hey kids, remember to add some type of bounds or exception checking to your code.. That particular "while" statement could lead to a site getting nuked 69 times.

The boys at Lockheed Martin are supposedly working on a new planning system.

Defense Tech: Fun With Nuclear Targeting