Happy New Year 2004, quicktime style.

Wendy Seltzer has some interesting thoughts on our expectations of privacy in a world of blogs and camera-phones. It makes me wonder whether we'll ever see Congress legislate a "privacy flag." Privacy flag legislation would require the makers of digital devices to honor individual privacy flags. We would all carry little cards with our privacy preferences on them. Set your ID to "anonymous" and you'd show up as a dark blur in digital pictures and video.

"One who gets older brother tickets to the Rose Bowl...between the 40-50 yard lines."

I have a great sister. :-)

According to CNN.com, domain names are bouncing back: "Last week, a Florida man sold men.com for $1.3 million, a healthy profit over the $15,000 he paid for it in 1997."

Larry Lessig reminds us of the good work EFF has done this year and that it's the season for giving. If you haven't given to EFF this year, now's a good time.

Bruce Tonkin's Protocol for participation in Names Council calls. He missed the rule near the end that requires everyone to vote along provider-user lines.

No one seems to know. As a reader pointed out, start with Public Interest Registry, which is the authoritative source for .org whois lookups. If you search for "icann.org," you'll see the list of nameservers associated with the domain name, but for the contact information, you'll see this: "SEE SPONSORING REGISTRAR." The sponsoring registrar for "icann.org" is Register.com. A lookup of "icann.org" on Register.com's whois server provides: "Domain not found."

I'm going to circle back to this in a future blog post, but here's some interesting background reading: Life in Mugabe-ville. It's an interview with Samantha Power, who wrote a very powerful piece in this month's Atlantic called "How to Kill a Country." Mugabe was in Geneva last week, as part of WSIS, hoping to do for the DNS what he's done for Zimbabwe.

Felt like a big one. I thought I was getting sick, but then I realized it was the building that was rolling, not my stomach.

Update: 6.4 in San Simeon, halfway between LA and SF.

Jamie Cowling reports on WSIS for openDemocracy: "The World Summit on the Information Society venue was bland, the rhetoric cloudy, the chocolates consoling – but ideas and energy flowed around the fringes."

Remember the December 7th "go live" date for .pro registrations? That was the "real" live date announced after the launch was delayed from April to August to September. You guessed it: delayed again. According to .pro-accredited registrar EnCirca: "12/10 Update:The launch of both third-level and second-level .Pro domains will occur at the same time. Go-live is anticipated in February." Yeah, right.

DomainPeople.com: ".PRO is unlike any other domain name extension to date." Supply your own punchline....

From an Editorial in the Baltimore Sun: "...Even more misguided is the international movement to take registration of Web addresses from a U.S. nonprofit - the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) - and put it and other coordination under the United Nations. At the 200-nation U.N. World Information Summit last week in Geneva, delegates opted to keep this bad idea afloat with a two-year study."

Ross Mayfield on why Verisign and Stratton Sclavos pose "a genuine threat to the very decentralized nature of the Internet."

He's right. More from Wendy Seltzer.