Here's a question for the Blogware team. I'm putting my money where my mouth is and moving everything over to lextext.org. Is this what I should do: (a) create a CNAME for blog.lextext.org that maps to user.blogware.com; (b) update the URL in the blogware settings; and (c) create a CNAME from blog.lextext.com to blog.lextext.org. Will that break anything?

California's post-Bush v. Gore election system allows "rolling voting" at designated polling places for the two weeks prior to the election date. I voted in the October 7th Special Election today at lunch, using the LA Public Library's new electronic touchscreen voting machines. A significant improvement over punchcards.

Hello, World!

Okay, what changed?

A New Draft Document from the RIRs: "The RIRs acknowledge the benefits in the ICANN structure in terms of providing an open framework for the coordination of a number of critical Internet administration functions, and have determined that they will continue to work within this framework and support ICANN in this endeavor. At the same time the RIRs are aware that ICANN is a private corporate entity, and that its future is one that is not absolutely assured. There is a risk, as with any private corporate entity, that the entity may fail...."

From the new case filing report for LA County: Streamcast has sued its former law firm, Wilson, Sonsini, for legal malpractice for the law firm's alleged failure to tell Streamcast that defense costs of the copyright infringement suits against it might be covered by insurance.

From today's new case reports in LA County: Kenneth Chyten; Marci Taback-Chyten; Oceanview Manor, LLC v. Warner Brothers Entertainment, Inc.; Warner Brothers Television; And Syndicated Productions, Inc., Case No. BC302708: "Defendants allegedly trashed plaintiffs' Malibu estate during shooting of The Bachelor and refused to restore property properly or make claims on insurance. $5 million in punitive damages." Here are the alleged homewreckers.

(Updated 12:09 PDT) Today starts the beginning of a new format for my icann.Blog. I'll only be posting to that section of my weblog on Tuesdays and Fridays. Expect more of a format like today's, with a longer comment followed by a lot of Quicklinks. Read on....   more »

Is "Happy Birthday," which is sure to get at least 1/365th of the spammed population to open the e-mail. That's probably a much higher ratio than with most spam.

Hiawatha Bray quotes a Verisign spokesperson in the Boston Globe: "VeriSign began work on the system a year ago, spokesman Tom Galvin said. 'We began to think of a service that would help improve Web navigation,' he said. Galvin said VeriSign informed a major Internet regulatory body, the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN), of the Site Finder plan. He said ICANN president Paul Twomey raised no objections."

I'm not sure if he'll publish it, but here's a note I sent to Dave Farber's IP list this morning about the ongoing debate over Verisign's Sitefinder service.   more »

Here's a feature I'd like to see in a future version of Blogware that would give individuals some of the same capabilities as big-time news organizations: publish in the future. In other words, I'd like to write an article, save it to Blogware, and have Blogware automatically publish it to the public site on a specified date and time. This would give me the capability of creating daily "editions" of the blog. I could write various notes, save and organize them into a single column, and then queue the column up for publication the next morning. Is that possible?

The Commerce Department has decided to let the Dean Administration handle the next MOU. Or maybe it's the Kerry Administration, I keep forgetting.

From Anick Jesdanun, AP Internet Writer comes this story on how ISC is planning to "patch" BIND to block the Verisign typosquatting service. According to the article, the folks at the Internet Software Consortium expect to release the patch tomorrow.

Here's a note from Tina Dam to SITA that unearths a little nugget from the .aero registry agreement -- as a condition of sponsoring the .aero registry, SITA was required to give up its .int domain name.

I don't think it's a coincidence that Verisign waited until Louie had moved on to implement its typosquatting service.

I received a nice little credit from Amazon.com recently (thanks, Milton!) that made me think I'm not doing enough to generate revenue from this site. Make no mistake, my weblog is and always has been a labor of love, not a means of making money. I'm never going to be able to compensate myself for the time spent reading and writing about ICANN and the other things that make their way to this weblog, but perhaps I can at least cover some of the hard costs associated with running a web server. So yesterday I started running a handful of small banner ads from Domain Direct, Commission Junction, BeFree, and Amazon.com in the lower left margin. They're all semi-related to the content of this web site. If you were inclined to buy any of products or services from these vendors, consider clicking through to them from my web site. I'll get a small commission, but the price to you won't change.

The Domain Direct ad is static. I put it there because I trust the folks at Tucows, and I also own Tucows stock. That's an easy company for me to feel good about promoting. The ad immediately below it is served from Commission Junction; ads from four or five different vendors I selected will rotate in that spot. The ads from Expedia and Travelocity are static and served from BeFree. The Amazon.com ad is based on the keyword "domain name" and will feature about a dozen books rotating in that slot. I picked the keyword, but I have no control over which specific books appear in that slot.

If you were inclined to go to Tunisia and book through Expedia or Travelocity, click through my banner. Who knows, with enough clicks, you may see me there too! ;-)

The ITU Weblog has a note on the ITU-ICANN joint meeting on .int domains. A PDF containing a summary of the meeting and a draft position paper is linked from the ITU site.

Wong Choon Mei writing for Reuters: A fight over the role of governments in managing the Internet is brewing as policymakers prepare for a U.N.-backed summit on the network's future, said an official at the body governing Internet domain names.

ICANN just posted the Preliminary Report for the Board meeting held on 9 September 2003.

It's 6:22 am on Monday, September 15th. Do you know where your preliminary report for September 9th can be found? It's not posted.

Elizabeth Olson follows the story of registries profiting from typing mistakes in Profits in Missed Exits on Information Highway. The article includes quotes from Vint Cerf.

Robert Connelly writes: "Eric Faucet of ICANN blog attended the meeting but avoided signing any of the registers when he arrived. I believe he entered in the back of the room."

Personally, I didn't see Eric, but that shouldn't surprise anyone. He's sneaky. I must have missed his entrance when I was saying hello to everyone. Not only is he good at getting into places where he clearly shouldn't be, he's a good hacker as well. He occasionally posts the most outrageous stuff to this weblog under my name.

Peter Yu's article on "The Neverending ccTLD Story," from the forthcoming book Addressing the World, is now available for download here (find the 'Download Document' icon near the bottom of the page). It's interesting reading.