I'm hearing from several members of the ICANN community that the Second Life software doesn't run on their computers. At the same time, I've heard from others that Ninca Island is a terrific idea for a virtual place to gather for those who aren't attending ICANN meetings in person. For the time being, I'm painfully aware that many ICANN participants will be locked out of Second Life because of bandwidth and/or hardware issues. Believe me, you won't be missing anything. This isn't -- yet* -- an official ICANN venue, and it's still very experimental. I expect lots of computer crashes and frustration. I think we can learn a lot about remote participation through the SL experiment, however, so I hope that those who can get SL to work will join in.

I've given several in world private tours over the last few days. If you'd like to arrange a meeting inside Second Life to receive a personal tour of the facilities and learn a few tips about how to maximize the SL experience, drop me a note. I'm not just your Ninca Island bartender, I also provide guided tours.
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* Yes, I said "yet." I am hopeful that we (as in the collective ICANN community "we") can demonstrate that virtual world participation is not only possible but productive and cost-effective. I hope that, down the road, ICANN can adopt something like Ninca Island for real meetings. Looking into my crystal ball, however, I'd say that the reality of productive, virtual world conferencing is at least two years away. So it you're not on this bleeding edge of experimentation, don't worry. We'll catch up to you down the road.

Now that ICANN has changed its RSS feed so my aggregation loop doesn't choke on it, I've given the official ICANN RSS feed the most prominent place on my icann.blog.us web site. This means that whatever ICANN publishes -- even an item it might wish to title 'Bret Fausett is a Big, Fat Idiot' -- will write to the upper left column of my icann blog. I have a few other items syndicated there as well. If you're writing about ICANN regularly and I've missed your weblog's RSS feed, drop me a note and I'll add it to the syndication column. You can title your items whatever you'd like, and they'll appear in the left margin of this weblog.


Competition at its best. I'm at the Starbucks in La Canada, California, drinking coffee and checking email while I wait for the morning traffic to subside...but I'm not using the Starbucks-T-Mobile wifi. As I started to log in this morning, I searched for nearby networks and saw a wifi hotspot from the competition next door. The hotspot is named "Goldstein's Bagel Bakery Public." What an idea: compete with the Starbucks next door by providing free wifi. And great advertising too. Next time I wait out the traffic, I'll stop next door.

If you're new to Second Life, go here to create a new character. Then download the software (available for Windows, Mac, and Linux) and log in. Once you're "in world," as it's known in Second Life, you'll land in an orientation area. This is a place where you can get dressed, change your appearance, and learn a little about Second Life navigation. Whenever you're comfortable with the interface, come on over to Ninca Island. Here's how to do it.

At the bottom of your Second Life window, in the lower right, you'll see a button called "Map." Alternatively, you can select "World Map" from the View menu. On the right side of the map window, you'll see three red circles. The third one down is 'search by region.' Type "Ninca" into this box and press the search button. A map of Ninca should start to resolve in the map window, and you'll see the word "Ninca" in your search result box. Click on "Ninca" in the search box, and then press the "Teleport" button in the bottom right. You'll land in the middle of Ninca island. I'm not sure which direction you'll be facing when you land, but turn around until you see the circle of flags surrounding a large fountain. That's the center of the conference facility. Walk or fly around and take a tour. (I've update the ICANNWiki page with these tips.)

The doors to the main conference center are open. The doors to the small conference center, with three break out rooms are closed, but you can open them by simply clicking on the doors. You are welcome anywhere on the island. Nothing is locked or private.

Just inside the doorways to the main conference center, you'll see several glass tables. I'm starting to leave some background materials for the Sao Paulo meeting on these tables. Click on the pamphlets that are sitting on the glass tables, and you'll be able to pick up the briefing materials in the form of Second Life notecards. If you have materials you'd like to leave, email them to me.

See you in world!

Verisign has the following announcement on its website:

VeriSign Now Offering Chinese Character Extensions  
VeriSign Digital Brand Management Services is now offering the following Chinese character extensions:

•         .中国 (.china) 
•         .公司  (.company) 
•         .网络 (.network)

Domain names cannot exceed 20 characters (each constituting element is considered as one character). For further details, please contact your VeriSign Digital Brand Management Services Account Team or Enterprise Customer Support.

We're discussing this issue in the ALAC, and I've asked the GNSO to place it on the agenda for an upcoming meeting.

ADD: A reader asks: "Regarding the VeriSign announcement -- are you sure they're not just selling the CNNIC IDN names?" Fair point. Looks like that is possibly what is going on, given the similarity in the TLD offerings between what is on the Verisign page and what CNNic is offering. It's not clear from the web posting, however, whether Verisign is offering this service as a registrar or as a registry.

Dear ICANN Secondlifers,

The Second Life grid is down this morning for a software upgrade. You'll need to download the latest version of Secondlife (you'll be cued to do so the next time you try to log in) before re-entering Second Life and Ninca Island.

For those of you who are new to Second Life, this is a great time to sign up for a free account and explore Ninca Island. It's almost finished!

      Bret

Global Name Registry has asked ICANN for permission to release two-letter second level domain names for public registration. I'm not sure why they were on the registry-reserve list in 2003, but whatever the initial thinking, it doesn't strike me as a concern any longer. Am I missing anything?

A few weeks ago, I purchased an island in Second Life and hired a development team to build a conference facility where remote participants could gather in parallel to ICANN and Internet Governance meetings. The island is named "Ninca" (an anagram for "ICANN"), and if you're already a Second Life user, you can teleport there to have a look around by clicking on this slurl. Send me email or in world IMs with your suggestions for improvement or new functionality.

The island is very much a work in progress, but the facilities are generally in place, even if we're still building some of the conferencing functionality (e.g. video and audio streaming, in conference blogging, and chat logging). I've instructed the development team to have some very basic functionality in place by next week's IGF meeting in Greece, where we'll run some beta tests, and to have full conferencing functionality in place by the December ICANN meetings in Sao Paulo. Be patient with us as we build out this space.

To the greatest extent possible, I'm trying to duplicate the in person ICANN experience in world at Second Life. By the time of Sao Paulo, we'll have desks at the conference center where you can collect and read all of the background material, and you should be able to make comments to the ICANN comment boards directly from inside Second Life. I'll be both at the meeting in Sao Paulo and in world on Ninca Island, and I'll try to act as a bridge between the two worlds. Sponsors at the Sao Paulo meeting, or anyone else for that matter, also will be able to have (for free) a table on Ninca Island where they can distribute their promotional materials.

If you're new to Second Life, I'm starting to put some background information on the ICANNWiki. In world, I'm "Lex Flagstaff." You'll also be able to recognize me because I'm probably the only guy in Second Life wearing a suit and tie.

And, finally, just like at the Wellington meetings, we have "an ICANN bar" on Ninca Island. I tend bar on Friday afternoons, so drop by for a virtual beer.

As it turns out, I was wrong about ICANN not updating its RSS feed. It has been updating the RSS feed continuously, but it was ordering the items from oldest to newest. Now, as I understand it, better RSS readers will read the date elements of the feed and sort entries however you specify, but my RSS reader (and those of others, I'm sure) were simply presenting the entries in the order in which they appeared in the feed. This meant that we were seeing the same entries at the top, day after day, while new entries were being added to the bottom where we weren't looking. ICANN has changed the order now (Thanks!) so those of us who were not reading the new items at the bottom of the feed now will get them at the top where we were looking.

Jon Postel, 6 August 1943‒16 October 1998. Vint Cerf's RFC2468 is worth reading again.

I found this bit of ICANN information fascinating:


Does anyone know anything about these "persistent" requests to ICANN? I'd like to see one. Shouldn't the requests be public anyway?

Here's where it gets a bit more interesting. .KP is on the IANA Root Zone Whois index, but the specific entry does not list any delegee. And .KP is not in the root zone. So why carry an entry in the Whois for a TLD that has not been delegated?

Does it mean anything at all that the .KP page on the IANA website was "last updated" on September 16, 2006? Questions, questions, questions. The answers may tell us something about the politics and points of control behind ICANN.

I don't think that the pursuit of ICANN over a specific domain name is going to go anywhere. ICANN doesn't operate any registry infrastructure, and as far as I know, its contracts with registries and registrars don't require those companies to take instruction from ICANN about the disposition of individual domain names. So to the extent that e360Insight thinks that ICANN has the power to suspend the domain name "Spamhaus.org," it's lawyers are woefully mistaken. This attempt will go nowhere. (See the Proposed Order drafted by e360Insight's lawyers here.)

But seeking to satisfy the judgment against registration interests supported by Reston, Virginia-based Public Interest Registry would be much more interesting.

For more, see this article on CircleID and this article on ICANNWatch.

ICANN has announced that it has a new RSS feed for news about Internationalized Domain Names (aka "IDNs"). I wouldn't get too excited about this until they start updating their main RSS feed (last item is from June), but at least it shows the organization hasn't completely forgotten about RSS.

I've syndicated the new ICANN IDN feed in the left marging of the icann.blog.us site. (I'd add the main ICANN feed to if it ever updated).

ADD: See comment below. I'm not sure when ICANN started updating the feed, but when I checked on it this morning through my syndication software, it was still months old. Nice to see it working again though. This is helpful! (and I've added the feed to the sidebar on the icann.blog.us page.

Harvard Law School's Jonathan Zittrain, writing in The Guardian: "ICANN's decisions have been neither brilliant nor terrible...."

Jerry Archer, in an opinion piece for CNET: "Security-wise, the proposed .com registry agreement, which is now pending before the U.S. Department of Commerce, would allow VeriSign to do, fundamentally, as it sees fit."