Maria

A couple of years ago, I was in Rome for work. I never had the chica-boom, so to speak, to put in the following this taxi receipt for reimbursement.
Gotta love the patriarchy…

Yesterday, one of the biggest events in the history of the Internet took place; non-Latin top-level domains went live in the DNS root zone. In plain English, you can now type the whole of a domain name in Arabic script. Not just the left of the dot (as in dot org) but the right of it, too. The three new top-level domains are السعودية. (“Al-Saudiah”), امارات. ( “Emarat”) and مصر. (“Misr”). They are country code names in Arabic for Saudi Arabia, United Arab Emirates and Egypt.

How did this happen? Years of collaboration and cooperation between countless technical, policy and linguistic experts around the world, endless patience and a fair amount of justified and motivating impatience for people to be able to use their own scripts and thus languages to access the Internet.

As Tina Dam, who leads ICANN work on internationalising domain names puts it, credit goes to the “registries and governments that have worked actively locally; the IDNA protocol authors; the policy makers; application developers” such as browsers who had to figure out how to make the url field read from right to left, and many, many more.

As my old IANA colleague, Kim Davies, says; the hard work and collaboration required to get this far is just the beginning. The people behind these new domains now need to work with their own communities to populate them. Browsers like Firefox don’t seem to have caught on yet, though they’ve had plenty of warning. And many more script and language groups are lining up behind to get their own characters into the root. Word is the Russians want Cyrillic in next (Medvedev got his game face on when he heard the Bulgarians might get there first.). [click to continue…]

I’ve renewed my never-ending summer of Trollope, this time with the Eustace Diamonds, the second – though it feels like the fifth – Trollope where “Frank must marry money”. Never one to shy away from a lengthy aside to the reader, Trollope gives a rundown of the attitudes, circa 1873, of “a fine old Tory of the ancient school, who thought that things were going from bad to worse, but was able to live happily in spite of his anticipations”, a trick the Tea Partiers might usefully learn:

“It was bad to interfere with Charles, bad to endure Cromwell, bad to punish James, bad to put up with William. The House of Hanover was bad. All interference with prerogative has been bad. The Reform Bill was very bad. Encroachment on the estates of the bishops was bad. Emancipation of Roman Catholics was the worst of all. Abolition of corn-laws, church-rates, and oaths and tests were all bad. [click to continue…]

Just before Christmas, I wrote a piece discreetly titled “Sunnyside: Best Book of the Year“. I was surprised that one of the most inventive, funny and profound books I’ve ever read hadn’t made it onto the seasonal glut of ‘Best of 2009’ books. That post elicited an email from no less than Glen David Gold himself. And always with you, gentle reader, in mind, I asked Glen if he’d be willing to take part in a CT book event. He said he would.

So here we are, with (northern hemisphere) summer right around the corner and the paperback of Sunnyside due out in the US any minute. In a couple of weeks, I’ll be posting on CT a set of essays about Sunnyside. Some great writers are going to take part. We’ll have Stuart Evers, a writer many of you will know and love from the Guardian’s book review pages; New York comics guy Adam McGovern, the man behind Pood; deadlines permitting, Robert Hanks, who reviews films books and pretty much anything, often for the Independent; and of course Glen himself with an essay in response to all of ours, and plenty of badgering about in the comments.

Consider this a heads up to read that lovely hardback or rush out and buy a copy before the event kicks off. Sunnyside is a terrific read; fantastic fun, tugger of heartstrings, prompter of head-scratching thoughts on the meaning of life. You won’t regret it.

Over at Henry’s place earlier today, I handled silly putty for the first time in my life. Great stuff, especially when it pops those unexpected little bubbles. Henry’s missus, Nicole, showed me a great silly putty trick; you squash it onto a newspaper and make an awesome transfer. The nearest newsprint to hand was the FT’s editorial page with a great cartoon of Pope Benedict, which I now share with you on pink silly putty. Happenstance being the best form of creativity, my phone’s picture of same included an unintentional shadow that looks like the jaws of a shark or similar closing on the pope’s head while he looks worriedly away. Happy Easter Sunday, y’all.

Sad and upsetting times in Ireland. Cardinal Brady, it turns out, was instrumentally involved in the closed investigation of the monstrous Fr. Smyth, and himself swore to secrecy two children raped by Smyth. The incident simply resulted in Smyth getting some form of censure from the Church and going on to rape and abuse many, many more children. Whose parents were in turn stonewalled by the Church. How does anyone get over this? Should they?

Meanwhile, Pope Ratzinger is wriggling off the hook – at least this hook, this time – for his own involvement in a cover up. It’s odd to me that people are searching so intently for Ratzinger’s smoking gun, when as head of the Congregation for the Indoctrination of the Faith, he wrote to bishops telling them that breaking the seal of secrecy on church investigations of sex abuse was punishable by excommunication. That’s the smoking gun that destroyed not just the childhoods and perhaps lives of one or two children in Ratzinger’s direct responsibility, but thousands of children around the world who deserved better from the one, true Church.

The Irish adult voices of raped children are joined by American ones; people now grown up who were raped and abused by Fr. Smith when he was sent away from these shores and off to where he wasn’t known and could start again. A Connecticut woman poignantly asks why she was repeatedly raped by a priest who had been sent to America instead of to the police. An Irish woman asks why no one went to the police. If they had, she might have been saved. Many might have been saved. [click to continue…]

As foreshadowed a while back, I’ve taken myself off to Nairobi for the week to take part in the ICANN meeting here. The security is pretty heavy but I’m glad to report the opening morning was one of the best attended I’ve ever seen and had by far the best dancing. I’ll be blogging about it pretty much every day this week. So far, I’ve written about the CEO’s provocative speech on the first day, where he called out unnamed African government representatives for telling porkies about IPv6 availability. I also mused about how we should act with President Omar al-Bashir of Sudan probably attending an unrelated meeting in the building tomorrow.

Topics I’m planning to write about during the week will be what’s next for the proposed .XXX top level domain, local civil society organisations and social entrepreneurship, something about the new top level domain process in general, and a few other bits and pieces. If there are pressing topics of this meeting you’d like me to write about, let me know in comments here.

But as the blog posts are a bit specifically Internet policy wonk for CT and I’m also doing a bit of self-marketing at the mo, please come on over to www.mariafarrell.com if you’d like to read more. I’ll probably do a more general wrap up post on CT at the end of the week.

Update – just realised I forgot to add a link to the ICANN meeting itself, for anyone who’s interested. What with all the security concerns, remote participation has been beefed up. No better time to get informed & involved.

This is a travel bleg. In a couple of weeks’ time, I hope to meet up with my beloved who’ll briefly be in Fort Benning, Georgia, and spend a weekend travelling together in Georgia or Alabama. His initial thoughts lead to south Georgia and the coastline or perhaps into Alabama. Mine are more a night in Athens, soaking in some music, and a drive around the classic heartland. The cherry blossoms in Macon also appeal, though we’ve got plenty of those in D.C. We’ve already been to Savannah and are more interested in visiting smaller towns this time, and getting a feel for another side of America. 48 hours is a very short time so spend in a place I’ve wanted to visit for so long. We’ll be flying back from Atlanta but don’t plan to spend time there. Any wisdom to offer?

Oh dear. Half of Greece is now protesting against the EU as the cause of budget cuts, and not, say, their own lying government(s), aversion to tax and an enormous black economy. They could even more logically protest about Goldman Sachs’ role in the affair. But no, it’s all the Germans’ fault.

Invoking the European statesman’s version of Godwin’s Law, Greece’s deputy prime minister Theodoros Pangalos says Germany never paid proper reparations following its occupation of Greece in 1941:

“They took away the Greek gold that was at the Bank of Greece, they took away the Greek money and they never gave it back. This is an issue that has to be faced sometime in the future,” Mr Pangalos told the BBC World Service.

“I don’t say they have to give back the money necessarily but they have at least to say ‘thanks’,” he added.
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Three Google executives have been convicted of violating Italian privacy law because of a children’s bullying video posted briefly by Google in 2006. Although Google took down the offending video of several children in Turin cruelly taunting a mentally disabled boy, and subsequently helped authorities to identify and convict the person who posted the video, three executives were convicted today of violating privacy. A fourth employee who has since left the company had his charges dropped, which seems to indicate that a political point is being made. The executives in question are outraged, and former UK Information Commissioner Richard Thomas is quoted as saying the episode makes a mockery of privacy laws.

For years I’ve observed that Italy always pushes for the most extreme EU version of laws about privacy and security and then domestically gold-plates them into laws that would seem more at home in Turkmenistan. It makes other Europeans scratch their heads as the Italians generally aren’t willing or able to enforce their draconian laws. Several years ago over a pint in Brussels, an exasperated UK official told me ‘the Italians have no intention of ever implementing this stuff, but we’re a common law country and if it’s on the books, we actually have to do it’.

Update: Milton Mueller has an interesting take on the decision and makes the point that the E-Commerce Directive has not aged well in an era of user-generated content.
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Although I no longer work for ICANN, I’d planned on attending its meeting in Nairobi next month to meet old friends and drum up some work for my new consulting business. The Nairobi meeting is scheduled to run from 7-12 March. The biggest issue on the table is a crucial stage in the addition of new top level domains; the vote by the Board on how to handle expressions of interest. But in the last 24 hours, ICANN’s COO, Doug Brent, has published a security warning that may result in the meeting being cancelled.

If this happens, it will be a real blow for the Kenyan Internet community. A previously planned meeting in Nairobi was cancelled because of security concerns prompted by election violence a couple of years ago. I thought this was the wrong call at the time, as election violence tends to die down and our meeting wasn’t till several months later. But I didn’t question and don’t envy the people who have to make that decision.
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Nominet, the body that administers the .UK country code, is holding an EGM later this month to decide on its future governance structure. As my old colleague Kieren McCarthy points out, the proposals include “a larger Board, lower voting thresholds, explicitly recognising that Nominet has a “public purpose”, giving the Board the right to set pricing, and a promise to review the organisation’s current membership setup to pull in more of the Internet community into its decisions.” These are all very good things.

Nominet has been through the wars in the past couple of years, with the biggest battles provoked by domainers (bulk commercial buyers of domain name registrations) trying to take over the Board of what is essentially a public interest organisation. (Like all fights, it’s a lot more complicated than that. Kieren wrote about the power struggle last year.)DTI, now of course known as BERR, was alarmed and threatened to take it over altogether. A big part of the problem is that there’s a very low bar for voting rights – basically anyone who does bulk registration of names – and so turnout is low, meaning capture by self-interested groups is distressingly easy. The changes being proposed at the EGM would address this. But they need to be voted in…

So, to the probably tiny percentage of CT readers who are interested, please do head over to Nominet and inform yourself about these issues.

Full disclosure: Through my work with ICANN (where I finished up last month), I got to know some of the Nominet team and think they’re doing a good job in difficult circumstances.

The WaPo online has been given a good tongue-lashing by – so far – every single commenter on their ‘Is Elizabeth Edwards Right to Drop John?’ discussion.

The forum set-up goes; ‘Elizabeth Edwards and her longtime husband, former senator and Presidential hopeful John Edwards, have separated, according to People magazine, via Reliable Source. … Is Elizabeth Edwards, who is battling incurable cancer, doing the right thing by separating from John? Should she file for divorce? Weigh in below.”

Responses range from to “how in the world would I know whether two people I never met should stay together? Why would the Post have such an incredibly stupid discussion?” all the way to “When The Post would offer such an idiotic, shallow, voyeuristic question for discussion, it should surprise no one that the institution of the fourth estate has failed.” The obvious question, ‘is this TMZ?’, is asked along the way.

Shame on WaPo. This is cheap journalism in both senses of the word. Once more the newspaper is called on the carpet by readers who have no difficulty seeing the difference between public interest and voyeurism. How has WaPo fallen so low?

Any of us who’ve been around the block a few times work-wise know how strong the toxic effect of a few key people can be. A whole organisational culture can shift with shocking ease from collegiality to zero sum games by the simple failure to punish bad behaviour. As soon as a minority is rewarded for – let’s call it non-cooperation because there’s such a range of behaviours that can poison a workplace – then the rest look like chumps for not piling in. But you don’t need game theory to explain something most of us have experienced. The nasty effect of ‘a few bad apples’ is nothing new. (A striking example of a good place gone radically bad is HP. Anyone thinking of voting for Carly Fiorina for public office should read this).

I’ve no particular insight to what’s happened in the Washington Post. I suspect the unbearable commercial pressures have changed the balance of power between editorial and commercial people to the point where cheapo user-created content and page views trump journalistic merit. They should listen to their readers to whom that bright line is very clear.

Winter has been brutal in more than the obvious ways. I just heard via a friend’s Facebook update that Vic Chestnutt gave up the ghost on Christmas Day. Justin Keating, a lion of the Irish left has also died (Garrett Fitzgerald remembers their work together in cabinet here) Cardinal Cathal Daly has gone to God, just as the Catholic hierarchy finally, mulishly owns up to its failure to protect children from sexual abuse. By Irish standards, his funeral seemed small and subdued, testament to the painful truth that however much we get right in this life, getting one awful thing very, very wrong is hard for others to forgive.

A funeral full of colourful characters, sadness and celebration was that of Michael Dwyer, Ireland’s best film critic. He was described by Daniel Day Lewis as “gentle, modest and kind”, a critic who “was never cruel, ever, nor was he self-serving.” That is high praise from an actor. (More here) Dwyer wasn’t afraid to tell you when a film was rubbish. He just had no need for spite or ego in how he did it.

Hugh Linehan relates many of Michael Dwyer’s achievements, and reminds me of lots I hadn’t known of or had forgotten: Dwyer was a Kerryman, and gave the Tralee Film Society and later the Federation of Irish Film Societies a kick in the arse at a time when there was so little choice in Ireland for films, books and music. He founded and later saved the Dublin Film Festival. Dwyer had friends throughout the world of cinema; the French government recognized him and declared him a Chevalier des Arts et des Lettres.

I grew up in a little town in 1980s Ireland. I wouldn’t wish to have lived anywhere else, but even to a rather prim teenager it felt limited. Most of the notoriously banned books like Ulysses or Lady Chatterley’s Lover were freely available by then, but our cultural window was still narrow. Books were Mills and Boone in the supermarket or something you went to Dublin for. Films were whatever was showing at the local flea-pit, assuming it was open and not, at that moment, turned into a restaurant or just left to rot. Television had two channels and video, when Xtravision came to our town, was mostly Rocky’s and Jean Claude van Damme flicks.
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