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April Foos RFCs


My friend Tom has a new book, this time around in a lighter vein. If you are a geek with some history, you will find it worth a read. Check out his Live Journal post for more info.

April Foos RFCs


My friend Tom has a new book, this time around in a lighter vein. If you are a geek with some history, you will find it worth a read. Check out his Live Journal post for more info.

Slashdot has a post today on the Web turning 16, which links to W3C’s history of the web page. Back in 1994 or 1995, shortly after my site was listed in a top 100 list (I think PC Computing Magazine?) some guy contacted me with a bit of interesting info: according to his records, my CERN HTTPD server was among the first 250 sites (I forget how he calculated that — perhaps based on the old Yahoo index?). Reading through the W3C history page I see:

I started up my server in early February 1993 and shortly after sent information about it to the WWW mailing lists of the time. Depending on what is meant by “known” above, It seems quite possible that the guy was right about my making the first 250… maybe…

Vint Cerf is making noises that IDN is a huge technical challenge:

I respect Cerf but this seems like fear-mongering (perhaps to counter international pressures particularly on ICANN, which is today controlled by the USA) rather than a technical argument. Uniqueness of names can be guaranteed in IDN, and talk of “permanent” break of the Internet into non-interoperable components, is a bit irresponsible. Also, phishing/spoofing attacks (the concern brought up above regarding the certainty of users in accessing sites) are not unique to IDN and have been addressed both before and also within IDN. Wikipedia offers a decent introduction to IDN/IDNA that addresses many of these points, and provides information on IDNA support in applications (e.g: Mozilla/Gecko).

The opinion of Viviane Reding of the EC, quoted in the same article, are, I think, a bit more on target:

I cannot but draw parallels to the (oft-mentioned) doomsday protestations of car manufacturers regarding everything from seat belts to better mileage.

A bit of slightly old news: A judge in Illionois awarded [default] $11 million to a person/entity listed as a spammer in Spamhaus’ block list. There are many interesting issues here, primary of which is that of jurisdiction. Below is Spamhaus’ response:

Below is ArsTechnica‘s report on the affair:

[ Link ]

Computer World has a report on the recent Farber and Cerf debate on net neutrality at Center for American Progress. I think Farber’s warning is appropriate:

The latest thing from Google: Google Checkout. An e-commerce (what a quaint old term ;-)) payment system. One nice feature I notice is that Google will help anonymize your email address.

Just for the laughs:

Most of you probably have a desktop computer, perhaps also a laptop, one or more hand-held device (Palm computer, iPod, etc), and a mobile/cell phone (and there is also the home phone, but I will ignore that here). The standard problem: keeping the information sync'ed up between all of them, without needing data re-entry.

What data?

At the least, contact/addressbook information, and calendar/task entries. Stuff that falls under the PIM (Personal Information Manager/Management) cloud.

How is it accessed?

You would think that in the Internet age you would store the information on a central server and access it using standard protocols supported by client applications. That, it turns out in my experience, is tougher than I would have thought.

The technology

If you live in a pure Microsoft world (Windows on your PC, laptop, handheld and mobile phone) you probably can stop reading, at this point, and add a comment exhorting me to come over to your side! Windows probably does a decent job of Sync'ing between your computer and your handheld or mobile phone. Throw in an exchange server and you probably get syncing across computers as well. Well, what about the rest of us?

The standard technologies (well, one of the standards: as the saying goes, the great thing about standards is that there are so many to choose from!) for contact and calendar information are LDAP directories and iCalendar based calendar subscriptions and import/export.

Surprisingly both LDAP and iCalendar are supported by today's addressbook, email and calendar applications, including: Mozilla Thunderbird, Mozilla Sunbird, Apple Addressbook (and hence Mail), Microsoft Outlook (from what I know), the many GNU/Linux/GNOME/KDE applications (Kmail, Evolution, Kontact, etc).

Well, are we done, then?

Annoyances

Unfortunately there are many annoyances to deal with:

Is there hope?

There is hope for the future, but my investigation has found nothing with enough coverage to make it worthwhile. The exception, if any, is ScheduleWorld. As far as I know, these are your options: