ICANN

Video: ICANN Halts Domain Tasting

In this video, Brad Fallon of FreeInlineReport.com reports on ICANN’s decision to remove the five trial period of owning a domain name. Brad notes that the decision followed Google’s move to block AdSense from websites less than five days old.

From the video notes on YouTube:

Following Google’s decision last week to block AdSense from web sites less than five days old, it looks like ICANN is removing the five day trial period for owning a domain name. This would stop the practice that was abused by “Domain Tasters” — people who take out a name for four days, put up Google ads, collect the money from the ads, and then cancel the name before they have to pay for it.

Video: John Lisbin on Domain Parking at SES NY 2008

John Lisbin, the chief strategist at Point It! discusses domain parking and domain tasting with Greg Jarboe of SEO-PR at SES 2008. In the video below, Lisbin addresses the issues advertisers have with domains in relation to searches performed using Web browser toolbars.

Happy Halloween to ghosts, goblins and geeks everywhere!

[Photo credit: Noel Dickover]

Ah, All Hallows Eve has come around again, though the holiday is being celebrated with costume-clad kiddies collecting candy and pumpkin-brew besotted co-eds in these parts, as opposed to the bonfires of Samhain, the celebration end of the harvest that is the ancient ancestor to to Halloween.

In honor of the holiday, we’ve opened the Vault of Tech Terror up again and added a new Halloween tech trivia quiz to the archives. We made the Word of the Day zombie army. And we asked our readers the following three questions:

1) Should you ever travel to Hades, you’ll have to get by this three-headed dog, the namesake of a secure method for authenticating a request for a service in a computer network.What’s the secret word?

2) This underworld denizen is also a program or process that is dormant until a certain condition occurs, when it’s summoned up to do its processing. Is it a(n):
a. demon
b. zombie
c. troll
d. ogre
Answer

3) You might see “RIP” on a gravestone, but your network depends on it for managing router information within a corporate LAN. What does RIP stand for (other than, of course, “Rest in Peace”)?
Answer

We’re not the only ones celebrating the holiday in fine techie fashion. Wired, for instance, has a marvelous gallery of geek-o-lanterns, including the Death Star pictured above, carved by one Noel Dickover. (Hawkeyes, beware: Iowa has begun taxing jack-o-lanterns, geeky or not.)If you’re stuck for ideas for dressing up, Chris Pirillo came up with five costumes for geeks: Steve Jobs, an iPhone, Chris Crocker, the Blue Screen of Death or the FreeBSD Demon. BBspot does him six better, with 11 more costume ideas for geeks, including a personal favorite: a 1G iPod Nano “complete with scratches and class action suit.” Heh.

CNET has a gallery of frequently hilarious ways to geek out this Halloween as well.

Christopher Null, over at Yahoo Tech, has his own list of the best geek costumes, including the TRON guy and an exploding Sony battery.

Brent Evans did a great geeky Halloween costume roundup as well, including Lego bricks, a working PacMan costume, Rubix cubes and the Wii-mote. Nicely done! He also links to the Wired Flickr photo pool of techie costumes.

Browsing through the lists, its not hard to notice a decidedly male-tinge to the selections. For the ladies out there, here’s a top 10 list of the best Halloween costume ideas for girls. Along with Trinity, Sarah Connor, Princess Leia and Ripley, she offers up Ada Byron Lovelace. Well played! I loved the Matrix, Terminator, Star Wars and Alien, to be sure, but true geek-cred goes to anyone dressing up as the first computer programmer.

I’m vaguely surprised by the lack of a Bluetooth fairy out there.

Halloweenforgeeks.com has a ton of DIY projects for anyone that wants to upgrade the normal porch offerings of carved pumpkins and spiderwebs. If you just want off the shelf geeky gizmos to make the holiday howl and friends freak out, PseudoMart.com has a great list of techie toys for Halloween.

Finally, if you’re swamped with work and haven’t been able to pull together a costume, you can always print out your own Halloween mask. Thanks, Lifehacker! Now THAT’s geeky.

Have fun out there!

The Internet Governance Forum: Internationalizing ICANN

The inaugural Internet Governance Forum took place from October 30 through November 2, 2006, in Athens, Greece.

The IGF Web site, which features text transcription of the opening ceremony and sessions on openness, security,
diversity, access and emerging issues was “set up to support the process started by the UN Secretary-General with a view to convening a new forum for multi-stakeholder policy dialogue.”

Archived webcasts of the proceedings are also available, in untranslated form, in English, Français and Español. The opening ceremony featured words from Vint Cerf and Robert Kahn. Much of the dialogue at the event was marked by implicit - and some times explicit - criticisms by delegates of US authority over ICANN.

The Secretariat’s informal summary of all the sessions is available here as a PDF.