David Farrar

Help!

When I was at the Heritage, one had to login via their Intranet. And it directed me to get.in2.net which took me to heritage homepage.

Now whenever I type in www.kiwiblog.co.nz (set as my homepage) it tries to go to get.in2.net. Only happens in Firefox and only for that exact URL. I have rebooted machine and it is still doing it. Am back home now.

Anyone got any suggestions for how to fix this very annoying problem?

Whoops!

Aaron B just IM'd me to suggest I look at the Xtra homepage at www.xtramsn.com.

Looks like someone forgot to pay the US$35 :-)

Broadband Targets Will Not Be Met

The Telco Commissioner has delivered a blunt warning to Telecom that if it does not change its attitude to wholesaling, then the issue of local loop unbundling will come back on the table.

This makes me somewhat more optimistic that we will get a good decision out of the Commerce Commission with regards to the UBS determination, which may lead to faster and cheaper broadband offerings. Hearings on the draft determination will be held next week.

Frontseat

I'm on the arts show, Frontseat, which screens this Sunday at 10.25 pm on TV One.

I was interviewed by Julie Hall on Bit Torrent file sharing software, how it works, why people use it, and what implications it has for television studios etc.

Was a fun interview, so will be interesting to see how the whole clip comes together.

Spam Prosecution

Great to see Australia using their anti-spam legislation to prosecute one of the major league spammers.

I'm hoping that the NZ anti-spam bill will at least make it into Parliament before the election, and it will get passed into law in early 2006.

Having legislation will not stop spam by any means. However it will be part of the solution (along with education, technical filters etc), and allow action to be taken against NZers who spam, using overseas providers. There are a few of them about, and some are suspected to be pretty major league themselves.

No Internet for Air NZ

I'm disappointed that the new Air NZ aircraft will not have Internet access. When flying internationally, I hate losing 12 - 30 hours of productivity. Once Internet access is offered by rivals, I will try to exclusively fly on such airlines.

I suspect many people will be like me in that regard, and wonder if Air NZ has looked at the revenue gain against the costs of such a service.

Telecom Outage

A story this morning in the NZ Herald on the Telecom outage.

As usual, comments get abridged, so I'll just elaborate a wee bit more here.

I made four main points:

1) Freak accidents do happen where you get two outages at the same time, so one should not be too judgemental.

2) However as Russell Brown has pointed out, greater use of neutral Internet peering exchanges would held mitigate the effects of such outages, as the better connectivity Telcos have, the more resistant one is to such accidents crippling the Internet.

3) Companies which critically need to stay connected, such as the NZ Stock Exchange, should have more than one Telco connection, so if events like earlier this week happen, they don't close down. The .nz registry for example has connectivity through both major Telcos, and also have locations in both Auckland and Wellington, so that it should ne incredibly rare to ever have an outage that lasts hours instead of minutes

4) Both for reasons of stability, but also to cope with the exponentially growing demands, more money needs to be invested in Telco infrastructure.

Multi-tasking

One of the fun things about being involved with InternetNZ, is the massively wide range of issues you get involved in. This week has been almost non-stop, and moving your concentration from one issue to another is a challenge.

Monday was reading a report to prepare for a conference call on how to do a Enum trial in NZ.

Tuesday was a (very good) meeting with David Cunliffe (IT Minister) on around a dozen issues ranging from anti-spam legislation to the Telco Act Review.

Wednesday was meeting with the DIA Censorship Office, the Classification Office and Netsafe on helping restrict access to illegal child pornography. After that had a Technical Committee meeting.

Today was a (also very good) meeting with Nandor Tanczos (Green IT Spokesperson) and his adviser on half a dozen issues ranging from open source software to creative commons to anti-spam legislation. Lots of areas of common agreement.

Then straight after that was a meeting with our legal and technical advisers to help prepare for the two day commerce commission hearing in July on the unbundled bitstream service determination. Now reading papers for a tele-conference tonight on upcoming international meetings.

Tomorrow is a full-day Council meeting and membership workshop (as in how to get more members, what should we provide to our members) plus a farewell dinner for the Council, as it is the final meeting before the AGM.

Despite the workload, I'm actually greatly enjoying my brief spell as the Acting President. As I said the range of issues is intellectually fascinating, where it can go from complex technical arguments to talks about European patent law.

Getting geekier

While I have a pretty good operational understanding of the Internet, I am by no means a 'techo'. Some of the people at InternetNZ are literally real experts in their areas, as they make their living from being able to keep portions of the Internet running.

So in all my years with InternetNZ, I have been on admin cmtes, legal cmtes, international cmtes, policy cmtes, constitutional cmtes, executive cmtes but the one committee I have never been on (for good reason) is the technical committee.

However I am having a brief spell as the Acting President, and the President is ex officio a member of every committee and task force. So today I am taking part in my first (and possibly last) meeting of the Technical Committee.

I did ask everyone to speak slowly for my benefit :-)

Wholesale Broadband

A lot of work has been done recently by InternetNZ on the draft determination by the Commerce Commission on the application by Telstra-Clear to get UBS, or effectively wholesale broadband.

If the draft determination is upheld, the flow-on effects for ISPs and consumers could be in the tens of millions of dollars.

The arguments before the Commission are pretty complex, not just technically, but also debating economic models etc.

A PR from InternetNZ on the issue went out today.

The next step is a two-day conference in July before the Commission. After that we should get a final determination.

UPDATE: Story on Computer World.

I love Citylink!

Was on a Citylink connection earlier today, and had to grab a file from a friend's server, also on Citylink.

Got a download speed of just over 9 Mb/sec. Very impressed. That is what I call broadband!

.xxx

ICANN has approved in principle the creation of .xxx as a new top level domain for the Internet.

I think this is a good move as it creates an area of the Internet which filters can reliably block for children, without having false positives that most filters use. Of course not all adult sites will move there but I suspsect a fair few will.

Also while on ICANN good to see that ICANN Board are not just blindly voting to give Verisign .net for another six years. The process has been seriously flawed, and criticised by even the Chairman of the group which drew up the evaluation criteria.

Digital Strategy

I attended the launch of the Government's Digital Strategy yesterday, in the Beehive Foyer. It was a real who's who of the industry with Telecom's Theresa Gattung and all the other prominent players there.

I think the IT/Comms area is one where the Government is doing a pretty good job, and the digital strategy, unlike some other documents, actually delivers some very useful initiatives such as $24 million for regional open access broadband networks. Yes I am sceptical in certain areas of the value of the state spending money, but I see stuff like this as core infrastructure, just as important as roads.

The Dom Post has a good focus on what is called cash for Mush!

Also good to see the Government no longer talking about getting better access to broadband, which technically starts at 256 Kb/s but fast broadband of 5 Mb/s or more. There is a big difference between the two. As Citylink says 5 Mb/sec is still not what some would consider fast, but it is a great step forward. Incidentally InternetNZ's long-term vision is 1 Gb/s access to every house! Talking of InternetNZ their statement on the strategy is here.

David Cunliffe has done well to get the funding for the strategy, and in producing a final strategy significantly tighter than last year's draft strategy, showing they listened to the feedback.

And to prove he walks the walk, not just talks the talk, he mentioned to me at the launch he does read this blog. And later that day a dreaded ninth floor staffer quoted my own words back to me re something I had blogged that morning. I just hope that H1 and H2 do not use the Internet :-)

Name Suppression and the Internet

I'm quoted several times on a front-page story in today's Dominion Post. Basically I agree with Justice Wild who commented in ruling on the Berryman case, that it was stupid and futile to keep information suppressed once it is on the Internet.

I said as much back in March.

The article covers the issues pretty well. I did make the point that name suppression orders are still very effective in cases which are not high profile (most family court cases), but that if there is strong media or public interest in a case, then it will inevitably become widely known.

Also that while the Internet certainly speeds up the rate at which people find out details of a suppressed case, this has been happening for some years. Almost everyone in Wellington in the mid 90s know who the famous NZer was who was convicted (and discharged) of taxi chit fraud, and this was before widespread Internet use.

TV Shows Downloads

I'm quoted in an article in the NZ Herald about downloading of popular TV shows in Australia and NZ, as there is such a wait for them to screen here after they screen in the US.

I'v suggested (and am far from the first to do so) that television studios need to start moving from solely a one to many distribution model, to also allowing a one to one model, where people can pay to download and/or view individual episodes.

.nz names dispute policy

Both the Dominion Post and the NZ Herald have stories on the recommendation by an InternetNZ working group to introduce a dispute resolution process (involving meditation and arbitration).

The two stories have most of the details, but those interested in the details, and the reasoning can look at the paper here. This is not the final policy which is yet to be drafted, and consulted on.

Again, I'm a member of the panel which made the recommendation, so my view is obviously in favour, but feedback always welcome.

Internet Banking Fraud

A story in the NZ Herald about a $34,000 fraud through probable use of a trojan horse keystroke logger program.

The dumbest hacker either

An article on Slashdot alerted me to this online chat transcript involving the world's dumbest hacker.

Basically the person he is threatening to hack tells him that his IP address is 127.0.0.1 (which always point back to the person's own machine). The moronic hacker gets to work and strangely he disappears. A few minutes later he is back saying "dude be happy my pc crashed otherwise you'd be gone" with no idea of why his PC crashed - his own hacking.

He then carries on hacking and boasting that he has deleted his victim's G drive, F drive etc etc until he gets to the point where he says he is 30% through deleting the C Drive. At this point he disappears and has not been seen since.

Priceless!

InternetNZ seeking a new executive director

Computer World has an article on the retirement of InternetNZ's excellent executive director, and the search for a new one.

Job details are online, and applications close this Friday. We are hoping to make an appointment in June to start in July.

Yay - a spam conviction

A car company that sent text messages to people after copying their mobile phone numbers from classified advertisements has been fined under Australia's new Spam Act.

Carsales.com.au was fined $6600. The authority ruled that the recipients of the messages had no relationship with the car website and did not give their consent to receiving the text messages.

It is the first time that text message advertising has been caught under the new law, which came into effect last year.

Also the ACA has raided the premises of what appears to be a major league spammer in Perth.

The ACA say they had received reports alleging "thousands of unsolicited e-mails" from the company and further investigations suggested this was "only the tip of the iceberg" and that tens of millions of messages could be involved.

These are both good news on the spam front.

Destiny Church website

The Herald reports that Destiny Church is trying to shut down a blog using the destinychurch.co.nz address.

Destiny is threatening to take action under ICANN's dispute resolution service. They do not seem to realise that a .nz domain name is not subject to ICANN policy, so they are talking from a position of great ignorance.

Even if such policy did apply, I believe that its use as a criticism site is legitimate, and that there is no cofusion with the official Destiny site.

However the author is in breach of policy by having registered the domain name under an alias. That is a breach of .nz policies, and he should remedy it as soon as possible, in my opinion.

I wonder if Destiny has noticed this long standing parody site of them?

Telco issues

A couple of related issues, which may be of interest.

Computer World has an article on the review currently happening of the Telecommunications Act. A hard issue to make sexy, but an important one.

Also last week the Commerce Commission made a ruling on whether ISPs have to fund TSO (used to be Kiwishare) obligations. Because Telecom are "burdened" with the local loop monopoly, they get to invoice out to other telcos a proportion of the money they lose on unprofitable (generally very rural) residential customers. No allowance is made for the 1 million+ profitable customers incidentially so telcos such as Vodafone and Telstra-Clear have to pay Telecom several million dollars to cover their market share proportion of the loss making customers.

Now some of these telcos were keen to have all ISPs have to contribute to the cost also. This would have led to ISPs having to also pay hundreds of thousands of dollars, or more, to Telecom.

Luckily the Commerce Commission has decided that the cost should only be levied on those with inter-connect agreements with Telecom.

The INZ press release on the issue is below:

PRESS RELEASE: INTERNETNZ
29 March 2005

InternetNZ welcomes Thursday’s Commerce Commission decision finalising the Telecommunications Services Obligation (TSO) liabilities for the 2002/2003 year.

David Farrar, Chairman of InternetNZ’s Legal & Regulatory Committee said:

“The effect of some submissions made to the Commission would be to include ISPs which do not provide phone services within the TSO tax net. If that happened, ISPs would end up paying big sums when they least expected to do so. We are already very concerned about the overall TSO regime. It needs a comprehensive review, but this is not being fully addressed in the current review of the Act by the Ministry of Economic Development. “

Michael Wigley of Wigley & Company, solicitor assisting InternetNZ on Telecommunications Act issues, said:

“The TSO determination has resolved, favourably from the perspective of most Internet stakeholders including ISPs, two important issues affecting their potential TSO liabilities.

First, the Commission has interpreted the Telecommunications Act in a way which limits parties liable to pay toward TSO, to those with interconnection agreements with Telecom. Also confirmed is that ISPs that provide only ISP services, are not captured anyway within the TSO tax net.

The second important outcome is that the Commission has confirmed its “net revenue” methodology for figuring out relative payments by each party that contributes to the TSO. It has continued to reject Vodafone’s preferred approach: TSO liability based upon “retail revenues”.

In simple terms, a “retail revenue” methodology is similar to a sales tax (ie: the payment is made based on the retailers’ revenues). “Net revenue” on the other hand is based on the GST model (each supplier in the chain between network provider and retailer contributes, based on the difference between inputs and outputs).”

David Farrar said:

“The “net revenue” model is fairer. If ISPs ended up being liable for TSO in respect of UBS services (that is, ADSL services supplied by ISPs under wholesale from Telecom), then a “retail revenue” model would have ISPs paying, in respect of UBS services, around 4% of relevant gross revenues. That would be a far higher percentage of net profit. Margins for this product are already tight, made worse by the imposition of churn fees, etc.”

Extending the TSO to ISPs, and then applying the Vodafone-sponsored “retail” methodology, would have been crippling for ISPs and ultimately highly disadvantageous for internet stakeholders. ”

Michael Wigley said:

“The retail v net revenue debate (and whether ISPs should contribute to TSO) is also up for review in the current MED review of the Act. InternetNZ is strongly opposing any change which extends the parties to be included within TSO liability and any change toward the “retail” revenue methodology.”

ENDS

Verisign to keep .net registry

Verisign, who run both .com and .net have effectively won the re-tender for the .net TLD.

The turnover for .net is around US $40 million so a fairly valuable win, especially as there will be almost no variable cost in having .net on top of .com, for Verisign.

I was hoping Denic would come out on top as they have a good record with .de, which is even bigger than .net, and were looking IIRC at a much lower registry price. But not to be.

Congratulations Frank and Sarah

Back in December I blogged about the romance between two US bloggers and the hilarious outcome when Frank gave Sarah a gun magazine for Christmas and she tried to board a plane with it.

Well Frank has just announced that he has proposed and Sarah has accepted.

Read the details - it is incredibly sweet and soppy. And close up pictures of the ring are here.

Congratulations Frank and Sarah - a match made in well not heaven but in the blogosphere!

Internet banking fraud stats

A useful article in the Dom Post reports on the incidence of Internet banking frauds, and puts things in perspective. Good to see also the major banks all saying they are looking to move to two-factor authenication.

Enum

Enum is basically a method of linking traditional pstn phone numbers to the DNS. For example the phone number of my old family home was 64 (4) 383 8249. This would be 9.4.2.8.3.8.3.4.4.6.e164.arpa as a Enum.

The Dom Post has an article on some Enum initiatives in NZ. As one can see there are many possible benefits with Enum, along with issues such as privacy to be worked through.

parliament.nz

The Parliamentary Service has applied to InternetNZ to create a moderated second level domain of parliament.nz such as is the case in the UK.

The idea is that apart from the official agencies such as Clerk's Office and The Parliamentary Service being able to use the name space, one would also allow parliamentary parties to have sub-domains such as act.parliament.nz, greens.parliament.nz which would be for the use of their parliamentary wings, rather than organisational wings.

I am initially very supportive of this, and in fact had several discussions when I worked there about having sub-domains for parliamentary parties. In theory I get a vote on the final application, so I have to keep an open mind, but on the basis fo what is there I am supportive.

One can argue that this can be done under the existing parliament.govt.nz domain, and yes it can. But Parliament is not really part of Government - in theory the Government is accountable to Parliament. And opposition parliamentary parties attacking government policies are probably best not to be in the govt.nz name space.

The reference to parliament.uk is an interesting one, as few people realise the granting of parliament.uk predates the establishment of Nominet (the .uk registry) and they are one of the few .uk 2LDs which are not under ultimate Nominet control. They are not listed as an official 2LD.

Anyway comments on the application can be made to InternetNZ, with details here.

UPDATE: Computerworld has an article on the application, quoting myself and Steven Heath on the issue.

My week of meetings!

For those who think being involved with InternetNZ is all just about sound-bites on the radio, here's my schedule for the week.

Mon morning - NZRS Board Meeting.
Mon afternoon - NZRS Disaster Recovery Planning
Mon evening - NZRS stakeholder function

Tues morning - chair InternetNZ Executive Appointment Panel
Tuesday noon - Organising Committee for March 2006 ICANN meeting in Wellington
Tuesday afternoon - InternetNZ Executive Committee
Tuesday evening - InternetNZ Member's meeting on business plan in Wellington

Wednesday evening - InternetNZ Member's meeting on business plan in Auckland

Thursday noon - InternetNZ Working Group on domain name dispute resolution

Thursday afternoon - chair InternetNZ Legal & Regulatory Committee

Ten meetings in a four day week is not typical luckily!

Incidentially if anyone out there cares about Internet issues, agrees with InternetNZ's mission "to protect and promote the Internet in NZ", supports our vision of an "open and uncaptureable" Internet, then do consider joining InternetNZ.

It is only $50 a year, and as you can see it is easy to get involved in issues ranging from technical to legal to policy. We are absolutely non-partisan and I know of Labour, National, Green and ACT supporters as members. If you want more information on how one can be involved, feel free to talk to me directly.

Internet Governance

Fot the small group of people who actually follow Internet governance debates (me, Steven, ....) Frank March's latest post is worth a read.

Frank, a fellow of InternetNZ, normally works in the IT policy section of the Ministry of Economic Development, but has been seconded to Geneva to work for the UN Working Group on Internet Governance. While the issues can be boring, and the process torturous, the implications are large if wrong decisions are made.

Online legislation project delayed again

The public access to legislation (PAL) project has been delayed again and looks to have another cost blow-out.

Hopefully this will be the last delay. We are significantly behind what has been managed in other countries.

MSN Messenger Virus

Those who use MSN Messenger should be careful as there is a worm out there which has infected contacts offering you a .pif file which will infect you.

Symantec call it W32.Kelvir.A.

It seems to have mutated as at first the file was called cute.pif but now it changes the file name randomly. I have had offered:

The Cat And The Fan piccy.pif
Crazy frog gets killed by train!.pif
Mona Lisa Wants Her Smile Back.pif
Me on holiday!.pif

When you ask the contact what they are sending you, it seems to block the message so if you get a contact offering you files through MSN Messenger, best bet is to email them to let them know.

Internet Banking Security

There has been a lot of media focus today on the SST story on how several bank accounts were accessed by a hacker using spyware at a cyber café.

I've just done an interview with Radio NZ on this issue (twice in three days - big week for Internet stories) and for those interested will probably be on at around 6.40 am and also maybe as background for a live interview with someone else at around 7.15 am.

I spoke mainly on how both users and banks have a responsibility for security, and that generally any public computer is a bad place to do your banking through, but also putting some pressure on banks to move to double password authentication where possible. Where a user is overseas or does not have a cellphone, it can be a problem but this is a minority of users.

Also touched on the need for education, the difference between firewalls and anti-virus programmes and how often people really read the ten pages of small print making up the terms and conditions.

An Opposition MP has called on the Government to step in and regulate in this area. I responded that the banks have the main responsibility in this area, not the Government, and that only if the banks fail to respond, would one expect the Government or Parliament to take an interest.

UPDATE: Also doing a live interview on Newstalk ZB in Christchuirch at 715 am Monday on the same issue.

Wellington City Council website

On Friday the Dominion Post had an article on how a website which uses Wellington City Council's name has been "taken over by a hard-core porn website".

I was interviewed about this by Radio NZ and several people said they heard me on the news bulletins as well as being on Checkpoint (note the item is almost 30 minutes into the audio).

I figured I'll explain what happened here in more detail.

Firstly no website or domain name has been hijacked. Both the Dom Post and Radio NZ got this slightly wrong. What has happened is someone who did not like WCC registered a domain name which some people might guess is one the WCC would use.

They used to have some material up attacking the Council and now they have set it up to redirect to a webpage which displays an explicit image. I'm not going to list the domain name used as the image it redirects to is about as work unsafe as one can get, and it made even me blanch. The fact that a half second before it redirected one sees it saying "redirecting to extreme-bizarre-penetrations dot com" gives you an idea of why you don't want to view it. Just trust me on this one!

Anyway the issues I talked about with Radio NZ were how common is this, how can you prevent it, and what can you do if this happens to you.

Firstly it is quite common, but not normally for reasons of dislike but financial gain. Many speculators buy up as many famous names as possible with the most well known being a porn site which is at the .com version of the official www.whitehouse.gov website, and hence gets a mot of traffic by mistake.

Domain names are generally on a first in first served basis, so the best protection is to register the most logical and likely variations on your official domain name. However one should be aware you can never ever cover every variation, so it may be worth-while for many. In the WCC case the domain name registered is not one that many people at all would ever just type in as a guess, and in fact probably had almost no traffic before recent publicity.

If someone does register a name, as in this case, the courses of action are generally three-fold:

1) Sue the registrant if they are passing off as you, or are infringing your intellectual property rights. Bear in mind criticism and parody are allowed and protected in most countries. I am not sure that WCC actually could take legal action for this case.

2) In many cases, one can access a dispute resolution process if you believe your intellectual property rights have been infringed, and the person who has the name is using it in bad faith. This is open to .com registrations but at this stage not open to .nz names. In fact there is a consultation happening on this issue at present.

3) There is a near universal requirement for registration details to be complete and accurate. In this case the details are obviously fake. Hence the WCC can complain to the Registrar (Enom, a US based company) and they are in theory obliged to try and contact the Registrant and get him or her to provide correct details, with an ultimate sanction of cancellation if they do not.

Was fun doing the interview with Radio NZ, and trying not to mention any of the offensive sites on radio, especially the one it redirects to - that would have been a first for Radio NZ viewers :-)

Wellington now has its own root server!

Now a root server is not some sort of computer sex game, but a computer which allows the 60 million or so domain names (website addresses for non geeks) in the world to work.

And thanks to Citylink and InternetNZ we now have one in Wellington which will get slightly better performance and also importantly greater reliability to the Internet in NZ.

Depeering may be why Tradme not contactable

The very popular trademe site is uncontactable for most people today.

According to discussion on the network operators group, this is probably because at 11 am today Telstra-Clear depeered from WIX (Wellington Internet exchange).

It is thought this has overloaded AT&T;'s Wellington pipe, as much traffic has to go through them now, rather than directly.

Best people don't keep trying the site. I'll do an update when it seems problem has been fixed. And oh yeah this is one of the reasons why peering is a good idea - minimises traffic having to go via international circuits.

UPDATE: It may be a denial of service attack, not linked to the depeering. No confirmation yet.

NZ anti-spam law

It is great the Government has announced the details of the proposed anti-spam law, and I am looking forward to seeing the actual legislation.

For those who don't know, I chair InternetNZ's anti-spam taskforce and have worked very closely with the Government on the proposed law. On the basis of the announcement, it looks like the legislation will be similiar to Australia's. This is a good thing, as world-wide Australia is generally regarded as having the best law, and also the most effective as locally sourced spam in Australia has almost disappeared.

People should be aware that no-one who is involved in fighting spam thinks legislation by itself will reduce spam. How-ever almost every expert agrees that legislation is a necessary part of a multi-pronged approach which includes education, technical filters, self-regulation and international co-operation.

Very little spam in NZ is sent locally because NZ ISPs are generally excellent in kicking off spammers. However this does not mean NZ is not a source of spam. There are a growing number of NZers who are majorly involved in spamming, and they hire people in the US to do the actual sending for them. At present they are immune from legal action.

The other important aspect of the legislation is that spam is an international problem, and only by way of legislation can we authorise international co-operation to catch the biggest spammers. At an OECD workshop on spam I attended, the US FTC spoke about how they sometimes need to execute within a week or so up to 14 search warrants in half a dozen different countries as one tries to trace the e-mail source, the website host, the domain name registration and the credit card bank account.

By being able to co-operate with the US FTC, and other countries, we will be able to play a party in closing down the major spammers who do spend most of the spam to NZers. We are almost the last country in the OECD to have anti-spam legislation.

Rodney thinks the law is pointless. I hope he will be open to persuasion once we see the actual bill. The law will not stop spam by itself, but without such laws and enforcement actions around the world, we will never reduce the impact of spam from the $25 billion global cost it currently is.

Apricot Report Part I

This is unlikely to be of interest to a huge number of people, so most of it is over the break. If you do not know what all the acronymns are, best to give up now :-)

Sunday 20 Feb

Today was the 1st day of the AGM of the Asia-Pacific Top Level Domain Association. Much of the day focused on issues with ICANN and IANA.

IANA reported that they expect the root zone to implement DNSSEC by the end of 2005 and IANA plans to by ready by end of March with a trial signed zone.

IANA is also looking at using PGP to help authenticate requests from top level domain managers.

The proposed ICANN draft strategic plan was discussed at a high level, and there were many areas where APTLD thought ICANN was planning un-necessary things such as an Asia-Pacific regional office, funds to help developing countries, funds for security research etc.

The area of most concern remains with redelegations of TLDs. It was reported that ICANN staff have been refusing to agree to a redelegation unless a ccTLD committs to a financial obligation and agrees to join the ccNSO of ICANN. This was unamiously seen as a bad thing.

Another big issue is the use of internationalised domain names for phishing, also known as homographic spoofing. It was reported that using IDNs phishing scams have been established where the URL looks (for example) identical to www.paypal.com, even though it is different. And the phishers even managed to obtain a secure certificate so that people would have almost no idea they were on the wrong site.

As a result of the phishing, some browsers such as Firefox has disabled support for IDNs, which is a huge blow to those involved with them. Bret Fausett has some useful links for those who want to read more about this serious issue.

Monday 21 Feb

A very full-on day. It is great to be able to fly overseas and enjoy being in other countries, but one doesn't tend to have a lot of spare time (I blog during conference sessions or very early in the morning.

First up was three hours on APNIC policy development for IP address space. It was a useful but fairly low level over-view of how one can influence APNIC policy. It was interesting to note that the minimum amount of space one can apply for has changed over the years from a /23 in the 1990s to a /19 and then has got more flexible and moved to a /20 and last year to a /21.

Also discussion of APNIC's moves to allow some data such as customer assignments not to be made public by default in the Whois. There has been concern expressed by law enforcement authorities about this.

An issue of relvance to many NZ providers or individuals is the transfer of historical resources which often pre-date APNIC to current APNIC members, with requests to hand back unused resources as these are often at a higher risk of spamming or hacking originating from them.

At lunch break I had a meeting with the main organiser of the Apricot 2005 conference, in order to allow us to finalise InternetNZ's presentation for Apricot 2007 to be held in Auckland. It is a very very complicated conference to organise, and will be a huge challenge if it is decided to hold it in NZ.

After that session was an APNIC workshop on spam. I was surprised to find that I actually was more up-to-date with this area than the presenters. I guess reading half a dozen articles a day on anti-spam developments has worked! The session was a good general session but less technically focused than I expected for Apricot.

Oh I also found out that APNIC has 45 staff!! That makes InternetNZ look lean :-)

Then late afternoon attended the AGM of APCAUCE, the regional anti-spam body. Most of the discussion was focused on China, where it seems the situation is going backwards after some progress has been made. The position now appears to be that Chinese ISPs do not think they can take action against spammers until such time as the Government passes an anti-spam law. This is of course not at all the case, but there is a limit to how much pressure one can bring to bear without involving Governments. I suspect INZ will talk to NZ Government on this issue.

In the early evening I had another meeting on the Apricot 2007 bid proposal, where we discussed the information we had got from the 2005 organisers and decided on the basis of that information to continue with our bid. The fees for Apricot barely cover the variable expenses such as food and most of the venue costs have to be met by sponsorship, with around NZ$500,000 needed to keep any deficit to an acceptable level.

In the evening .jp kindly shouted around 40 APTLD people out to dinner at a local restaurant. After the 15th course arrived even I was hoping there would be no more!

Was a very enjoyable meal and company. A few people went out and did Karaoke afterwards until the wee hours, but I had to head back to the hotel to analyse some data and write a report for a client of my polling company, so Japan got to miss out on my singing voice.

UPDATE: It appears ICANN is not asking ccTLDs needing redelegations to join the ccNSO. In the case study we were given it was included in a letter, but because the ccTLD had said it wanted to join to influence policy development for accountabily frameworks.

Free Mojtaba and Arash Day

The global web blog community is being called into action to lend support to two imprisoned Iranian bloggers.

The month-old Committee to Protect Bloggers' is asking those with blogs to dedicate their sites on 22 February to the "Free Mojtaba and Arash Day".

Arash Sigarchi and Mojtaba Saminejad are both in prison in Iran.

Can Police use spyware?

A Police staff member has speculated that the Police may not need a warrant to use a computer keystroke recording device to intercept e-mail or other internet communications.

I am not a lawyer, but my understanding of the Crimes Amendment Act dealing with unauthorised computer access is that the Police do need a warrant. It was a point many submissions were made on, including one from InternetNZ.

It would be nice for an MP to ask a couple of parliamentary questions to the Police Minister asking for confirmation that the Police do not, and wil not, use spyware without a warrant.

At an Internet law conference late last year a related issue came up in relation to the SIS. My suggestion was that if the SIS really wants to monitor someone's e-mail they should simply set up a open wireless Internet broadcast within range of the person's house. There would be an 80% chance the suspect would go "Cool, free wireless broadband" and start using it as long as the network was not called "SIS1" or the like. No protection against stupidity :-)

A farewell to Usenet

It was with sadness that I read that AOL (the world's largest ISP) is dropping access to Usenet newsgroups.

I was a Usenet regular for many years, since I went online in 1996. The Internet newsgroups were the most fun part as we debated every issue under the sun. I made many many good friends through Usenet - a couple of dozen or more. I actually had a hand in creating around half the nz.* groups and am one of the moderators for nz.net.announce. I was one of the top ten global voters on newsgroup creation.

I never thought a day would come when I was not a regular on Usenet.

But in fact I have basically not read or posted there for almost six months.

The signal to noise ratio is just far too low in Usenet. Plus every second thread turns into a debate on Bush/Iraq. I find reading a dozen or so blogs a day is far better than wading through hundreds of Usenet posts. And the level of argument and debate is so much higher.

It is a salient lesson in technology how a medium can become redundant due to new software. In ten years times blogs may have died to be replaced by something else.

Usenet - thanks for all the good times, but now I bid a fond farewell. I will not be returning.

Speed, wonderful speed

Since I got my new laptop last year, it has been incredibly slow - in fact painfully slow. Think taking a minute sometimes to open a file type stuff.

After doing the easy stuff such as defraging the hard drive, deleting some files, I finally concluded it must be a RAM issue. I had the standard 256MB at purchase.

I found out that my start up sequence chewed up 220MB of the 256MB, and further 128 of it was dedicated to the video card. Which meant that even if I had one one application open it was still a dog.

Now I have 512MB and only 16MB for the video card. It is like having a entirely new machine. Warp 10 compared to the Model T. Life is good again.

Good Disclaimer

Like most, I get sick of all those lawyer written disclaimers you get in e-mail - blah blah must return e-mail if received by mistake blah blah.

I much prefer the disclaimer I got in an e-mail today:

Notice: Unless you have exactly seven (7) letters in your middle name, you may read only the words in the above message that start with a vowel and/or contain the letter z. Failure to adhere to this notice will result in Microsoft Explorer 2.0 being installed on your system as your default browser and a fee of one dollar ($1) per word that you have read that is in violation of the above mentioned statement.

Domain Name Disputes

Reuben Schwarz in the Dominion Post has a useful and informative article on the proposed policy for domain name disputes for .nz names.

I'm a member of the working party dealing with this issue.

panix.com hijacked

There was a major hijacking of a domain name over the weekend, when the panix.com domain name effectively got hijacked.

Panix is an ISP with over 30,000 customers. So this affected a hell of a lot of people. The domain name was transferred from their registrar Dotster to Melbourne IT with the *new* registrant being a a company in the United Kingdom, and panix.com's mail redirected to a company in Canada.

This hasn't been reported much in the media yet. I'm subscibed to the North American Network Operators Group mailing list (lurk only to know what is going on) where there has been around 100 posts on it. Other ISPs have helped out by locally treating any requests for panix.com as being for panix.net which was not hijacked and is accurate. A similar thing happened when a NZ ISP had their domain name disappear for a few hours.

Melbourne IT have now pointed the domain back to the proper registrant and are investigating what happened. They say the request to transfer was done through one of their UK resellers. In theory the current registrant should have been notified of the request to transfer and had five days to turn it down. The results of the investigation will be interesting as the reseller should have required proof of the transfer being authorised, which it wasn't.

If you have a domain name in one of the generic top level domains, it is worth considering placing it on registrar lock to stop this happening. You don't need to do this with .nz domain names as we have a UDAI (unique domain authentication identity) password which is needed for any transfers.

There has been some criticism of Verisign as the registry for not reversing the domain name transfer. But for once I will defend them that it is not the registry's job to unilaterally decide in cases of disputes. The onus is with the two registrars to sort it out in line with the ICANN policy. Melbourne IT has come in for some criticism that they were not easy to contact over the weekend, and the change could not be reversed until Monday by which time a lot of the damage had been done.

NZer elected to ICANN Board

Congratulations to Peter Dengate-Thrush, the immediate past president of InternetNZ, who has effectively just been elected as one of the 15 Directors of the Board of ICANN.

A ballot has just been concluded amongst country code managers (who have joined the country code supporting organisation of ICANN) for two members of the ICANN Board. The result needs to be ratified by the country code organisation council, but this is a formality.

ICANN sort of sets policy on which top level domains (.com, .info, .net etc) get created, who gets to run them, the operation of the root servers which the Internet basically runs on etc, so it has quite a significant role in Internet governance.

UPDATE: Press release from InternetNZ is now below.

InternetNZ (The Internet Society of New Zealand) is delighted that’s its immediate past-president, Peter Dengate-Thrush, has been elected to the board of the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN).

Dengate-Thrush, a Wellington based barrister, was president of InternetNZ from 1999 to 2001, and chairs its international affairs committee. He is also the president of the Asia-Pacific Top Level Domain Association.

ICANN was created in 1998 to co-ordinate policy relating to domain names and IP addresses. InternetNZ, the .nz country code manager, is a member of ICANN’s country code supporting organization which elected Dengate-Thrush in a ballot open to all country code managers who have joined the supporting organization.

Peter Dengate-Thrush has been involved with ICANN from the beginning, having been a key participant in meetings which established ICANN, and since its establishment as a voice for ICANN to operate transparently and democratically. He also fought for many years for the principle that country code managers, such as InternetNZ, are responsible to their local Internet community in terms of policies, and that ICANN should only have a co-ordinating role. This principle has now been accepted.

The election result has to be ratified by the country code supporting organization council, as a formality, and then Dengate-Thrush will take up his position on the Board of 15.

“I am grateful for the vote of confidence that country code managers have shown in me, by electing me to the ICANN Board. I am looking forward to the challenge of being a member of the Board and helping ensure that ICANN provides excellent service to country code managers and other stakeholders.” said Peter Dengate-Thrush.

“At a time when the United Nations is debating whether governments should be more involved in the ‘governance’ of the Internet, I am pleased to be able to have the opportunity to serve as a director of ICANN, which brings the private sector and governments together in a forum which is not controlled by Governments alone.”

“InternetNZ is delighted that Peter has been elected as a director of ICANN. He has been an incredibly successful advocate for country code managers like InternetNZ, to ensure that local Internet users retain control over their local domain name registry. With ICANN having also decided to hold its March 2006 meeting in Wellington, this means that once again New Zealanders are punching above their weight in terms of influencing important international organizations.” said InternetNZ president Keith Davidson.

ENDS

Why Gordy has slacked off

A number of people have lamented the reduced output from NZ Pundit in recent times.

A reading of this very amusing post, and comments, explains why he may have been distracted.

Romance is breaking out everywhere!

A dangerous present

Silent Running alerted me to this story of love and presents between two blogs, and airport security. It is hilarious.

First some background.

Frank runs IMAO, a humourous right wing blog in the US.

A few months ago he ran a competiion for a blog t-shirt babe and Sarah won the competion with the photos of her wearing an IMAO t-shirt and pointing a gun. Sarah has her own blog.

Despite living in different states, romance occured, and over the last few months we have enjoyed reading about their first meeting, and now they are going out.

A couple of days ago Frank gave Sarah her Christmas present, wrapped up, and she put it in her luggage. Then it turns out trying to board a plane with a gun magazine is not a good idea. Read about what happened on Sarah's blog.

Software Engineer seeking job

A friend's wife, based in Wellington, has just completed her diploma of software engineering and is looking for an entry level IT job - perferrably as a C++ or Java programmer, but would consider anything related, such as analyst, tester, programming in other languages.

Oh her 16 papers, she got 14 As, one B and one C which put her very much at the top end of the class.

If anyone out there has a job which may be suitable, just drop me a note (david at farrar dot com) and I can send you a copy of her CV.

Domain Name Disputes

For those interested, InternetNZ is consulting on establishing a dispute resolution process for .nz domains.

The usual benefits of such a system is to allow persons whose intellectual property, such as trademarks, is being infringed or cybersquatted to quickly get the issue resolved, rather than a lengthy court battle.

The flipside can be that some people can try and use a system to bully someone else out of a name which is being legitimately used. The most infamous case was the NZ Government being found guilty of reverse domain name hijacking for trying to claim newzealand.com. They eventually paid almost a million dollars for it (which was incredibly stupid also).

Finally a more sane limit

In the past I have whined about the pathethic 1 GB per month limit which my full broadband connection attracted. I'm pleased to report that as of today my limit is now 10 GB a month, and for $10 a month less than what I was paying. May the trend continue.

I have celebrated by commencing downloads of Season Eight of Southpark which have yet to show in NZ. And no it is not breaking copyright - the Southpark creators Matt and Trey have said they are happy for people to create and download digital copies so more people get to enjoy it.

ICANN coming to NZ

One of the things I have been involved with at InternetNZ, is being on a small working group which earlier this year bid to host the March 2006 ICANN meeting in Wellington, New Zealand.

We just found out today, that we have been successful. This will be a major challenge over the next 15 months, but hey the busier you are, the more efficient you get!

We have also bid to hold the Feb 2007 APRICOT meeting in Auckland. I am starting to get terrified that we may be sucessful with that one also :-)

ICANN tends to be a mainly policy focused meeting, while APRICOT is much more technically focused.

The press release just put out by InternetNZ is below.

5 December 2004 - For immediate use

MAJOR INTERNET POLICY MEETING TO BE HELD IN WELLINGTON IN 2006

The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) has just announced that its March 2006 meeting will be held in Wellington, New Zealand.

ICANN, a private sector organisation, has responsibility for co-ordinating policy relating to Internet domain names and IP addresses.

A number of countries bid to host ICANN meetings, and InternetNZ, the .nz country code manager, was the successful bidder for the March 2006 meeting.

"We are delighted that we will be having this opportunity to host an ICANN meeting." said Executive Director Pete Macaulay.

"It will provide a great opportunity for New Zealanders to attend, without the cost of overseas travel. It also will bring to New Zealand over 500 of the leading people involved with the Internet including ICANN Chairman and "Father of the Internet", TCP/IP co-creator Vint Cerf."

The meeting will be held from the 27th to the 31st of March 2006, and will primarily be at the Wellington Convention Centre and the Duxton Hotel.

InternetNZ President Keith Davidson, who chaired the bid committee, said "InternetNZ is looking forward to the challenge of organising this major event, which in fact is not just one meeting, but a collection of around 20 separate but related meetings for registries, registrars, country code managers, intellectual property lawyers, Internet users, and Government representatives."

ENDS

Internet Law

Just started day two of an Internet (Web) law conference in Auckland. I'm attending in my role as Chair of the Legal & Regulatory Committee of InternetNZ.

Yesterday we had sessions on general Internet law, the Electronic Transactions Act, website development issues, e-commerce and consumer issues, web site provider contracts and of course spam. The last one especially had a very lively discussion, with a recent nine year sentence in the US against a spammer.

I'm not actually a lawyer myself, so was quite pleased that I found I was as up to date, or more up to date, with the other participants on the major legal issues in the key areas. I once did want to be a lawyer but I guess I should have concentrated more on law than politics at university!

They do have wireless connectivity at the venue, but one can only use it if you have an Xtra account. So it was with great hilarity I observed 2day Internet owner Peter Mott having to become a customer of Xtra so he could have Internet access. The empire has finally won :-)

Firefox is go!

I downloaded and started using Firefox today. So far very impressed. Only 4.5 MB installation file and copies everything through perfectly from Microsoft Internet Explorer - Bookmarks, Passwords, History, Forms etc.

Vint Cerf interview

IDG's CIO magazine has an interview with Vint Cerf, which may be interesting for those into the geeky stuff.

Cerf is one of the two co-authors of TCP/IP on which the Internet basically runs.

Maori Party websites

Helen Bain in the SST reports on how a doofus registered the domain name maoriparty.co.nz and had it redirect to a KKK site.

I must say tht I am slightly annoyed that after being persuaded by the Maori Internet Society to set up maori.nz as 2 second level domain, major Maori groups ignore it and we have maoritelevision.com and maoriparty.com. Perhaps this will be an incentive to also get the .nz versions of their names before someone else does!

Incidentially I am on a working group exploring whether there should be a process where contested domain names can be adjudicated on, without having to go to court. The issues are fairly complex as you do want to prevent infringement of intellectual property rights, but you also want to protect free speech in the form of criticism and parody sites.

I wonder if the Maori Party have trademarked their name? Merely registering it with the Electoral Commission does not give the same protection.

Search Engine Terms

Hey I'm the sixth highest hit on Google for drunk women, just beating out the NZ Herald who is in seventh place. Ironically it was their story that I was blogging about.

Other search terms people have used to find my blog are:

Wellington City Councilors
Aaron Bhatnagar
Gordon Campbell
nightlife in brussels
Nicky Watson
driving and cellphones
ballwashing (I am second highest for this, thanks to a reader's intemperate comment!)
bullshit the islams did
should fox hunting be banned comments

Amusing as always.

Internet broadband

There is a story at Computerworld over a statement put out by InternetNZ over the woeful broadband offerings in NZ.

As I have mentioned previously, I am on the full-speed DSL plan, but the 1 Gb a month limit is so miniscule that I exceed it simply by e-mail and web browsing. In fact if I downloaded at full speed the monthly limit would be used up in around 73 minutes.

Internet Free Speech

There is an ongoing battle over Internet governance, which is now being investigated by a UN working group. Most western countries want the naming and addressing system kept in the private sector, while some other countries want a inter-governmental body such as the ITU to perform this function.

There is an interesting article on Icann Watch about a recent UN meeting, and the Brazilian Government's view.

Brazil said "It is a myth that an intergovernmental approach will jeopardize the free speech on the internet. Free speech is endangered when one government controls the system, not when all do."

I could not disagree more strongly. The nature of international politics is you will have deals such as "I'll vote for a domain name tax to fund third world computers, if you vote to support this ban on domain names which make fun of my President".

I could also easily see coalitions between religious states, agreeing to push for domain names which blaspheme, or which host material which blasphemes, to be banned. Of course it won't work, but it will impose huge costs, and it will stifle what we have.

Few things concern me as much, as this attempt by some countries through the UN to "govern" the Internet.

NetGuide Awards

I've added a link on the left to the NetGuide Awards. There is a section for blogs. That is one of the categories decided by judges, not public votes, so I don't need to bribe the masses. However if you do like reading my blog, do feel free to nominate it, and say why in less than 25 words.

You should take the time to vote in the other 16 categories. Apart from having your opinion count, you can win prizes.

Nigel's back

Yay - Nigel's back and making up for lost time with 16 posts already.

They're all worth reading except the one on spam legislation where he is wrong :-)

SST on spam

Tara Ross from the SST has done an article on the costs of spam, which I helped contribute towards.

MS XP Service Pack 2 Upgrade

Ouch 100 MB of upgrade. Hope it is worth it.

Rather glad I am not on a 56K connection as it would have taken over four hours at maximum speed to download. Even 256K so called Jetstream would take around an hour. Nice thing about full Jetstream (2 Mb/sec) is even 100 MB took under 10 minutes.

Of course the bad thing is that it cost me $20 in traffic volume!

Verisign loses lawsuit

Verisign has lost another round of its lawsuit against ICANN.

This is good news as far as I am concerned. There are a lot of bad things ICANN has done, but getting Verisign to stop Sitefinder was not one of them.

Bret Fausett has a short summary, which I agree with.

Internet defamation

It greatly concerns me to see the NZ High Court agree with an Australian court that defamation laws apply not just in the country of publication but the country of readership.

This has huge implications for speech on the Internet. It means that the NZ Courts believe every single statement on the Internet is subject to NZ defamation law. Using this logic, one then concludes that anything published on the Internet has to comply with the laws of every single country on Earth.

So be aware that if you write something on your NZ blog which breaks the law in Thailand, or Germany or France, someone may sue you in a foreign court and cite the NZ High Court as precedent for why they should be able to sue you.

Of course one can simply never visit any country which finds you guilty of defamation, but that is not the point which is the stupidity of forcing all Internet publishers to know the laws of every country on Earth.

DPF on spam

The Government has released a summary of submissions on the proposed anti spam legislation. This got National Radio to do a piece on spam on Morning Report this morning, including some quotes from me.

Transcript is below for anyone who may be interested.

Resenter (sean plunket): the government’s finally cracking down on unsolicited messages through the internet, otherwise known as spam. It’s estimated that spam makes up more than half of new zealand’s internet mail and some say that if nothing is done to bring it under control it could spell the end of email as a major form of communication. Penny mckay reports.

Extract from spam message

Reporter (penny mckay): spam messages just like this one have increased in the last three years from about eight percent of email to about 70 percent.

Extract from spam message

Reporter: much more of this says david farrar of the internet users and providers group, internet nz, and people will stop communicating by email.

David farrar (internet nz): it’s already happening. I can think of many people i know who have either started using email less because they’re finding it difficult to cope or they’ve closed down an existing account and set up a new one because there’s too much spam to the old one.

Reporter: most other oecd countries have introduced anti-spam laws and it’s been feared that without similar legislation new zealand would be seen as a spamming haven.

Extract from spam message

Reporter: david farrar says that only about 200 spammers produce 95 percent of the world’s junk email but countries need to work in concert to track them down.

Farrar: the spam goes across multi jurisdictional boundaries. The united states federal trade commission tells us that they sometimes have to execute 14 search warrants over five countries within a week to trace a spammer. So what’s really needed isn’t just one country passing laws but getting most of them to pass laws and work together.

Reporter: the legislative model that new zealand is likely to adopt in its battle with spam is that of the european union and australia which is called ‘opt-in’. The executive director of internet nz, peter mcaulay, explains under what circumstances people can send an unsolicited email under opt-in.

Peter mcaulay (executive director, internet nz): they can send it (a) because they know you, (b) because they have an existing commercial relationship with you or (c) because you have given them permission to send.

Reporter: but rowan parker, director of an online development company, says businesses have a real fear that under the new opt-in legislation they’ll be labelled spammers just by emailing people they may not know.

Rowan parker (director of an online development company): if i feel like drumming up a bit of business and making a few appointments i have to think twice about making an approach by email. I can ring up four people and say hey i’m in town next week i think you could use my services, but under this legislation if i don’t have a prior relationship with them i can’t email them.

Reporter: the associate minister for information technology, david cunliffe, says there is concern that legitimate commercial emails don’t get caught up in the legislation.

Honourable david cunliffe (associate minister for information technology): there is a grey area here. I mean i don’t think we are thinking all commercial messages should be banned and we want to, you know, work with industry to come up with some legislation that will get a good balance.

Reporter: and david cunliffe says people need to be realistic about what the legislation, due to be introduced by year end, can do.

Cunliffe: we need to be realistic. Ninety to 95 percent of spam comes from outside new zealand so in a short run, even with good deterrents and good penalties, we’ll only be able to reduce it five to 10 percent below where it would have been otherwise.

Reporter: david farrar says there’s never going to be a day when there will be no spam but he says the new law is the first step toward joining a global network to catch, fine and drive as many spammers as possible out of business. So we’ll get less of this:

Maurice on comms

Tom Pullar-Strecker in the Dominion Post has an interesting interview with Maurice Williamson, who has taken Communications off John Key.

For those who want the short version, it is:

* Telco Commission Douglas Webb "got it right on balance" when he recommended against unbundling the local loop

* Telecom should nevertheless have the "sword of Damocles" hanging over it

* He deems past practices in the Hutt Valley where Telecom offered differentiated pricing street by street, depending on the availability of a competing service as "predatory pricing, shonky behaviour with complete disregard for what is reasonable in commerce."

* Swain should get guarantees on number portability from the telecommunications industry, or else intervene to ensure it comes about

Phishing Test

Mail Frontier has a quite nice and useful Phishing Test. They show ten examples of e-mails and you have to classify each one as legitimate or fraud. I got 9 out of 10 correct.

Internet Peering

For those who have been following the NZ Internet peering issue, there was a story this week in the Dom Post about it, and what InternetNZ is trying to do.

It will be a sad day if NZ content providers are forced to move offshore due to the lack of local peering.

Talking of InternetNZ, the AGM is on Friday. Anyone interested welcome to pop in - Level 9 of Exchange Place on Willeston Street with drinks at 5 p.m. and AGM at 6 p.m. Membership only $50.

I love wireless

When I got a new notebook in March, the best decision I made was getting built in wireless.

I'm sitting in a cafe at Kuala Lumpar Airport with free broadband Internet access - it's great. And the ICANN conference had wireless which meant that no matter what rom you were in, you had continual access with no cables or wires.

Even though I've been used to mobile phones for over a decade, I still find it amazing that my notebook can connect to literally millions of other computers around the world, while just sitting on my lap in a room, not plugged into anything at all.

If 20 years ago one had claimed that was possible, I suspect most would have though you watched too much Star Trek.

Free Internet in Malaysia

It has been very amusing as I’ve been working on my laptop while being driven to the hotel from the airport (a 60 minute drive). So far I have picked up three wireless connections while in transit with two of them allowing me free Internet :-)

Moe on anti spam legislation

The Dominion Post has a story on the spam legislative options workshop. the debate on whether to exclude MPs from any spam legislation was amusing, if one sided!

Incidentially I did not "concede" to owing a polling and telemarketing company. I volunteered the information during discussion on the scope of any spam laws, and the company I own does not do telemarketing at all. We aks people questions (market research), not try to sell things.

A copy of the official InternetNZ submission to the Government on proposed anti spam legislation is now online.

Fine the zombie owners?

The anti spam legislative options workshop was very good (except that the webcast used me as their static image when ever there was a pause!).

One of the interesting ideas proposed was that owners of computers than get infected with viruses and become spam zombies (where the spammer sends spam through their infected machine to disguise the spammer's identity), should face possible penalties. An analogy was made to the user of a faulty car which causes an accident.

I was interviewed by Radio NZ on this, and other spam issues. I didn't advocate liability for zombie users (preferring education) but did note it may become more of an issue in the future. The interview was on Checkpoint last night which is online, but it is around 45 minutes through the programme and there is no fast forward.

Anti Spam Legislation

I doubt I will be able to blog teh results of the Civil Unions Bill 1st reading vote until this evening as I am helping chair a Government and InternetNZ workshop on legislative options for dealing with spam.

Should be a good day with around 70 people attending. Had very pleasant night out with the Australian Government spekaers last night!

If anyone is interested the workshop is being webcast.

People may also be interested in this story in the Herald about the latest anti spam proposals from Microsoft and AOL. I have some reservations about the side effects of these proposals.

Aaarrgh!

It is a gorgeous day in Wellington and I am stuck inside at an Executive Committee Meeting of InternetNZ. Only redeeming feature normally is the great wireless networking at 11Mb/sec. Unfortunately a cable has been snapped somewhere and even that is down.

So how am I blogging? Cafenet is reachable from here, and they have a stunning special of free access for every weekend in June. They're great value even at their normal rates, but the ability to be almost anywhere in the Wellington CBD and have free high speed Internet at the weekend is excellent.

Spam Legislation

The Government has released a discussion document on legislation against spam.

InternetNZ has been working with the Government on this issue, and has organised a workshop in Wellington on 24 June 2004 to discuss legislative options.

In my opinion legislation is an important part of the fight against spam. It is not a magic bullet, but along with education, technical solutions, self-regulation and international co-operation for enforcement it will mitigate the problem.

From my observations there are an increasing number of New Zealanders involved in the international spam trade.

Beware fake govt e-mails

If you get an e-mail from the www.govt.nz domain, it is a fake and will do nasty things to your machine if you open the attachment. Details at Stuff.

500 spams a day!

I’ve just purchased a new laptop and for the first time am using (nervously) Outlook 2003. Also installed Norton's Internet Security as it filters viruses, spam and firewalls.

My ISP filters spam, as does Outlook 2003 and Norton's. The spam filtered at each level is very interesting.

In just two days, the spam I have been sent and had filtered is:

By Ihug using Spam Assassin (Assassin level) – 857 with no false positives that I can see, using their onlien check.

Of those that got through, Outlook 2003 got a further 202 spams and there were around five false positives. I can teach it who to let through (unlike server side products whihc only have general levels of protection) so this should reduce in time.

Of those that got through both Ihug and Outlook, Nortons got a further 17 (they also labeled many of the ones Outlook got). There were three false positives, again this will reduce with time.

After all filtering, my inbox still had 21 spams get through.

Now the scary thing is in just two days I received 1,097 spam e-mails!!

I think this shows technology alone has limitations. God knows what I would do if Ihug did not have a server side product which saves me downloading 120,000 spam e-mails a year approx. Even with my move to Jetstream, this would be a hassle.

Cost-wise, if I receive on average 500 spams a day that is 180,000 a year. Now if each 10 KB that would be 1,800,000 KB or 1,800 MB or 1.8GB of spam. Now excess MBs cost 20 cents on Jetstream so spammers could potentially cost me $360 a year in traffic alone.

Effing bastards.

Anti-spam legislation

The Government has announced that it will introduce, this year, anti-spam legislation.

In my opinion this is a good thing. Legislation will not solve the problem by itself, but it is part of the overall solution. David Cunliffe deserves praise for taking this issue on and getting a commitment out of Government. Previously the policy was not to support legislation.

In my role as Vice-President of InternetNZ I've just been interviewed on this by TV3 so if anyone is interested the item is likely to be end of 1st segment or beginning of second segment tonight. Don't expect more than a few seconds.

InternetNZ has also done a press release which I've included below, again for those interested.

InternetNZ welcomes anti-spam legislation

InternetNZ, the Internet Society of New Zealand, is welcoming the announcement by the Government that it will introduce to Parliament anti-spam legislation by the end of the year.

“We believe good legislation is part of the solution to the ever growing spam problem, and support this move” said InternetNZ Vice-President David Farrar.

“Spam now makes up 65% of all e-mail, up from 7% in 2001, and the cost to internet users and providers is in the billions of dollars”

“We congratulate the Government on this announcement, which will be welcomed by the hundreds of thousands of internet users sick of spam. We wish to especially commend the Associate IT Minister David Cunliffe for the interest he has taken in this issue, and getting a decision to introduce legislation” said Mr Farrar.

InternetNZ Councillor David Harris, who is also the creator of popular e-mail program Pegasus Mail, commented that “legislation by itself will not solve the spam problem, but it is an essential component along with education, self-regulation and technical initiatives.”

“Legislation will be beneficial for NZ in three ways. It will allow us to deal more effectively with home grown spammers. It will also make it less likely that spammers from overseas will seek to relocate their operations to New Zealand, and it will enable an appropriate NZ Government agency to work with overseas counterparts to track and trace the major league spammers who are responsible for most of the spam we receive.” said Mr Harris.

“We look forward to working with the Government and Parliament on the details of the proposed legislation, and getting it passed into law” concluded Mr Farrar.

ENDS

For more information please contact:

David Farrar, Vice-President, InternetNZ on 027 447 0216 or
david@farrar.com

David Harris, Councillor, InternetNZ on 03 453 6880 or
david.harris@internetnz.net.nz

Peter Macaulay, Executive Director on 04 495 2113 or
exedir@internetnz.net.nz

InternetNZ has an anti spam website at http://www.stopspam.net.nz

ICANN Rome Meeting

Yesterday saw the end of the ICANN meeting I had been attending. The meetings are held three times a year with the 2004 ones being in Rome, Kuala Lumpa and Capetown.

Most of the meetings are focused on domain name policies and operations. This is now a relatively sizeable industry with 60 million domain names generating around NZ$3 billion in primary retail revenue and a secondary market of several hundred million more.

Attending on behalf of InternetNZ, the .nz manager, the first three days were taken up with meetings of the country code managers covering a variety of topics from DNS security, to registration policies to internal ICANN structure. The biggest topic is the ongoing discussion with the Governmental Advisory Committee as to the roles and relationships between Governments and country code registries. In most countries the registry is not selected by the Government but historically was delegated the role before Governments took much interest in the matter. Nowadays the issue is on the UN, ITU and WSIS agendas.

The next two days were public forums on current issues. Most of these were to do with generic top level domains such as .com, .info, .net etc. The final day was the ICANN Board meeting where final decisions were taken on a number of issues.

I’ll put a link through to my full report, when it is published, for those interested in the issues which range from should international organisations have special rights to their names in every top level domain to should one be able to reserve a domain name if its current registrant lets it lapse.

There is also a much wider debate on whether the role performed (and often not very well) by ICANN should be done by a private sector entity or by a governmental body such as the ITU or UN. I'll be posting more on this over the year.

You have 15,000 unread messages!

Logged into my e-mail this morning and was rather suprised to find that I had over 15,000 e-mails downloading. Even worse it was growing at over 100 per minute.

A quick check through webmail of some headers and found what was happeneing. I am one of the moderators of the nz.net.announce newsgroup and one of the other moderators had a bounce message going to the group moderation address which included himself so it was stuck in a never ending loop.

Not only was the number of messages expoentially increasing, but each message was attaching all the previous bounce messages, so the size of each one was also getting much bigger.

I didn't fancy just e-mailing my ISP helpdesk with the problem as it can take 24 hours to respond and Jesus by then I might have been into the millions, so made Telecom some money by phoning from Italy and spending ten minutes on hold. Problem was solved within an hour thank God.

.nz policy reviews

For those interested in the policy issues around .nz domain names, the Domain Name Commissioner has published two new policies for consultation.

The policy on second level domains is at http://www.dnc.org.nz/content//proposed_new_2LD_policy.pdf. This is about what second level domains there are (co.nz, org.nz, geek.nz etc), how they are created and also whether one should allow registrations directly under .nz such as telecom.nz instead of telecom.co.nz

Also a policy on who is allowed to do zone transfers is at http://www.dnc.org.nz/content//proposed_new_zone_transfer_policy.pdf. This won't be of interest to many people - basically it is about under what circumstances can someone gain access to the master list of .nz addresses.

Yay - Cheaper Broadband

Telecom have announced new prices and limits for broadband Internet. While still not ideal, they are a significant improvement on the previous offerings.

As reported, it is probably no coincidence this happens just as debate about unbundling the local loop goes to the next stage.

I like the 10GB plan which when you exceed the limit, doesn't cost you more, just lowers your speed to normal dial-up. I think this will finally allow me to afford going to broadband.

OECD Spam Workshop

I am in Brussels at the moment having just finished attending an OECD conference on the scourge of the Internet. No, not NZ Pundit, but spam.

Around 250 people from all 30 OECD countries were there (I was attending on behalf of InternetNZ) representing governments, industry, and consumer groups.

The spam problem has been getting worse with the latest statistics being that spam is now up to 60% of all e-mail (was 7% two years ago). The only good thing about this is it has changed from an annoyance to a major cost, hence governments and industry are focusing on putting the major spammers out of business through a mixture of lawsuits and technology.

We heard how some of the major spammers are hard core criminals who are involved in cocaine smuggling and money laundering also. The ones behind the phishing (spam e-mails forged to look like from a bank so you hand your account details over) are in the same category.

Bill Gates to solve spam problem!

Bill Gates has proclaimed that within two years the spam problem will be solved.

I hope he is right, but also worry that the solution could be worse than the cure. Any sort of charging system for e-mails could get very messy.

.nz domain fee lowered

InternetNZ has announced that it is lowering the cost of .nz domain name registration fees charged by .nz Registry Services from $2/mth ($24/year) to $1.75/mth ($21/year).

The lowered fee reflects the benefits, in my opinion, of moving to a competitive shared registration system from the former monopoly that existed up until December 2002.

Disclaimer: I am Vice-President of InternetNZ and a Director of NZRS

Why the UN should not run the Internet

As previously reported, certain countries want the UN to take over governance of parts of the Internet.

There are many reasons this is a bad idea, but the name Robert Mugabe should be enough. In a speech to WSIS he basically compared the Internet to Weapons of Mass Destruction, and said it is used "for peddling propaganda ... and misinformation campaigns used to deligitimise just struggles."

So do you really want Muagbe having a vote on how the Internet is run?

Who rules the Internet?

There is a fascinating battle happening internationally over who controls the Internet, or at least the governance of the domain name system and IP address allocation. These were done by Jon Postel up until his death in his IANA role.

A US based organisation called ICANN is currently is performing this role. Now ICANN has many faults - it is overly secretive, has no clear decision making, is not democratic etc. Indeed I along with many others have been critical of it.

However the alternative is gasp having oversight done by a committee of the United Nations! And that is definitely far far worse. Rather than make policy setting more transparent and democratic, it would do the opposite. Worst of all there would be real scope for such a UN agency to use control of the naming and addressing system to start censoring free speech because they could set a policy that a domain name will be removed from any website which a government deems untruthful etc.

Another article on this battle is here.

New Crime Laws in force

Yesterday the Crimes Amendment Act 2003 came into force. It was known as the Crimes Amendment Bill (no 6) for the four years it was before Parliament and introduces four new crimes relating to misuse of computers.

Pity the Police E-crime Unit is so under staffed they can only deal with a third of complaints. I can verify this as I still have an unactioned complaint from 2001 when a candidate for Wellington City Council took an e-mail I had circulated to some friends suggesting good people to vote for, and amended it to become an e-mail asking people not to vote for certain people and resent it out under my name, which was of course a forgery. I had half the City Council on the phone to me that day asking why I was e-mailing people telling them not to vote for said Crs!

In case anyone listens to Radio Pacific I was the person interviewed yesterday talking about the new laws, and the exemptions for the security services.

Internet Issue Blogs

Two recent blog posts worth highlighting.

The first is by David Zanetti, and tells for the first time in public how he got involved in the Brown vs O'Brien internet defamation case. For those not aware of the case, Patrick O'Brien was the CEO of Domainz and he sued for defamation Alan Brown, a member of ISOCNZ which owned Domainz, for comments made on a mailing list. One of the issues in contention was whether O'Brien made a habit of issuing legal threats against people.

The second is by 'phirate' and gives his thoughts on the Antispam workshop arranged by InternetNZ.

I don't agree with everything said, but impressed to see so much thought on the issue and the workshop.

Well done David Cunliffe

Rare for me to praise a Labour Minister, but kudos to Associate IT Minister David Cunliffe who is showing an enthusiasm for the Government to help in the fight against spam.

Within my role with InternetNZ I've been doing a lot of work in this area lately.

IDG has an interesting interview with anti-spam vendor Brightmail CEO Enrique Salem, whom I met yesterday. Some of technology out there is amazing, but I doubt whether technology alone will solve spam.

I tend to think legislation has a role to play, but on the other hand as my colleague from ACT commented - when has passing a law ever solved anything!

Flash Mobs down under

Flash Mobs have arrived in New Zealand with Auckland having had its first one. The NZ Herald gives a good report of the event.

Flash Mobs somewhat appeal to me as they are pointless and done just for the sake of doing something. As good a philosphy as I've ever heard.

Wellingtonians can join a Wellington Flash Mob Yahoo Group. There are also websites at www.flashmob.co.nz and www.flashmobs.co.nz but neither seem to give much info.

DPF

Spam spam spam spam

Spam has been my major activity in the last three days. No, not sending it, but trying to stop it.

Had a meeting with the DMA (who are anti spam unlike some of their overseas counterparts) in Auckland on Friday to discuss ways to reduce spam. On the way to the meeting read in the taxi a NZ Herald story about Christchurch resident Shane Atkinson who boasted of up to 100 million spam e-mails a day. A further story looks into the ingredients of his penis enlargement pills.

Internetnz decided to lodge complaints with various regulatory authorities and I've spent most of the weekend looking through enough penile growth websites to last a life-time, as background for the complaints. Also done a few media interviews on the issue.

The full PR from InternetNZ follows. Should be further updates on this issue on Monday.

INTERNETNZ LODGES COMPLAINTS AGAINST SPAMMER

InternetNZ is lodging complaints against Christchurch spammer Shane Atkinson with three different regulatory bodies.

Atkinson has been identified in the media as being responsible for the sending of up to 100 million spam e-mails a day to promote his penis enlargement pills.

InternetNZ Vice-President, David Farrar, said that complaints are being lodged with:
- The Commerce Commission for breach of Section 10 of the Fair Trading Act 1986, relating to misleading conduct in relation to goods.
- The Ministry of Health for breach of the Medicines Act 1981
- The Privacy Commissioner for breach of the Privacy Act 1993

"Mr Atkinson is an unrepentant spammer who believes that those who don't want to receive spam should not connect to the Internet. InternetNZ disagrees that connecting to the Internet is a license for Mr Atkinson to promote his penis
enlargement pills to every man, woman and child's e-mail address he can find" said Mr Farrar.

InternetNZ has been considering investigating the possibility of advocating for NZ legislation to combat spam.

"If nothing is done to stem the tide of spam, we will start to lose Internet users as they become overloaded with junk mail. It is estimated that just over 50% of all email travelling the Internet is now spam". said Keith Davidson, InternetNZ President

“If spammers believe there is nothing wrong with spamming, then legislation will become a definitive requirement in New Zealand. Many other countries have passed or intend to pass anti-spam legislation. While New Zealand has been able to rely on industry self regulation and a high degree of co-operation between ISP's in the fight against spam, it is becoming apparent that further steps towards legislation may be desirable if attitudes like those of Mr Atkinson
exist.” according to Mr Davidson

InternetNZ urges the appropriate regulatory authorities to prosecute Mr Atkinson to the maximum extent permissible under current laws." concluded InternetNZ Vice-President David Farrar

ENDS

Hope I made sense!

Just got interviewed by Radio NZ for an item of Internet Political Campaigning. Will play on Monday after 8.00 a.m.

I think I managed not to come across as too much of a blithering idiot. but you never know until you head what actually gets played.