July 2008

At this evening's Unigroup meeting 'll be giving a quick summary of name-space and dns news including ICANN's Paris announcement on gTLDs, the recent hijacking of ICANN's own domain (and what insight this gives us into IANA operations) and of course the current flapdoodle over the critical DNS vulnerability discovered by Dan Kaminsky. Immediately following will be the main presentation on Deploying and Scaling Rails.

Next Wednesday, July 30th at 11:00am there will be a briefing from the Mayor's Office and Diamond Consultants for the Broadband Advisory Committee regarding the Bloomberg Administration's plans for bridging the digital divide in New York City. The Broadband Advisory Committee was established in 2005 with the passage of Introduction 625-A creating a joint public broadband commission to advise the Mayor and the City Council of New York on how the resources of City government can be used to stimulate the private market so that residents and businesses of New York City have more options in terms of high-speed Internet access. The goal of the committee is to educate the general public about broadband and the newest communication technologies, and to give New York City residents the opportunity to comment on how the digital divide in New York City can be closed. To support these efforts the Broadband Advisory Committee has held public Broadband Hearings in the Bronx, Brooklyn, Manhattan, and Queens. The Committee will hold its fifth and final hearing in Staten Island this fall. Diamond Consultants was hired by the New York City Economic Development Corporation to determine the breadth of the digital divide in New...

Just got back from a week in Washington at the Alliance for Community Media conference. Well I got back on Saturday but I pretty much took all of yesterday to recuperate. The best sessions at the conference were, of course, the Drupal one, and also the last session on Social Media 2.0. (It was nice that social media wasn't looked on as the red headed step child of the conference this year.) It would have been great however if the conference had had working WiFi so participants could have tweeted the session highlights in real time. That obviously works better than trying to 'summize' after the fact. (btw Twitter just bought summize today, which you probably heard.) I was mainly on the social media and technology track, but one of the main points of focus of the conference in general was the changes that 'PEG' stations are being subject to by the collusion of big media and all too easily bought federal and state regulators. In particular, the losses in all 20 states who were pressured into passing laws that further drain what limited PEG resources there are into already burgeoning big media coffers was viewed as a grave setback. Not included in those 20 is Hawaii where they adopted a new State level certification program as...