Category Archives: Internet

The Kool Kids are all aTwitter about Bacn, which means non-spam email you don't want right now,

Bacn is email you receive that isn’t spam… And isn’t personal mail. It’s the middle class of email. It’s notifications of a new post to your Facebook wall or a new follower on Twitter. It’s the Google alert for your name and the newsletter from your favorite company.

Bah. Procmail is your friend. If you use 'nix email, anyway. My procmail rules are rather long and complex, but they do sort the Bacn and Sausage pretty well. It's the spam that bugs me, even with SpamAssassin working at full tilt.

An important lawyer who you would think has better things to do appends the following to an otherwise serious discussion:

In other Most Excellent news, this totally pwns your boring old Flash clock:

http://pageoftext.com/wikiclock

As part of my now nearly complete service on the ICANN Nomcom, I had to think about what skills make for a good member of the ICANN Board of Directors. It seemed to me one way to think about it was that skills should be defined by what I wished the Board did; but that another way to think about it was that that skills should be defined by what the Board actually does.

But what does the ICANN Board actually do? I decided to find out. Or rather, I made my research assistant find out. The results surprised me, and I've posted them now at ICANNWatch, under the title What Does the ICANN Board Do?.

Here's the first paragraph:

In an effort to identify the skill set that would best serve future Board members, we conducted a quick and crude analysis of the most visible evidence available of what the ICANN Board actually does: the ICANN Board meetings. We recognize that this is perhaps not the best evidence imaginable: much of what the Board does is done in secret, and Board meetings have been criticized as somewhat scripted. Nevertheless, many Board members reject these critiques, and even if it were true that meetings are scripted, they remain important events and do memorialize many of the most important things that ICANN does. Besides, one has to start somewhere.

In addition to the hundreds of spams with foreign character sets and/or random texts designed to overwhelm spam filters, in addition to the phishing and the pills and the various ads, I also get a lot of mail from PR and advertising lists I never subscribed to. Much of it is political, created by people trying to push info to bloggers. Some of it, the more welcome part, is academic — calls for papers or conference announcements. But some of it is inexplicable. Take this example from today's inbox:

Attached, please find CAPWIP's Invitation and Information Sheet for the forthcoming 8th Training on “Making Governance Gender Responsive (MGGR)”, which will be held on November 12-19, 2007 in Manila, Philippines.

How, I wonder, did I get on that list? It's a good cause, I'm sure, but I'm not going to Manila for a week of it.

Copyfight: the politics of IP has the gory details at When is a Reprieve Not a Reprieve..

The music didn't die last week. But now it's being subject to carefully calibrated extortion.