Web 2.0.11562 beta

Three cheers for the future of our technology policy. The clearest thinker I know of on these matters is headed to Pennsylvania Ave. Nothing official announced AFAIK but it’s widely speculated that she will hold the title of special assistant to the president for science, technology, and innovation policy.

She understands the complex world of technology policy like few do. Most experts understand only a very narrow swath of the tech-policy landscape, which includes managing spectrum allocation, setting national broadband policy, regulating telephone and cable companies’ oligarchy, furthering the discussions around nanotechnology policy & biotech policy, and my fave - Internet policy!

DNSSEC needs to happen ASAP, a coherent national Internet defense policy needs to be articulated ASAP, the barriers protecting the telcos that have accumulated in recent years need to be torn down ASAP, and more. I’m so tired of the complete lack of leadership from the executive branch in recent years. Let the market work has been the mantra, and the results have been:
1. we see degraded service and predatory activity from the big players (I’ll pick on Comcast slowing down Internet access for certain applications as my example)
2. we see the regulatory framework constructed by Congress (just recall those terrific “Internet is a series of tubes” videos from Ted Stevens if you think Congress is capable of doing a good job with this)

So in my view we obviously need policy leadership from the top of the house, otherwise it’s relegated to Congress, and we all know where that leads. Ms. Crawford can draw upon her experience at ICANN and her knowledge of regulatory issues from her teaching experience at Yale and Michigan law school courses about communications policy issues. Go Susan go!

What’s the common strategy here that most folks use? One main email address for personal use, one for business, and one that’s used to signup for various web services.

That’s not a terrible strategy at all, but it’s not the best either. Your throwaway address really must be just that. Because people are free to abuse it. You cannot know who it was that’s responsible, and you cannot shut it down, because you depend on that address for so many sites.

Better solution? Register another domain, get the .net version of the main domain you usually use. I say use a new domain because then you can just use it only for email aliases. Create a new alias for EVERY website and service you signup for. Use the name of the site or service, like amazon@yourdomainname.net or foomagazine.com@yourdomain.net. You’ll find that fewer folks will send you spam because you know where it came from! Even after years have passed and you start getting spam, you can simply delete that address. Problem solved!

OK it’s a little disappointing that nobody criticized this as being too easy to crack. Someone is supposed to come along and give me the opportunity to follow up by showing how simple it is to tweak this to get really, really, solid passwords. I think the argument goes like this:
basing passwords on domain names of the sites means there are predictable patterns.

Well yes and no is my answer. Suppose you used the letters following or preceding the real letters, like b instead of a, etc? How about using hexadecimal digits for the first 16 alphabet characters? How about starting with pig latin? On so on and so forth. There are as many variants on these example steps as there are thinking people.

Be a password pro! Basing passwords on domain names with extension ensures a unique password for each site.

It’s not often that I look into my askimet settings to see how much trapped spam has accumulated but the default setting for this is to keep trapped spams for 45 days. I never really thought this was a bad thing, but having now reduced it to 10 days, I can see a 20 MB reduction in the size of my database backups!

I use a cron job to make database dumps, and I’m keeping the 3 most recent versions. So I realized that I am wasting 60 MB of room just storing spam! Well actually 80MB if you count what’s in the database as well. Comment spam never got treated so well in history as people like me have been treating it!

Somebody willing to fight back http://NoDaddy.com - gotta like this guy’s spunk, even if he runs up some serious legal bills.

In case you haven’t noticed I’ve focused this blog increasingly on the domain name industry and related topics. Yes I’m in the business, and yes I think there’s value that can be realized by topic-oriented blogs. So from now on I’ll try to keep my non-domain name ramblings off this site. My goal then is going to be providing opinion, and if lucky a little insight.

Did you know you could drag Firefox tabs to re-order them? You could have found this or pretty much any buzz on the web at popurls.com

Bill Gates not only knows what microformats are but says we need them? Maybe he just likes things that start with “micro”?

There’s Jeremy Keith’s presentation on, what else?, unobtrusive DOM scripting, and finally this great list of AJAX tutorials.

An interesting glimpse into the heads of the latest crop of web 2.0 startups at “Under the Radar” including the office-like apps that are being snapped up before they even get to see their success. The cool social software apps are there, and basically anyone with a new app looking for venture capital or outright purchase by one of the big guys.

Elsewhere, check out Moveable Type’s venture into the Chinese market, as reported on Niall Kennedy’s blog.

I switched to a new server and had some downtime as result. The lone subscriber surely dropped this blog, leaving me as the only reader. As soon as I get some free time there’s several more little posts I’d like to make. Stay tuned.

Welcome to WordPress. This was my greeting from my third, and hopefully last blog software. I’m just so picky. I want to have my cake and eat it too. I am always amazed by, but never satisfied with software. Maybe this is why I am so fickle, and cannot seem to stick to a blog software.

I want full control, but I want upgrading to be super-easy. I want to host my own, but have an easy install and easy config. I want a blog to use PHP and MySQL, as if I wrote it. I may never edit much code but I want the option anyway. I want ultra easy publishing, but I want to be able to insert html, make up my own css style or easily use others.

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