World Summit On The Internet And IT 323
eegad writes "The Seattle PI reports on the upcoming first phase of the World Summit on the Information Society to be held in Geneva on December 10-12. 192 nations are involved in the effort to set some ground rules for the Internet (a little late, eh?) including ways to deal with spam, a possible "digital solidarity fund" to help developing nations, and discussion of UN regulation. The goal of this phase is to adopt a "Declaration of Principles" and "Plan of Action". Some countries plan on asking for a UN commission to study new ways of running the Internet aimed at the 2005 phase. The official website will provide coverage of the event. How come I wasn't invited?" The Washington Times also has a piece on it, as well. We had covered this a bit before.
Best thing they can do (Score:4, Interesting)
That said...
It might be nice to encourage people to use bittorrent to download porn. The bandwidth savings would be akin to quadrupling router capacity across the Net.
Or, maybe fix email by requiring everybody to send ciphered messages only. Require/encourage mail servers to permit a user to provide it a gateway public/private key through which all incoming email must satisfy (not the same as your personal public/private key.) Solve spam and nine-tenths of Echelon with one single kick in the balls.
Then, get over this self-inflicted trauma over raw sockets. Raw sockets are cool. Raw sockets + UDP can all but eliminate the nastier p2p problems, like how to work through firewalls, as well as how to send data anonymously. These are good things. Let good people do good things with good technology.
But we can do all of these things through education. We don't need the UN/Geneva/Britney Spears to tell us how this whole thing should work.
While talking about spam (Score:1, Interesting)
If you know something about spamtools
please go vote.
Knud
Re:cross your fingers.. (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Best thing they can do (Score:5, Interesting)
I'm not sure PKI needs to be part of the SPAM solution. Three reasons:
1) The same clueless ficktwizzles that set up their mail servers as open relays (224K of them? according to ORDB.org [ordb.org]) will also be setting up their mail server certificates. No, this isn't fraught with peril.
2) There isn't a black market (that I'm aware of, doh) of private keys. Client certificates are useless, server certificates are useless unless you also own the domain name, code signing certificates, well, um, yeah I guess those are dangerous. But we've seen the lengths spammers will go, and I can easily foresee a huge market for stolen certificates, if now every domain has one to send mail.
3) The _last_ thing we need to do is get Verisign slobbering over using certificates for email. Over in the SPF discussion [listbox.com] mailing list there are Verisign people who want certificates in the DNS records published by SPF.
Re:just say NO to the UN (Score:4, Interesting)
Right, so you've nothing to say on UNESCO, UNHCR, IPCC and goodness knows how many other good things the UN does that are fantastic and absolutely necessary. You just don't mention them because many media outlets, out of ignorance and a desire to criticise, have got an obsession with claiming the UN is worthless.
Worse, the UN routinely caves into member states that are notorious violators of human rights. What good can from an organization that has human rights committees comprised of brutal dictatorships? Of disarnament committees run by the same?
Do you know why? Think for the moment of what the UN is: a forum for governments. Maybe the failure of the UN to really tackle human rights issues is because the governments in the UN, and in particular in the security council, deliberately skirt around human rights and try not to get too many legally binding documents through that would kill off their own industries. Hello UK, USA, France, Germany, Russia, etc. The problem with the UN in this regard is that its member states can be so damn hypocritical.
Sorry, a UN managed internet would simply give certain 3rd world countries (and some European) a new means to bash or otherwise attempt to restrict prospering Western countries. It would advance anti-Jewish attitudes, probably going as far as to restrict Israel! China would be given free reign to threaten Tiawan and run ramshackle over tibet. Can you imagine what these nations would want to classify as SPAM?
Wow. Evidence? Does the UN routinely "bash" Israel? It passes motions condemning its human rights abuses, just as it does for all human rights abusers, but it is hardly anti-semitic. The only people who claim that are those who simply cannot discern the difference between anti-Semitism and 'anti-Israeli-Governments'-policy-ism'. It's like all the 'anti-American' nonsense.
I'm worried about what the WSIS will come up with too, but let's at least be rational about this, rather than sensationalising ignorant nosense!
Why don't we tell them what we think? (Score:1, Interesting)
Re:just say NO to the UN (Score:3, Interesting)
How serious would they take an organization that only allows the nice-and-dandy in? This is a planet-wide organization, they have to give everyone a say, and that especially includes the ones that everyone else would rather see silenced.
would simply give certain [countries] a new means to bash or otherwise attempt to restrict prospering Western countries.
So far, every time I read the actual protocols, it more looked like these "certain countries" wanted something like a share of the prospering, and not a restriction. Now if you think for a second, if you take a share of something, it is in your best interest for that something to be large.
Of course, newspapers, politicians and other 2nd hand sources with an agenda usually have no trouble turning things their way.
Which is why you should check original sources if you can, instead of buying your opinions wholesale from the paper boy.
Can you imagine what these nations would want to classify as SPAM?
Sure, but this is the UN. If there is one trait that has been very constant over its existence then it is that of unbelievable levels of compromise. Everything at the UN level gets washed down to the lowest common denominator, and a bit lower just to be sure.
If we need a definition for spam, then a UN-created definition is sure to be the most restrictive. In fact, I'm sure most of us here would whine how much of the spam it doesn't include.
ICANN might be annoying but at least we can lay hands on them
We can? Who exactly is "we"? Sure doesn't include me, or anyone else outside the US. Which just happens to be about 95% of mankind.
Re:Such a bad idea. (Score:3, Interesting)
Please explain to me how an unelected body composed of a majority of countries governed by dictators can grant anything legitimacy?
Good try though....
If the US made decisions based on how it "affected our image" the world would have long ago descended into brutal dictatorial chaos, while we sat on the sidelines wringing our hands worries about "our image"
Tut, tut
no credibility... (Score:4, Interesting)
I have family living in B.A. - I visited Arg. for a few weeks last November. After looking at miles of black and white marble columns and hand-worked wrought-iron that enclosed their WATER PROCESSING PLANT in B.A. - I felt no pity for the bureaucrats at this service arm who now cry poor. The unabashed "we are Euro, ergo better than the rest of [south] America, so let's have palacial water plants..." The whole place was shocking. (parts beautiful, yes) But the officials I met.... inept, corrupt, nepitistic, backwards - maybe they should get their house in order before looking to "suggest" some of their 'winning insight' to the rest of us.
(did you hear about the folks of B.A. suing a new (chilean owned) utility that, after months of written warnings removed the power-leacher-wires from the poles? Yep, they had the audacity to sue the company for cutting them off b/c they'd tapped in illegally. It's still in the courts, the folks there think "it is our right to have electricity" - just as it is this guys' "right" to have a say on riding coat-tails.)
build something, contribute, dont' back-street drive.
Re:thanks for not getting it.. (Score:2, Interesting)
And no-one is talking about 'subservience' here. You make the UN sound like some unaccountable shadowy organization hell-bent on bringing the US to its knees.