onfocus

The Board was presented with a unique and complex situation – impacting one of the largest registries with more than 10.5 million domain names registered. After completing its evaluation, the ICANN Board finds that the public interest is better served in withholding consent as a result of various factors that create unacceptable uncertainty over the future of the third largest gTLD registry.

This is a relief. The .org top-level domain is not being sold for parts after all.

"Today, Firefox is enabling encrypted DNS over HTTPS by default in the US..."

So strange to see a tech company put energy into consumer privacy but I’ll take it.

My guess is that no one could figure out how to set up a job in Windows Task Scheduler so they do cert renewals by hand and their cert renewal person was sick on renewal day. (Sorry to joke, but this gives me real flashbacks and it's nice to know even corporations can make basic mistakes.)

"Rogers Communications said a landslide damaged a fibre cable and caused the outage."

Amazing that one cable could be that critical to such a wide geographic region.

As a collector of dumb domain names I am shocked (!) by this performance report. How could anyone go for these idiotic TLDs? Also wondering: is .shocked available?

My alternate headline for this: Twitter CEO makes the case that Mastodon has a superior architecture for social media; forms group to invent it. The Mastosphere has been chatting about this quite a bit with worries about embrace, extend, and extinguish. It wasn’t received well is what I’m trying to say. Mastodon BDFL Eugen was more diplomatic.

Anil on links and the web we’ve settled for:

"So let’s look at all the apps that live under our thumbs, and interrogate the choices they’re making, and then imagine what they would look like if we demanded that our tools don’t tie our hands."

"[$50 billion] sounds like a lot, but it could be a bargain compared to adding a lane to I-5, the current north-south corridor linking the megaregion."

Co-signed!

"But everything that looks good doesn’t necessarily work well. In fact, those two traits are opposed more often than not: efficiency tends to look messy, and good looks tend to be inefficient."

I really enjoyed this essay about perceived efficiency and complexity. Especially with the Chesterton’s Fence kicker. Understanding an existing system before changing it is important.

People are greedy. That's why we can't have nice things. Here’s more about why this is horrible from the EFF: Nonprofit Community Stands Together to Protect .ORG.

This is a great story about some amateur radio folks who acquired a block of IP addresses in the early internet days and recently sold them to Amazon for millions of dollars. Their plan:

"It is our intention to grant funds across all reaches of the educational, research, and development spectrum, with awards being made to support qualified organizations whose programs could well serve to advance the art of digital communication, with special emphasis on that which would benefit Amateur Radio."

Brent Simmons on his blog tech setup. I like his micro.blog idea but I have mixed feelings on syndicating out to services like Twitter and Facebook. a.) They are terrible for society and individuals. b.) I think you need to be ‘present’ and interacting for the social part of social media. Maybe you can do both, but: society.

Similarly: Always own your platform.