No Such Weblog

The Hulk wasn't as successful as anticipated due to illegal copies of an early version that made it to the Internet -- at least that's what a report on German TV tonight wanted to make viewers believe, in the context of some IP-perspective reporting about our localized version of the DMCA. I don't buy that propaganda, though: The cinema trailer I saw earlier this year was certainly enough to keep me from watching that film.

Via CircleID comes a pointer to Bob Frankston's essay Implementing .DNS: We're selling numbers. Big numbers and we promise that we'll never sell the same number twice. The benefits: Stable URLs that don't suddenly point to unrelated content, and domain names that come without semantic connotations and all the baggage these bring into the game.

Alexander Svensson notes that .kids.us is going to be launched on Thursday. He takes a critical look (in German) at some of the questions that a kid-safe domain will have to face: Kid-safe content is a relative notion; a movie that's R-rated in the US can be considered harmless here. Also, the policies in place in .kids.us are so restrictive that the only content available is non-interactive, static, and un-linked. "Families would probably be better off with a CD-ROM with kid-safe content", Alexander writes.

While the objections are well-taken, I have a problem with his final conclusion, that not delegating .kids in 2000 may have been the best decision ICANN has ever made. On the merits, he's right. But should ICANN look at these merits? Shouldn't it have permitted a .kids domain, and let it fail?

Via Dave Farber's IP list: Reporters sans frontières has published a worldwide press freedom index that attempts to assess the actual freedom of the press throughout the globe. Surprisingly, the US is only on place 17 -- behind much of the EU, Canada, and even Costa Rica.

Via EUpolitix.com: European commissioner with responsibility for data protection Frits Bolkestein will tell colleagues that the EU has failed to obtain key safeguards on information European air carriers are compelled to give to the US authorities.