Apricot Report Part I
This is unlikely to be of interest to a huge number of people, so most of it is over the break. If you do not know what all the acronymns are, best to give up now 🙂
Sunday 20 Feb
Today was the 1st day of the AGM of the Asia-Pacific Top Level Domain Association. Much of the day focused on issues with ICANN and IANA.
IANA reported that they expect the root zone to implement DNSSEC by the end of 2005 and IANA plans to by ready by end of March with a trial signed zone.
IANA is also looking at using PGP to help authenticate requests from top level domain managers.
The proposed ICANN draft strategic plan was discussed at a high level, and there were many areas where APTLD thought ICANN was planning un-necessary things such as an Asia-Pacific regional office, funds to help developing countries, funds for security research etc.
The area of most concern remains with redelegations of TLDs. It was reported that ICANN staff have been refusing to agree to a redelegation unless a ccTLD committs to a financial obligation and agrees to join the ccNSO of ICANN. This was unamiously seen as a bad thing.
Another big issue is the use of internationalised domain names for phishing, also known as homographic spoofing. It was reported that using IDNs phishing scams have been established where the URL looks (for example) identical to www.paypal.com, even though it is different. And the phishers even managed to obtain a secure certificate so that people would have almost no idea they were on the wrong site.
As a result of the phishing, some browsers such as Firefox has disabled support for IDNs, which is a huge blow to those involved with them. Bret Fausett has some useful links for those who want to read more about this serious issue.
Monday 21 Feb
A very full-on day. It is great to be able to fly overseas and enjoy being in other countries, but one doesn’t tend to have a lot of spare time (I blog during conference sessions or very early in the morning.
First up was three hours on APNIC policy development for IP address space. It was a useful but fairly low level over-view of how one can influence APNIC policy. It was interesting to note that the minimum amount of space one can apply for has changed over the years from a /23 in the 1990s to a /19 and then has got more flexible and moved to a /20 and last year to a /21.
Also discussion of APNIC’s moves to allow some data such as customer assignments not to be made public by default in the Whois. There has been concern expressed by law enforcement authorities about this.
An issue of relvance to many NZ providers or individuals is the transfer of historical resources which often pre-date APNIC to current APNIC members, with requests to hand back unused resources as these are often at a higher risk of spamming or hacking originating from them.
At lunch break I had a meeting with the main organiser of the Apricot 2005 conference, in order to allow us to finalise InternetNZ’s presentation for Apricot 2007 to be held in Auckland. It is a very very complicated conference to organise, and will be a huge challenge if it is decided to hold it in NZ.
After that session was an APNIC workshop on spam. I was surprised to find that I actually was more up-to-date with this area than the presenters. I guess reading half a dozen articles a day on anti-spam developments has worked! The session was a good general session but less technically focused than I expected for Apricot.
Oh I also found out that APNIC has 45 staff!! That makes InternetNZ look lean 🙂
Then late afternoon attended the AGM of APCAUCE, the regional anti-spam body. Most of the discussion was focused on China, where it seems the situation is going backwards after some progress has been made. The position now appears to be that Chinese ISPs do not think they can take action against spammers until such time as the Government passes an anti-spam law. This is of course not at all the case, but there is a limit to how much pressure one can bring to bear without involving Governments. I suspect INZ will talk to NZ Government on this issue.
In the early evening I had another meeting on the Apricot 2007 bid proposal, where we discussed the information we had got from the 2005 organisers and decided on the basis of that information to continue with our bid. The fees for Apricot barely cover the variable expenses such as food and most of the venue costs have to be met by sponsorship, with around NZ$500,000 needed to keep any deficit to an acceptable level.
In the evening .jp kindly shouted around 40 APTLD people out to dinner at a local restaurant. After the 15th course arrived even I was hoping there would be no more!
Was a very enjoyable meal and company. A few people went out and did Karaoke afterwards until the wee hours, but I had to head back to the hotel to analyse some data and write a report for a client of my polling company, so Japan got to miss out on my singing voice.
UPDATE: It appears ICANN is not asking ccTLDs needing redelegations to join the ccNSO. In the case study we were given it was included in a letter, but because the ccTLD had said it wanted to join to influence policy development for accountabily frameworks.