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WASHINGTON -- The esteemed National Research Council wants to know what you think about porn on the Net.
An NRC panel that Congress commissioned said this week that it will hold regional meetings across the United States, so that people with particular expertise in the area -- don't think about that too much -- can testify.
"Regional meetings are opportunities for committee members to receive open testimony from interested parties -- in person -- who are unable to appear in Washington, D.C.," the panel said in an announcement. "Site visits are opportunities for committee members to examine organizations and communities that have developed approaches to the problem of protecting kids from pornography and other inappropriate Internet content."
This national smut-tour will take panel members to several cities including Austin, Kansas City, Salt Lake City, Miami and San Diego.
ICANN investigation: It looks like the Commerce Department will be investigating a six-year deal that ICANN proposed that would give Verisign continued control over the master dot-com database.
This week, the House Commerce committee asked the administration to perform a "thorough review" of whether the deal is an especially good idea or not. It would extend continued monopolistic control over the global registry for dot-com names, which all domain name registrars use.
"We urge you to exercise your oversight authority to ensure that ICANN's final decision in this matter is made and implemented in a transparent fashion," the letter said. ICANN's board has not yet approved the arrangement.
Needless to say, this complicates life for ICANN, which currently exists in a kind of legal limbo: It's not quite a government agency, it's not quite an entirely private nonprofit, but it still gets bossed around by bureaucrats.
View this ad or we shoot this dog: Forget CNET's poster-size adverts. The latest trend is a user agreement that requires visitors to view your banners.
A reader pointed out that Stories.com recently updated its site to say that anyone connecting to it must view "any and all advertisements sent on or by pages of this site."
And Junkbuster-style filtering just ain't allowed: "Users found to be using screening or filtering systems to remove or hide ads from Stories.com may have their accounts terminated without prior notice or warning."
Declan's D.C. Notebook (continued)
Stories.com didn't say what happens if you're using a text-only Web browser such as Lynx to view the site ad-free.
Financial spam: Democratic legislators want the Securities and Exchange Commission to investigate financial spam.
A group of House Dems wrote to the SEC this week, asking the agency to answer 10 questions, including "How common and pervasive is the use of 'spam' e-mails by broker-dealers, investment advisers and investment companies and their representatives?"
The letter appears to be prompted by opposition to an anti-spam bill from some financial service groups.
Banning spam jokes: It's getting so that you can't even joke about spam anymore.
I subscribe to the cypherpunks list, which gets more spam than usual because the list maintains an anyone-can-post policy. That policy allows people to send messages to the list through anonymous remailers.
One benighted would-be spammer, Ganesh Acharya, a "marketing analyst" at Icode in Virginia, sent a query to cypherpunks asking for help in spamming. Excerpt from Icode's query: "We are looking forward to conducting a bulk e-mail (HTML) campaign targeting the (small and medium businesses) and hence a bulk e-mail service provider."
I responded, dryly: "Cypherpunks are well-known providers of bulk-e-mail HTML spam campaigns. As a 'marketing analyst,' you've clearly come to the right place." Sending such a query to the privacy fanatics who subscribe to the cypherpunks list is, after all, a little like asking Planned Parenthood to help you code the HTML for your Nuremberg Files site.
That was enough to prompt a censor-happy system administrator, J.A. Terranson, to send a message to UUNet, my upstream provider, accusing me of spamming. Terranson's message to UUNet was four words long and blunt: "Please muzzle this idjit...." Terranson appears to be a system administrator for Missouri FreeNet.
UUNet duly forwarded this "anti-spam" complaint to my primary network provider, Rackspace. Rackspace's Melanie Fussell sent me what was certainly a form message: "Investigate this issue immediately and confirm that this issue has been resolved."
All this for a rather mild joke about spam? What? We can't poke fun at clueless spammers anymore? Sheesh.
It's clear that spam is getting worse. Anecdotal evidence suggests the volume is increasing, and a recent Wired News article reports that more spam is coming from overseas.
What's more, reliable sources say it's unlikely that the House bill, which the Commerce committee approved this week, will go anywhere. "It's going to be ambushed on Judiciary," one source said, and apparently just about all the staffers who successfully steered the bill through the House last year have left the Hill.
Translation: It's time to upgrade your e-mail filters.
