Author: Josh Philip Ross

Slate has an article about the conflict over top-level domain names on the Internet. It’s an abstruse subject, but essentially it comes down to this: there’s a group called ICANN that administers top-level domain names (that is, the URLs we type to go to web addresses, including .com, .org, .net, .edu, .gov, and country codes such as .us, .cn, .kr, and so on). ICANN is a California-based nonprofit, and this is what makes the rest of the world nervous. Countries like Iran and China worry that leaving the top-level domain system under US control puts them at risk of having their web traffic meddled with, and they would like to have greater control of that traffic themselves.

The latest round of chatter on this subject has been generated by a recent summit in Tunis, at which the idea was floated that the UN should take over ICANN’s job. Enthusiasm for this notion was reportedly low.

There are two interesting concepts in the Slate article, and I would love to hear from readers who know more about this subject than me whether either one makes sense.

The first is that top-level domains could be administered by some kind of distributed peer-to-peer system like BitTorrent:

Countries that choose to house Torrent servers would receive a random piece of the DNS pie over a closed P2P network, with mirrors set up to correct data by consensus in the case of corruption or unauthorized modification. No one country would actually physically host the entire database.

Is this actually plausible?

Secondly, the article argues that top-level domains are headed for eventual obsolescence. How realistic is this idea? Will other modes of communication make .com irrelevant? If so, how soon will this happen?

A while back, I posted a meme in which I asked people to leave one memory about me. The response was dismal, but I am willing to humiliate myself again, so here goes, lifted from Pagan Mom:

If you read this, if your eyes are passing over this right now (even if we don’t speak often), please post a comment with a COMPLETELY MADE UP AND FICTIONAL memory of you and me. It can be anything you want — good or bad — BUT IT HAS TO BE FAKE.

When you’re finished, post this little paragraph on your blog and be surprised (or mortified) about what people DON’T ACTUALLY remember about you.

In the December 1 New York Review of Books, William Dalrymple takes an illuminating look inside the madrasas. Just as Peter J. Boyer’s New Yorker article a few months back drew important distinctions between Christian fundamentalists and Evangelicals (see this earlier post), Dalrymple points out that few of the al Qaeda terrorists who have mounted attacks on targets in the West are products of the notorious madrasa system, which some have labeled as terrorist training camps.

In fact, the madrasas vary widely, as one would expect. Even the most militant, however, tend only to produce foot-soldiers in regional conflicts — Kashmir, Iraq, Afghanistan — while the terrorists that attack the West tend to be sophisticated, Western-educated and anything but poor:

It is now becoming very clear … that producing cannon fodder for the Taliban and educating local sectarian thugs is not at all the same as producing the kind of technically literate al-Qaeda terrorist who carried out the horrifyingly sophisticated attacks on the USS Cole, the US embassies in East Africa, the World Trade Center, and the London Underground. Indeed, a number of recent studies have emphasized that there is a fundamental distinction to be made between madrasa graduates — who tend to be pious villagers from impoverished economic backgrounds, possessing little technical sophistication — and the sort of middle-class, politically literate global Salafi jihadis who plan al-Qaeda operations around the world. Most of these turn out to have secular and technical backgrounds. Neither bin Laden nor any of the men who carried out the Islamist assaults on America or Britain were trained in a madrasa or was a qualified alim, or cleric. (Emphasis added.)

Dalrymple goes on to explain that bin Laden and his gang are in fact impatient with the kind of nitpicky Islam promoted by the Taliban.

Understanding these distinctions is increasingly important, and Dalrymple’s article is a useful read for anyone who hopes to get past stereotypes and truisms and gain a realistic picture of what is, and what is not, part of the terrorist threat that America faces.

In my early years in New York City, back in the mid-1990s, I gradually noticed that everywhere I looked were the words REVS and COST: sometimes in graffiti and street-art form, but more often on stickers pasted on the backs of WALK/DON’T WALK signs (which still had words then, not pictures) or other, similarly visible but hard-to-reach spots. This was too early for there to have been a Web address — in those days I still thought Gopherspace was the main part of the Internet — and when I called the phone number that was listed on some of the stickers, I got a confused, rambling message from what sounded like a couple of college-age white guys like myself.

What was astonishing about the REVS phenomenon was less its artistry than its sheer penetration: uptown, downtown, all around town, the stickers were ubiquitous.

They’ve long since faded from the scene, but Streetsy has a great gallery of more sophisticated REVS pieces, including some gorgeous metalwork, though no pic of the giant graffito that still graces DUMBO.

There’s also a Neckface gallery. In Carroll Gardens, we have our very own Neckface arm stretching across a rooftop visible from the elevated F line on the Manhattan-bound side.

I have mixed feelings about graffiti. In general, I’m against it: it’s vandalism, and people have a right to decide how their own property will or won’t be decorated, plus the bulk of it is ugly. But I still enjoy a really elegant or clever or beautiful graffito, and I would be sad if they all went away. A lot of the art on Streetsy is quite lovely, and certainly graffiti livens up a lot of otherwise grim and neglected stretches of the city. The “are we free yet?” pill bottles in the Gowanus Canal zone (right) are good examples.

Either way, though, I agree with Gothamist’s assessment that corporate graffiti sucks balls.

Lou Rawls: You’ve Made Me So Very Happy

Fans of De La Soul’s brilliant Buhloone Mindstate will enjoy this Lou Rawls track, which is sampled as the basis for De La’s moving I Am, I Be. (Via Soul Sides.)

Faith Boogie: Hey Hey Shorty | Lemme Do My Thing | Chick Like Me

Have you heard about Faith Boogie, wunderkind of hip-hop? This 14-year-old doesn’t rely on cuteness (a la Kris Kross) or South Parkian cognitive dissonance (a la Lil Bow Wow). She has a killer flow, plus she does her own engineering, if not yet full production (according to music (for robots), which is where I heard of her). I especially love that swoopy line of Chinese fiddle on Hey Hey Shortie — I’m a sucker for world music samples — but I like all three tracks, and I think this ninth-grader (!) has a serious future.

Oh, but don’t look for the album, ’cause there ain’t one yet.

Curbed links to a couple of fascinating stories about the Bococa area (that’s Boerum Hill/Cobble Hill/Carrol Gardens, for the uninitiated).

The good news: The dilapidated Smith and Ninth Sts. subway station, one of the city’s worst, is slated for rehabilitation. The MTA funded this once before, then slashed the funding, but is now restoring the funding. Let’s hope they actually do something about it this time.

The bad news: The Brooklyn House of Detention, on Atlantic Avenue, will likely reopen in 2007, ensuring that our neighborhood will continue to provide housing for the poor. The community is fighting it. But this brings us to …

The bizarre news: In that same story, the focus is on the possibility of making the House of D into a mixed-use facility, with street-level retail and maybe even high-end residential development.

The other bizarre news: This plan for Gowanus development, from Wired New York.

Finally, the Times reports on the conflicting visions that residents and developers have for the Gowanus Canal area.

Demonstrating his fine leadership skills, John Bolton is once again charging in to declare that everyone else’s work is totally worthless. Wonkette has a little rant about his latest shenanigans.

I suppose that bullying and browbeating have worked so well on Iraq, Iran, North Korea and the Security Council that the Bush administration couldn’t possibly choose a different tactic for the UN, where there’s an opportunity to browbeat the entire world at once. Too bad you can’t browbeat hurricanes, though.

Here’s a curious artifact from the distant past: a 1932 Betty Boop cartoon of Cab Calloway’s Minnie the Moocher, complete with what appears to be a ghost-walrus doing much of the lead vocal, as well as an amazing opening clip of the very young Calloway himself doing an amazing snake-hips dance that would have been a prominent feature of his performances at the Cotton Club.

And note that Betty Boop’s father’s head turns into a phonograph cylinder player. Celluloid cylinders competed with flat discs through the 1910s, but the disc format won out. Edison sold its last cylinders in 1929, so by 1932 the cylinder would have been a symbol of obsolescence.

The new Lady Sovereign EP/DVD, Vertically Challenged, is out in stores in America (I’ve got mine), and Ms. SOV is playing the Knitting Factory in NYC Wednesday night, November 30, at 9 p.m. ( tickets here). I won’t be there ’cause I’m an old fogey who has to get up and go to work the next morning, but I encourage others to check it out.