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The internet community has long been waiting for ICANN to deal with the evolving DNS issues inherent in the decentralised system. The appointment of Whit Diffie as Vice President for Information Security and Cryptography at ICANN should bode well amidst the criticisms of ICANN not doing enough in responding to domain name security hacks and attacks. The Canadian Press has said "While ICANN does not run many of these domain name servers directly, it can press for the use of a security protocol that is meant to verify that the directory information is authentic. The technology uses mathematical techniques similar to encryption.".

According to this article "word of mouth has become word of web." People are using digital technology to communicate important information such as social gatherings and recommendations about things such as new recipes - things that used to be transferred through offline word of mouth. The implication is that people without an online presence miss out, and the response of the Canadian (as well as the Australian) government is to inject millions of dollars into decreasing the 'digital divide' to encourage social participation through increased digital literacy.

After the class last night, I kept having a thoght that maybe our whole society structure is changing bcuase of the internet, the accessibility to the Internet. Money, education, perhaps are the main critaria to structure the society anymore.

Pew study shows the African-American population is more inclined in Mobile Internet and especially Twitter whose awareness has raised significantly

This is my third blog entry on the theme of the Digital Divide. I've looked at the situation in Thailand in terms of the class divide, political divide, and digital divide that characterise the conflict.

A different kind of censorship: this critical article talks about the British government's promises of supplying every household with broadband internet. Yet 1 in 4 Britons are estimated to have an inadequate broadband connection, even more so in rural areas. Villages in rural areas are raising money to connect their communities to fast broadband access. How much is the government censoring its citizens' right to information through inadequate internet access?

Social media's role in the organisation and communication of the protests in Thailand is still small compared to the role traditional forms of media have played. This article however is a good primer on the details of how social media has been used - citizen journalism, regular journalism that is now "on the fly", amplification of messages via social media channels. Censorship by the government has also been a factor in the unrest.

"ICANN / IANA and the global technical community would do well to re-assert the principle that the open allocation model for IP numbers - while imperfect - has been cultivated for sound technical and political reasons"