Cybersurf

Good morning and welcome to Cybersurf, a weekly look at what’s happening on the internet. I am Steven Lang.

This week, Time magazine announced its person of the year. Normally, the person is given this title for having been the most prominent newsmaker of the year. When the award was originally devised in 1927 it was not surprisingly, called MAN of the year.

Since then the list of People of the Year reads like some sort of American role of honour including Martin Luther King, Rudolph Giuliani, Mahatma Ghandi and almost all US presidents. But it also includes some villains such as Adolph Hitler and Joseph Stalin.

This year, Time has named as its person of the year - You – yes you, and you and you and you.

That is the official designation of the person of the year – YOU. And you can check it out at time dot com.

Yes, it’s a little confusing at first but when you read the accompanying article, it becomes clear that the YOU in question is the Internet user – because it focuses mainly on Web 2 point Oh, and especially on YouTube – the web site that allows users to upload and share video clips on line.

There is feature article on youTube.com but the article also highlights the roles of other Web two point oh sites such as MySpace, delicious, Flickr and Wikipedia.

Incidentally – YouTube was featured on Cybersurf twice this year – in August when it was nominated as one of Time magazine’s fifty coolest sites and in October when the site was bought out by Google for U$1.65 Billion .

The article does not explain however, that the YOU in question is essentially the Internet user who also reads Time magazine.

Changing tack somewhat – while following up the recent story about the Bushmen of the Central Kalahari who are campaigning for the return of their ancestral land – I found their web site at this address - www.iwant2gohome.org/

It is a very interesting site including a video message from Archbishop Desmond Tutu and hundreds of tiny photographs of members of the organisation. As you mouse-over each picture a message from that person pops up onto your screen.

A site that links to iwant2gohome has blamed De Beers for the misery of the Kalahari Bushmen. If you go to boycottdebeers.com you will find this site that accuses the diamond giant of manipulating the Botswana government into forcibly removing the Bushmen.

There are further links to two additional sites that claim to have the facts about diamonds. If you go to diamondfacts.org you will find a number of facts and news items from a De Beers perspective.

A parody site – called realdiamondfacts dot org – looks precisely like the original but the facts or so called facts are very different.

I suggest you look at both diamondfacts.org and realdiamondfacts.org and draw your own conclusions.

I will put these links up on the Cybersurf blog if you have difficulty finding the relevant pages. So note this down. Go to Cybersurf dot blogspot dot com. One more time Cybersurf dot blogspot dot com

But before you do that, I’ll sign off for today and invite you to listen to Cybersurf, next week, same time, same place.

Relevant Links:

• Wikipedia entry on Person of the Year
  
• Time Covers of Person of the Year
• I want to go home
• De Beers
• Boycott De Beers
  

Hello, Bom dia, and welcome to Cybersurf, coming to you this morning from Sao Paulo in Brazil. I am Steven Lang

This week, the Internet Corporation for Assigned names and Numbers or ICANN is holding it Annual General Meeting in Sao Paulo, the largest commercial hub in South America, where incidentally it has been raining almost continually for the past ten days or so.

ICANN is the body that coordinates addresses on the internet. Paul Twomey, CEO of ICANN always goes to great lengths to explain that the organisation does not control or manage the Internet. He like to compare his sophisticated set up to a snail mail postal service, where ICANN coordinates the postal address system – but does not deliver the letters, does not set prices and does not say what people can put in the envelopes.

Twomey says that ICANN does not deal with e-commerce nor does it set any rules regarding hate speech or pornography – in fact it has nothing to do with content at all.

Now we know what ICANN does NOT do – so what does it do and what is the Sao Paulo meeting all about?

First of all, although the organisation is headquartered in California where it was originally incorporated, the council makes an effort to be inclusive by holding meetings in various parts of the globe. It’s also a great way to see the world.

In 2004 the final meeting of the year was held in Cape Town.

One of the most important topics of discussion here at the Sao Paulo meeting concerns Internationalised Domain Names or IDNs. When the Internet was initially set up, addresses could only use the 26 letters of our Latin alphabet; the numbers from zero to nine and a hyphen – the system is known as LDH – or Letters, Digits and Hyphen.

This is very problematic for people in countries where English is not a common language – and it can create a lot of confusion. Here in Brazil where Portuguese is the spoken language, people need to write addresses with a C cedilha – the C with a little tail - and a number of letters with accents. The LDH system ignores character sets used by billions of people in countries such as China, Ethiopia, Japan, Egypt and Russia.

There is also a serious risk of confusion when an individual letter is pronounced differently in diverse languages. For example the letter that looks like a P in English is in fact an R in Russian. Our letter Y has the value of a U in Russian.

You might have noticed that Russian language web sites use the country code of dot RU – which is fine if you are using the Latin alphabet and thinking in English. But if you would prefer the Cyrillic alphabet – as most Russians do – and thought in Russian – then logically all Russian addresses should end with dot PY.

The problem is that Paraguay has already secured the dot PY country code top level domain.

This is only a small example of problems created by Internationalised Domain Names. If you had add the characters of all the major languages of the world – the useable character set would have to increase from the existing 37 of the LDH system to more than fifty thousand.

So while you ponder the enormity of that problem, I’ll go back to the conference.

Thanks for listening and please tune in again next Wednesday for more Cybersurf.