Google Wave! It's been eagerly anticipated by many, and finally the beta is open to the lucky few who managed to bribe, beg or steal an invite. With thanks to a very good friend who has immediately rocketed their way up my Christmas list, I logged into my Wave account for the first time this week. I'm fairly impressed, with one caveat.

I'm not going to recap all the various clever bits of functionality Wave provides. Many other sites have done this to death, and there's that incredibly long Google IO video that shows you everything you could possibly want to know. What I will do is offer a couple of words of advice and caution. I have to do that, otherwise you'd realise I'm just posting screenshots of Wave to make you jealous.... (Read More)

Whilst I work on the next full length article for Zero Flaws I thought this merited a brief post. The Home Office has now released the consultation paper for the proposed communications monitoring system (as discussed in the previous two articles), called "Protecting the public in a changing communications environment". You can find the paper at this link, as well as instructions on how to submit your comments and response for consideration. The closing date for submissions is 20th July 2009, and rest assured Zero Flaws will be participating!

An interesting thing happened last week. The Internet evolved. In a blink of an eye the restrictions on top level domain names - the .com or .net bit at the end of a web site address - were wiped away. ICANN, the organisation responsible for managing and maintaining this addressing system, approved a change to the DNS infrastructure that will allow any top level domain to be registered. DNS, as you'll remember if you read the Robustly Flawed article, is the telephone directory of the Internet. Until last week all top level domains, .com, .uk, .net and so on, were restricted to a tightly controlled list of possibilities. As well as the generic domains such as .net every country gets a top level domain, for example ".uk" for the UK. That's how things work, and ICANN have stuck very tightly to this position. In fact although adding extra top level domains is trivial ICANN have proved very reluctant to actually do it - campaigns to give adult websites a ".xxx" domain have been going on for years.

Great, but it's a shame that it's all pointless. This might well come back to haunt me but let's go for it anyway. Allowing anyone to register a new top level domain is an utterly useless exercise. I predict, to use an Internet meme, an "epic fail".... (Read More)