Topic: United Nations

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?

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Topic: Islam

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.

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Topic: United Nations

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.

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Topic: United Nations

Secretary-General Kofi Annan is asking for $1.6 billion for renovations to the United Nations headquarters in Manhattan. According to the Daily News, this will involve building a temporary conference center (or centre, in UN-speak) on the North Lawn.

The current price tag is 55 percent higher than the original estimate because lawmakers in Albany are pissed off about the Oil-for-Food scandal, so they've been sitting on permit applications for a cheaper renovation. Considering that the United States provides 22 percent of the UN's regular budget, Albany's delaying tactics will ultimately cost the American taxpayers more money while doing nothing for New York City or State except spreading the word that we're less hospitable than we could be.

Meanwhile, it seems like the rumored temporary relocation of the United Nations to Brooklyn is not a going concern.

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Topic: Iraq

But South Korea is.

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Topic: United Nations

Yesterday I took our new speechwriter over to the UN cafeteria and was happily waylaid by an international food fair being held in the lobby of the Secretariat Building, which featured dishes from all over the world: Carribean pastries, Ukranian dumplings, Chinese mixed platters, ANZAC cookies from New Zealand. The Iranian pulao platters were selling like the proverbial hotcakes, but what caught my eye was the Nepali delegation's chafing dish full of momo (dumplings).

I asked how much for just the momos, and the woman said she'd give me three for $2, a mix of veg and chicken momos. Deal. "This will bring back happy memories of my visits to Kathmandu," I said.

"Oh, you have been?"

"Yes, I've visited Nepal twice and I loved it."

"Here, let me give you some more vegetable momo, this one has different taste."

Your intrepid reporter did not refuse. Hot sauce was also proffered, and it was good — almost as good as the hot sauce at the now-defunct Tibet Shambala.

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Topic: Korean Culture

WARNING: ADULT CONTENT

I don't usually post this sort of thing, but this is just so bizarre and fascinating that I have to: a couple of blog entries (1, 2), with lots of pictures, about Loveland, an erotic theme park on the Korean resort island of Jeju-do, which is a popular honeymoon spot. (Via Fleshbot. Loveland has an official site, in Korean, and their gallery is astonishing.)

Korea, unlike Japan, is not a country where pornography is ubiquitous. In fact, it's a relatively prudish society. Though one can find plenty of porn in video rental shops, and we even knew of one actual porn theater that was across the street from the E-Mart megastore, it was all rather tame: nothing much kinky, and certainly no hint of homosexuality, male or female. Korea has no equivalent to Japanese octopus smut.

On the other hand, the Koreans seemed to have a sense of humor about sexuality. Their romantic comedies often feel less like When Harry Met Sally and more like The Three Stooges, and the pornographic movies all have to have plots, presumably to get past some censorship law, so many of them are pretty funny (on purpose). (I didn't watch a lot, but I did watch a few. For cultural research, of course.) And then there was the banned ad, which is also pretty funny.

Still, I'm startled to learn of Loveland, and all those pics of statue-love may be the kinkiest thing I've ever seen out of Korea.

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Topic: United Nations

So the UN simultaneous translation system was designed by Brähler ICS, a German firm, as you can see here, and was installed by Conference Systems, Inc. Knowing this will help you ... um ... er ... Okay, I admit, it's just full-on UN geeky.

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Topic: Politics

The New York Times today calls it ugly. The lede:

George W. Bush has been in the White House for 248 weeks, through a terrorist attack, two wars and a bruising re-election. But it seems safe to say that he has never had a worse political week than this one — and it is not over yet.

And it gets worse from there.

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Topic: United Nations

Sean Penn among the diplmats

If you saw The Interpreter (I didn't), you probably saw those weird white thingies hanging off the ears of exotically dressed dignitaries.

I have now worn one. Two, in fact, at informal consultations on the draft resolution that South Korea is pushing in the General Assembly. I won't go into too much detail on the technicalities, both because they're boring and because I'm not sure it wouldn't be some sort of diplomatic no-no, but I will say that I have thoroughly enjoyed my exposure to the process of negotiating and hashing out a text at the UN.

My responsibility has been to type changes to the draft text into a laptop, on the fly, so the delegates can squint at the changes projected on the screen at the front of the room. This is sometimes challenging when the delegates mutter in accents, but that's where the ear thingies come in handy. I always thought of them as being for translation, but they're also handy just to amplify speech, and I'm sure it will satisfy the budget hawks among my readers to know that there's a sound person in a booth at every single meeting in every single conference room at the UN whose job it is to switch people's mics on and off when they forget. And the efficiency experts among you will likewise be thrilled to discover that conference room reservations and sound are handled by one department, projectors by another.

In any case, working in the conference rooms at the UN feels weirdly like being in a well-funded middle school circa the late 1970s. Except the crowd in the cafeteria is cooler.

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