Since the internet began (in Al Gore's garage I believe), the US has maintained control of the authoratitaive DNS servers...the master "phone book" if you will for the internet. This has been tolerated uneasily by the rest of the world, but recently other nations have been making noises about wrestling control from the US (specifically, ICANN, a private company set up by the Department of Commerce). And can you blame them? Brazil does 90% of its tax collection online. Most countries have come to rely on the Internet for governance, commerce, and communication. But this change has huge implications. What will an international group say about standards? How about human rights applications?

Today's Slashdot carries a frightening article that suggests that what we previously thought of as [[w: cyberterrorism]] may be a new competitive business strategy. See Blackout Shows Net's Fragility. Slashdot is blogging an a ZDNet article discussing a dispute between Level 3 Communications and Cogent Communication that has left subscribers to both networks unable to talk to another.

“The Network City: Emergent Urbanism in Contemporary Life

At the World Summit on Free Information Infrastructures, Community wireless network activist, Julian Priest (of informal.org, and author of the seminal State of Wireless Networking in London) speaks here (in the attached Quicktime movie) about Alexi Blinov's project Hive Network in which he has modified an off-the-shelf ASUS, Linux access point to become a stand alone streaming media device, capable of organizing with other sich devices into authomous ad-hoc networks.

Ether, a project about the impact of telecommunications on everyday life by new media architectural collective AUDC, of which I am a co-founder, was featured in the LA Weekly recently. The exhibit remains open by appointment.