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Los Angeles ACM Chapter Meeting

Wednesday, November 3, 1999 

ICANN - Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers 

Myles Losch, Telecommunication planner and information technology analyst
Dori Kornfeld, ACM Washington Office

ICANN will be meeting in Los Angeles the first week of November. On Wednesday evening, at the regular Chapter meeting, Myles Losch will describe the new corporation, its responsibilities and functioning. He may also have present, as guest speakers for a panel discussion and Q&A session, one or more participants in the ICANN meeting. The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers is the non-profit corporation that was formed to assume responsibility for the IP address space allocation, protocol parameter assignment, and domain name system management functions. For more information about ICANN, see www.cpsr.org/conferences/dns99/dnsconf99.htm and 
www.icannwatch.org

Members are invited to attend portions of the meeting. There is a workshop on Sunday, October 31, from 9 to 5, and an open meeting (public session) with the ICANN Board of Directors on Wednesday, probably during the day.  The schedule was not yet posted at press time. The meeting will be held at the Sheraton Gateway Hotel, 6101 West Century Blvd. (This meeting must be something of a coup for Los Angeles; prior meetings were held in Singapore, Berlin, and Santiago!) There is no cost or fees, but attendees are requested to pre-register their attendance at http://cyber.law.harvard.edu/icann/la/preregistration/. The basic ICANN Web site is www.icann.org. 

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Myles Losch is a long-time member of the Chapter, especially interested in telecom and public policy issues. He is a telecommunications planner and information technology analyst. He previously held software development and telecom technology positions at Atlantic Richfield and Southern California Gas. In cooperation with the SIGGRAPH Public Policy Committee he planned sessions at CFP98 and CFP99. His BS in geology is from the City College of New York. 
Meeting Summary
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The LA Chapter meeting was held at the end of the day of the ongoing ICANN conference at the Sheraton Gateway hotel.  Myles had come to the LA Chapter meeting directly from the ICANN meeting that continues for one more day with more public interaction with the ICANN Board and a Y2K update discussing how well the Internet is prepared for the century rollover. This meeting of ICANN was the fourth in a series after meetings in Singapore, Berlin, and Santiago. ICANN is the outgrowth of an older organization headquartered in Los Angeles, Internet Assigned Numbers Authority (IANA). IANA was the original authority responsible for the oversight of Internet Protocol (IP) address allocation. ICANN has taken over this work and has expanded its coverage to IP version 6 with a 128-bit address space. Also, operation of the Internet's domain name system and management of the root name service has been taken over by ICANN. Dori Kornfeld discussed why ACM members should be concerned about what is going on at ICANN. ACM, under its President Barbara Simons, has taken an active interest in the Internet. ICANN can either be considered a mundane organization that handles the details of the Internet or a ground breaking major effort. It has attracted attention from many people and groups with their own particular interests and some of them may look on its as a group to pursue their own interests. One of the issues that has come up is what has been referred to as "Cyber Squatting" where someone claims a domain name that is well known in the commercial world. This recently happened to McDonalds who ended up paying for its name that someone else had registered. ACM has been concerned with "Domain Hijacking" where legitimate business's are attacked by trademark owners who basically try to extract money from them using the threat of legally forcing them to drop their domain names. ACM is quite interested in topics and issues of domain names that affect non-commercial users. Every procedure at ICANN has resulted in some kind of conflict over how it affects various users and companies. A conflict resolution group has been set up to handle these problems without going to court. ACM has been trying to keep individual name owners from being unfairly harmed. The problem is a big one because the Internet and ICANN are international. There is some recent troubling legislation called the "Cyberpiracy Prevention Act" in the U.S. House of Representatives and the "Anti-Cyber Squatting Prevention Act" in the Senate that are designed to protect trademark owners. The legislation is drastic and provided high monetary penalties of up to $100,000 even when no monetary loss can be proven. Even higher penalties can be assessed if criminal activity is proven. Congress listened to the trademark owners and the House was about to rush the bill through committee on an emergency basis. ACM, some other groups, and a number of academic law specialists presented the committee with letter complaining about this and the committee delayed action on it for one week. However, the following week they pushed the bill through the committee and it passed the House without opposition. They had received heavy lobbying on this issue from trademark owners, particularly those in the entertainment business. The current status is that the two bills passed by the House and Senate have to be revised in a Conference committee before being returned to each body for final passage. The White House is not completely happy with this bill because it has been made applicable to foreign domain holders as well as those of U.S. Citizens and attempts to apply its provisions in places where U.S. law does not have jurisdiction. The Administration believes it sets bad precedent to pass legislation that affects foreign citizens operating in their own countries because it could lead to retaliation from other countries. The ICANN organization hopes that its conflict resolution mechanism can avoid some of these problems by resolving the issues before attempts are made to resolve them by legal action. ACM is concerned that the high cost penalties of the new law will inhibit small users who have limited financial resources from defending themselves. In addition, the new law extends trademark protection to "famous names" and this could be a problem where people with the same or a similar name have obtained a domain name. One example was a 17 year old boy who registered MSD-online as a domain name for a mountain bike he was building and was being pressured by Morgan-Stanley-Dean Witter to drop that use. Complicating matters, the boy's father filed for domain names for Morgan Stanley Dean Witter and Goldman Sachs and this is a more likely case of real "Cyber Squatting". During a question and answer period Lee Schmitt mentioned that a Frys french fry company had a dispute with Fry's electronics company about their domain name. Ms. Kornfeld believe the ICANN conflict resolution procedure could resolve many of these disputes and also the problem of "shotgun" domain listings where domain names of close mis-spellings of a name are registered along with the basic name. Myles Losch mentioned that there were concerns that there could be anti-trust implications if the actions of the conflict resolution organization were perceived as anti-competitive. There has also been concern about what is called "tarnishment" where domain names are registered to mock and complain about the practices of various companies such as those names that use the company name and add something like ".sucks" to the end of the name. There are freedom of speech issues involved when the company tries to have the domain name suppressed. One of the problems is that there are both cases where people have used little restraint in registering domain names and there are certainly valid reasons for trademark owners to be concerned about this. However, there are legitimate reasons for similar names, particularly if someone has been operating a business under their own name for years and wants to use the name by which they are generally recognized as their own domain name. Small companies and individuals can be intimidated by legal action and particularly if the new financial penalties have been passed into law. Under current law there has been one case that went to court where Hasbro who owns the game "Clue" filed suit to prevent the use of Clue as a domain name by a computer company that had it registered earlier and had used it for about five years. The judge ruled the case invalid, because the Hasbro suit had no standing under current law. Myles mentioned that registration of domain names which had been a monopoly of NSI corporation has been opened up to competition and the new competitors are complaining that the proposed ICANN procedures favor NSI. There were also questions about how the new organization is budgeted and on how the costs are allocated to members. The council of the U. S. Government Small Business Administration (SBA) was concerned that the procedures favored large organizations and did not give sufficient protection to small business. There were concerns expressed at the meeting that the ICANN procedure was so fundamentally flawed that it will be unable to achieve consensus, although this seemed to be a minority opinion. This was third meeting of the LA Chapter year and was attended by about 18 persons. This was an excellent presentation provided on short notice by speaker Dori Kornfeld who was contacted at the conference and graciously agreed to speak to the chapter. 

Mike Walsh, LA ACM Secretary 
The Los Angeles Chapter normally meets the first Wednesday of each month at the Ramada Hotel, 6333 Bristol Parkway, Culver City. The program begins at 8 PM.   From the San Diego Freeway (405) take the Sepulveda/Centinela exit southbound or the Slauson/Sepulveda exit northbound. The menu choices are listed in the article above.

To make a reservation, call or e-mail John Radbill, (818) 353-8077, and indicate your choice of entree, by Sunday before the dinner meeting.
There is no charge or reservation required to attend the program. Parking is free!

For membership information, contact Lee Schmidt, (805) 393-6224 or follow this link.


Other Affiliated groups

SIGAda     SIGCHI    SIGGRAPH     SIGPLAN      TACNUM

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LA ACM TACNUM

For information contact John Radbill at (818) 354-3873 (or radbill@1stNetUSA.com).

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LA SIGAda

LA ACM To Host SIGAda'99 Conference

October 17-21

ACM SIGAda will hold its annual conference, SIGAda'99, at the Crowne Plaza Redondo Beach & Marina Hotel.

LA ACM is well represented on the conference committee with Hal Hart as the conference chair, Judy Kerner and Frank Belz as workshops co-chairs, Winsor Brown and Ed Manderfield as local arrangements co-chairs, and recently moved Ed Colbert serving as treasurer. Barry Boehm is the closing keynote speaker on the morning of Thursday, Oct. 21, and Rick Hefner and Winsor Brown are giving tutorials. Several other well known figures from LA ACM, LA SIGAda, LA Metro SIGPLAN, and LA SIGPLAN will provide onsite logistical support for the conference, just as they did for ICSE 99 at the LAX Marriott in May.

SIGAda 99's theme focuses on recognized strengths of Ada -- "The Engineering of Industrial Strength Real-Time and Distribute Systems Using Ada and Related Technologies." This focus was the suggestion of Ada 95 chief designer Tucker Taft, who is serving as Program Committee co-chair. An outstanding two-track program has been defined, offering a full two-day track Oct. 19-20 specific to the theme and an alternative track of more general Ada software engineering and education papers (some actually overlapping with the theme). Of at least equal interest to LA ACM members who find it difficult to take days off work should be the two days of affordable tutorials on Sunday and Monday, Oct. 17-18. Both days offer a mix of topics specific to Ada practitioners and important language-independent technologies of interest to both Ada and non-Ada audiences. Sunday's offering include UML (the new standard OO modeling notation), Intro to the Personal Software Engineering Project Management Process (PPMP) by Winsor, and the new Software Maturity Capability Model (CMM) Version 2 and the CMM-Integration Initiative critical for maintaining economic competitiveness of our businesses, presented by Rick Hefner. Monday includes a "guided tour" of the popular Personal Software Process (PSP) by Winsor again, metrics basics, and MetaH, an architectural description & implementation language and toolset. All of these are technologies that forward-looking software professionals need to stay positioned for leading positions in the ever more-challenging software industry of the 21st century.

All tutorial descriptions, as well as the full technical program, workshops and registration materials, are reachable from the SIGAda'99 home page, http://www.acm.org/sigada/conf/sigada99. Read there about other bargains at SIGAda'99.

Finally, SIGAda is pleased to invite all members of LA ACM to:
    Tuesday evening's reception at 6:30pm,
    The "gala" featuring a production of music and good humor, following the reception,
    The Thursday morning closing plenary sessions featuring a panel titled "What happened to integrated environments?" at 9am,
    Barry's keynote titled "Predicting the Future of Computer Systems and Software Engineering." at 11am
Just bring along an issue of DataLink as your admission ticket. (Hint -- DataLink will be available at the Oct 6 meeting.)
Hal Hart, SIGAda '99 Conference Chair

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LA  SIGGRAPH

The Ultimate Camera

Monday, November 8, 6:30 Social Hour, 7:30 Program

Leonard H. Goldenson Theater
Academy of Television Arts & Sciences
5220 Lankershim Blvd., North Hollywood

For David Fincher's "Fight Club", BUF Inc. created the ideal camera of infinitely scalable size, speed and mobility to pass through walls and follow a character's stream of thoughts. Join BUF to see how they worked from 2D photographic reference images to develop photo-realistic CGI sequences that stunningly break beyond existing physical limitations.

This event is free to L.A. Chapter SIGGRAPH members and $10 for non-members. New members who sign up on-site and pay the $25 annual membership fee (checks or cash only) do not have to pay the $10 registration fee. Members only will be given priority entrance from 6:30-7:00 PM. After 7:00 PM it's first come first served. We strongly urge that members arrive early to assure their admittance.

For further details contact the SIGPHONE at (310) 288-1148 or at Los_Angeles_Chapter@siggraph.org, or www.siggraph.org/chapters/los_angeles

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 Last revision: 1999 1020 [ls]