There’s an extremely cryptic story posted on The People’s Daily Online about an interesting change to the Chinese domain name system. The article announces:

A new Internet domain name system will take effect as of March 1 in China.

Under the new system, besides “CN”, three Chinese TLD names “CN”, “COM” and “NET” are temporarily set. It means Internet users don’t have to surf the Web via the servers under the management of the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) of the United States.

It’s a little tricky to know how to read that little bit of anti-ICANN triumphalism. Does this mean that China is introducing new top level domain names, using Chinese characters, that are alternatives to the .com, .net and .cn TLDs? Or does this suggest that China is going to begin running a rival root nameserver that has authority over .com, .net and .cn domain names, potentially in conflict with existing ICANN-affiliated rootservers?

It’s worth taking a close look at an earlier People’s Daily Online story, “Microsoft supports Chinese domain names”:

Chinese can apply Chinese domain name for searching enterprises and departments that they want online from 2006. Microsoft’s IE7 browser supports “Chinese.cn”, which signals that Internet will greet the age of all-new Chinese domain name, said Liu Zhijiang, an official with the China Internet Network Information Center (CNNIC) on Thursday in Beijing, according to China News Service.

In other words, the change occuring tomorrow appears to be support for new TLDs (top level domains), written in Chinese, not Roman, characters. In an email sent to colleagues earlier today, Rebecca MacKinnon translated the Chinese original of the People’s Daily article. She reports:

For those who read Chinese the critical paragraph is here (corresponding to paragraph 4 in the English article):

同时，CNNIC的相关负责人还向记者澄清了外界的一些说法。昨天有消息称，信产部将新增“中国”、“公司”和“网络”3个中文顶级域名。对此，CNNIC相关负责人刘志江解释：“这3个域名早在2002年就已被增加，上述说法不准确。”

What this shows is that the Chinese are definitely NOT establishing alternative .COM’s and .NET’s. The way in which the People’s Daily article was translated into English is deceptive.

…what they are doing is establishing new Chinese-language domain names, 中国 (which means “china”), 公司 (which means company), and网络 (which means “net”).

In other words, Chinese users who enter .com addresses will still be visiting the same servers as American or European users entering the same addresses. But those who type in .公司 addresses will use Chinese-hosted nameservers independent of ICANN to resolve these addresses.

This isn’t a huge development technically – there have been “experimental” nameservers for years that have supported top level domains that ICANN hasn’t supported (like .xxx) – but it is a pretty dramatic development in terms of internet governance. Much of the discussion at the World Summit on the Information Society focused on ways to create a domain name system independent of ICANN, which is percieved by some as being US-controlled… despite ICANN’s international board membership. China has now gone ahead and created three new TLDs that will only work for users in China. Type 中国.公司 into your web browser outside China and it will probably not resolve. The same domain name in China likely will resolve as of tomorrow.

Will non-Chinese companies bother registering .公司 domains to point Chinese users to their sites? Or will this be part of the further split between the multinational and the Chinese internets? Will Chinese internet users favor .公司 sites over .com sites?

What’s important to note is that CNNIC is not – apparently – hijacking .com and .net, leading to situations where Chinese DNS servers might point “google.com” to a server owned by Baidu. Given the cryptic nature of the People’s Daily story and the current sinophobic mood in the US, I expect to see multiple blog posts to that effect. If that were true – which I doubt – we’d be looking at a pretty serious trade conflict between the US and China and heavy lobbying by US companies for trade sanctions. Instead, I think we’re seeing a continued attempt by Chinese internet companies and the Chinese government to create a Chinese-language Internet that’s separate from the multinational internet, now to the point where it has its own China-specific top level domains. Which is pretty interesting in and of itself…

Rebecca’s got her take on the situation here.

The pace of my blogging of the TED conference made it more or less impossible to point to other bloggers hard at work at the same event. Bruno Giussani also liveblogged the event – he and I spent Saturday lunch comparing our strategies and our relative levels of exhaustion. Next year, maybe we’ll be smarter and take turns covering events. If you’re looking for comprehensive coverage of the conference, put his posts together with mine, and you’ll have pages and pages of in-depth posts.

The official TED blog, put together by June Cohen and others, had an excellent feature – “the day in quotes”. “The Lone Ronin” had better seats than I did, and has lots of good photos of the glitterati with their red badges. Ory Okolloh and “My Name is Kate” both offered their favorites of each session. Tom from TrueTalk, Loic Le Meur, kev/null, Renee Blodgett and surely others I’m missing.

Tom Abate, writing in the San Francisco Chronicle, highlighted some of his favorite talks from TED and was kind enough to note my three-minute talk on Asian blogs.

Thanks to everyone from TED and all the speakers for four unforgettable days and lots of exciting new ideas to play with.

I predicted that Museveni would get 55% of the popular vote and claim victory without a runoff in Uganda’s elections, and that the opposition would declare the vote rigged and respond with increasingly intense protest. I was off by 4% – Museveni is reported to have received 59% of the popular vote, though his party concedes that he lost Kampala, northern and eastern Uganda. It’s almost irrelavent whether international observers declare the voting free or fair as the situation leading up to the vote was so grossly unfair, with major opposition candidate Kizza Besigye harrassed with every tool the Museveni government had at its disposal.

That said, it’s incumbent upon global leaders not to let Museveni slip quietly into his third term and third decade of leadership. Voter, press and candidate intimidation before the poll were widespread. Abraham McLaughlin, writing for the Christian Science Monitor, talks about being threatened – perhaps in jest, perhaps not – by Museveni’s media officials. Nart Villeneuve reports that the website of Radio Katwe, an independent, anti-government radio station, has been blocked within Uganda. The radio station was prevented from broadcasting during the elections by Uganda’s ministry of health, who cited laws against campaigning within 48 hours of the election.

(The station was reporting, not campaigning. And they were reporting that Bessigye had narrowly won the election. Nart points out that the ham-handed censorship – most likely performed by Uganda Telecom and South African phone company MTN – blocked 657 unrelated web sites that shared the same IP address. Uganda Telecom offers the completely false claim that they couldn’t have blocked the site, as the site is hosted in Japan. All they had to do is add one IP address to the blacklist on the gateway routers at UT and MTN…)

The Guardian newspaper describes Uganda as being in “turmoil” after the election results. It’s unclear at this point whether Besigye will fight in court, or whether his supporters will fight in the streets. In the meantime, I can only echo Bill from Jewels in the Jungle:

the people of Uganda will have to wait ’til the cows come home for real democracy and political freedom to take hold, yet again.

Update: Uganisha, writing from Kenya, was in Uganda just before the elections and has a brilliant account.

Tom Rielly has a very funny, very profane, very politically incorrect summary of the conference. Rather than attempting to replicate his unique performance, replete with armies of barbie dolls, powerpoint slides, and references to a “crade to crade scream bag”, Negroponte’s “One Lapdance per Child” intiative, and satanic messages promoting “The Purpose Driven Life”, I’ll offer my own quantitative summary:

Days I spent at TED: parts of 4
Hours I spent sitting in TED sessions: roughly 22
Posts I’ve put up about TED thus far: 44, including this one
Approximate total words in those posts: 19,000
Approximate words per post: 432
Approximate words written per hour at TED: 864
Approximate number of beers I plan to drink this afternoon: roughly equivalent to the number of Al Gore/Brokeback Mountain jokes Tom just told.

And now, back to our regularly scheduled blog. Thanks. TED. for having me, and thanks to all my regular readers for their patience in having this conference briefly hijack this space.

Legendary venture capitalist Vinod Khosla gives a three minute talk about ethanol powered “flex fuel” cars. He tells us that Brazil has adopted ethanol fueled cars in an amazing way – they’ve gone from 4% to 70% of all new car sales being of flex fuel. This is because ethanol is a LOT cheaper than oil in Brazil, and consumers want cars that use this cheaper fuel. Volkswagen is now considering phasing out gasoline powered cars in this, the 10th largest auto market in the world.

Ethanol’s not only cheaper – it’s better for the environment, with 60-80% fewer emissions than petroleum. It’s sustainable, not extractive, and is an easy switch for automakers. (Khosla tells us there’s a 130-page report on his website with more information on ethanol – I will link it when I find it…)

Khosla is now co-chairing a ballot initiative to get California to add an oil extraction tax… he tells us California is the only oil producing state that doesn’t have this sort of a tax. He sees the tax as raising $4 billion dollars over 10 years for petroleum reduction efforts, like flex fuel cars.

Songwriter Jill Sobule was challenged to write an appropriate song to introduce Al Gore. She’s got a pretty little ditty with the chorus “Everyone’s out in merry Manhattan in January”.

Al Gore’s the comedy relief. No, seriously. He’s really, really funny. After apologizing to Majora Carter for slighting her – and offering her a seat on the board of his new initiative -he gives a standup routine on the challenges of being an ex-Vice President. “I flew on Airforce Two for eight years – now I have to take off my boots to get on an airplane.”

He and Tipper were driving – themselves, he notes with a sniff – when he discovered something amazing. He looked in the rear-view mirror and discovered that there was no motorcade! “You’ve heard of phantom limb pain. Imagine the pain of a phantom motorcade.” They pulled into a Shoney’s for dinner, where the waitress made a big deal of his presence. Talking to the next table over, she said to the customer, “That’s former vice-president Al Gore.” To which he resonded, “Boy, he’s really come down in the world.”

A day later, after flying on (someone else’s) Gulfstream to Lagos, he tells this story to a Nigerian audience. They thought it was pretty funny. But he realized the impact when they stopped for refueling in the Azores. A man ran across the tarmac carrying a sign “Call Washington”.

Al wondered what could be so wrong in Washington… then realised “quite a bit”. So he called his staff and found out that a Nigerian wire service reporter had posted a story which had Gore saying, “My wife Tipper and I have opened a low-cost family restaurant called Shoney’s and are operating it ourselves.” Unsurprisingly, this moved across late night TV rather quickly, resulting in a handwritten congratulations from Bill Clinton. “We like to celebrate each other’s successes in life.”

Shifting quickly from humor to his serious subject, he offers suggestions on what we, as individuals, can do to help save the planet. He offers the following list:

- Reduce emissions in your own home
- Buy a hybrid car
- Be a green consumer, especially for efficient appliances
- Live a carbon-neutral life, reducing your footprint and offsetting your impact with carbon credits, pointing us to Climatecrisis.net
- Promote and share his slide show, which will be a move called “The Inconvenient Truth”
- Become politically active
- Use tools of mass persuasion, including impact ads, to share the message

His big idea is one inspired by trying to help his daughter with debilitating migraine headaches. Ultimately, she was treated with biofeedback – looking at a visualization of brain waves and being told “make the bar go down”. We need the same sort of biofeedback for the planet. He talks about putting a satellite at the L1 stable orbit point between the Earth and the Sun, measuring how the earth absorbs and radiates energy, allowing us to detect enegry going in and out. Until we have a measure of this energy, we can’t measure how well we’re “making the bar go down.” This satellite exist – it was built in 1998 and slated for launch in early 2001, but it was cancelled. This is precisely the type of feedback we need to figure out how we can save our world.

Editorializing: I’ve long been an an admirer of Jimmy Carter, who’s done so much more for the world out of office than he did in office. It’s pretty clear to me that Al Gore may well be the next Jimmy Carter, being so much more powerful AFTER he’s been the second most powerful person on the planet.

Majora Carter is the founder and executive director of Sustainable South Bronx. She takes the stage, wearing a “Green the Ghetto” t-shirt and tells us that sustainability and environmental justice are achievable goals in urban areas.

She comes from a part of New York City – Hunt’s Point, South Bronx – that houses 40% of city’s commercial waste dumps, four power plants, a food distribution center that brings thousands of trucks in and a sludge plant. When the Parks department gave a 10,000 “seed grant initiative” to develop waterfront parks, she thought it was well-meaning, but naive, as no one could actually get to the river.

But out on a jog with her dog, which pulled her into an illegal dump, she found an empty lot that went down to the waterfront. Leveraging that seed money, she raised over $3 million to build the Hunt’s Point Riverside Park.

She explains that race and class are extremely reliable indicators for finding “good and bad stuff” – Black people are 5 times more likely to be within walking distance of a power plant or chemical facility. “Why would you go for a walk in a toxic neighborhood?” This leads to asthma, obesity, diabetes and other critical problems for the South Bronx.

We get a rapid-fire history of the South Bronx – an interracial community of people who walked to work, ripped apart by “white flight” and by the Robert Moses highway system which bypassed the South Bronx to make it easier for wealthy communities in Westchester to commute to Manhattan. These projects displaced 600,000 people, destroyed the economy of the South Bronx and led to a community where it was a better economic bet to burn down buildings, rather than to maintain them. Redlining by community banks meant that new development couldn’t occur. And what this led to was a neighborhood known for “pimps, pushers and prostitutes”, where her Vietnam Vet brother was gunned down on the streets.

This neighborhood is now leading a transformation of the city, building a greenway that will connect the South Bronx to Randall Island park. She’s building an organization called the Bronx Ecological Stewardship Training – it’s designed to create “green-collar jobs” in the community. The project is so ambitious that they’re now talking about taking down the Sharon Expressway, a Robert Moses highway that’s unused even during rush-hour. It could become 28 new acres of urban green space.

She draws some parallels between the South Bronx and New Orleans – they’re both waterfront communities, where housing and commercial space are close together. They’re both hotbeds of creativity – think jazz and hiphop. “Neither the destruction of the South Bronx or the Ninth Ward is inevitable.” How do we ensure that these communities are more than empty campaign promises?

She suggests that her vision for the future – “Green – it’s the New Black” – relies on a triple bottom line. That triple bottom line means the developer, the community and the government all win. This is pretty far from the future the South Bronx may be facing, with big box stores and new stadium development.

We can do this differently. Enrique Peñalosa, the mayor of Bogota, realized that most Bogataños have no cars, though the city was designed for cars. He narrowed roads from five to three lanes, banned parking in many places, and built an amazingly efficient mass transit system. For these efforts, he was nearly impeached. But the result is a beautiful city with more greenspace. If he can do this on a third world budget, we have no excuse.

At the end of her talk, she calls out Al Gore. Talking to him briefly about her work, he suggested a grants program. Her response – “don’t waste my time”. This is another top down effort – development of the South Bronx and communities like it need to be bottom up and have to come from the community. They need not to waste one of the most valuable resources of all – the energy and creativity of people in communities like the South Bronx.

Jamais Cascio has a tough act to follow, but he’s perfectly qualified to address the last session’s topic, “The Future We Will Create”. As the co-founder and senior correspondent for Worldchanging.com, he (we, as I’m a correspondent and chairman of the company) have written 4,000 stories about the environment, markets, the second superpower, poverty alleviation, and an amazing range of solutions to the problems that face us all.

Jamais gives an ultra-rapid tour of some of these solutions: inflatable shelters, distributed power generation, landmine detecting flowers, ultra-high efficiency vehicles and cities that make it so you need to drive less, biomemetic approaches to design, computer climate modeling, fab labs, cradle to cradle design, one laptop per child and Gapminder.

Focusing only on negative outcomes can blind you to the possibility of success. “Pessimism is a luxury of good times” – it will kill you in bad times.

The solutions featured on Worlrdchanging have certain things in common: transparency, collaboration, willingness to experiment and an appreciation of science. They make the invisible visible – people change their behavior when people can see what their actions mean. Having a visible gauge of gas mileage can change how people drive. Wall-mounted devices that show the power consumption of a house can change people’s energy footprints.

Openness can be scary, but it’s also critical. Open access journals like the Public library of science are making knowledge access to the whole world. Open access sequencing of disease allowed scientists in the developing world key information on important diseases of the developing world. And the open sequencing of SARS was critical in ensuring that a rapid response was possible.

A growing number of people live life mediated through the lens of a camera – which, increasingly, are part of cell phones. Mobile phone minutes are now an alternative currency in Kenya. Phones may be critical for projects like Witness – a web portal will allow cellphone users to upload their photos and video, which opens up the program to the growing “digital generation”.

Imagine a similar web portal for documentation of environmental change? It would give voice to people affected by this climate change, but also give every day citizens a chance to participate in solving these problems: EarthWitness, perhaps.

(Jamais makes it clear that Witness is not affiliated with this idea and that, at present, it’s purely an idea, not yet a project.)

While we need better documentation of environmental crime, the EarthWitness project might look at good news, not just the bad. “It would show us the world we’re leaving behind and the world we’re building for generations to come.” Open source hardware hackers are building linux-enabled phones – we could build our own phones as well as the servers they speak to.

This site could also serve as a collection point for environmental data reported by atmospheric sensors… which could also be attached to people’s cellphones. There’s an existing project using sensors mounted on pigeons – it wouldn’t be hard to build these tools into phones. Uppsala Biological has a module that can process blood test results and upload them from the field.

Imagine that your phone could sense Avian Flu – this could be a critical part of Larry Brilliant’s INSTEDD initiative. Mashing up this data on maps would give visualizations of what people all over the world were seeing about their neighborhoods, collaborating to create maps that have information we can’t get from satellite imagery.

Bottom-up technology-based collaboration might allow us to work together to fix the future. “Another world isn’t just possible – another world is here. We just need to open our eyes.”

Thomas – not Tom – Dolby provides the intersession music for TED as the official musical director. He tells us that, ever conference, a TEDster corners him and asks when he’s going to play “his song”. So we get a live performance of “She Blinded Me with Science”, with harmonica from Charles Fleisher who jumps up from the audience with his harp. Dolby’s got great headphones. He refers to the “mad scientist rant” section as “the Cliff Stoll part”. Very, very cool.

Gregory Colbert is the photographer and videographer behind Ashes and Snow, a remarkable exhibition of three films and over 100 large photographs of animals, hoping to inspire a magical and inspirational view of nature. The show, hosted in a set of shipping containers – a nomadic museum – has been touring the world. He explains that it’s a “bestiary”, a poetic understanding of animals in their environment. “A universal bestiary has never existed, that features all the totemic animals from around the planet.”

He shows us ten minutes of his film, shot in sepiatone, featuring slow moving images of people juxtaposed with animals. Children sit in water, as an elephant’s trunk dangles. A child stands outside a temple, as a hawk lands on his back, making it look as if he has wings. It unfolds with a sort of dream logic, image after totemic image, as children and elephants swim under water, hawks fly down corridors and a young boy sleeps curled up with a leopard.

(Editorializing: Colbert introduces the film by telling us that none of the images have been retouched or digitally altered. This makes me wonder about the scene where a child is, apparently, attacked by hyenas – were the human performers people who trained these animals and had relationships with them? Or were his human subject placed in situations of incredible danger?)

Colbert suggests we should renegotiate our contract with nature. It is common practice to compensate people for fair use of their property in advertising – actors, musicians are paid for their roles. This has not been the case for nature and animals. He suggests that when Ford uses mustangs to brand a car, they have a responsibility to give back and sustain the environment that they’re taking from.

He’s founding Animal Copyright and the Animal Copyright Foundation. The foundation will collect 1% of all media buys that use animals, and will distribute these funds to conservation projects around the world. In three years, it will become the largest environmental fund in the world without any fundraising. “Corporate poachers” who don’t use Animal Copyright will be shamed by bloggers, the media and others if they don’t display an Animal Copyright symbol.

“On behalf of the elephants, thank you for listening”.