I'm exhausted. I know I should be running around and seeing everything,

but I feel like I have already. The conference is big but not so big

that you can't duck into all the booths once in a day. There are panels,

too, but most of them are in UN-speak. The plenary (big) hall is

probably the most interesting, as that's where various presidents and

ministers and what seem to be speaking. And there's a certain level of

amusement to hear representatives from Myanamar (Burma) talking about

an information society. (Their take was largely that you should be

able to fill out government forms online, not that citizens should

have unfettered access to the Net, duh.

After Robin Gross's panel, I got to speak with her at some length,

much to my delight. I congratulated her on an excellent panel and

then proceeded to ask the dick question: "Okay, but what's the

point?" Robin said she had seen really visible progress at WIPO since

NGOs (like EFF, FSF, etc) started to participate in discussions;

apparently a number of the WIPO folks had simply never heard or

seriously considered these alternate viewpoints. At the talk itself

this was made clear by the WIPO panelist (Mr. Petite) saying:

"If something isn't protected and doesn't have rights attached,

it's worthless. It's without value." (I guess Linux is as good as used

toilet paper, then!) and confusing statements like "Copyright doesn't

give you a monopoly; you can do whatever you want with your copyright,

like give away your work for free if you choose." I hate to break it

to Mr. Petite, but actually patents and copyrights *are* temporary

monopolies on ideas and their instances respectively. The founding

charters of most patent / copyright ministries say as much. So there's

a lot of education that needs to be going on, and it sounds like Robin

is hopeful that dialogue is actually producing real results at WIPO,

and that WIPO changes are likely to affect positive and meaningful

changes in the laws of member states (like the US). I felt invigorated

with hope on the issue.

I then got into the plenary hall - turns out that the restriction with

passes only applied to Kofi's welcome speech, after which anyone could

duck into the hall. So I sat in back and watched, much to my amazement,

as Mahmoud Abbas, the man in charge of the Palestinian Authority, got

up to speak. Most of the hall - several hundred people - stood up and

applauded vigorously for what seemed minutes. Abbbas then spoke about

the information society in Palestine,

namely how it couldn't really exist until things with Israel were

settled and how Israel really ought to stop bothering Palestinians. He

exited stage left and immediately thereafter my jaw dropped to the

floor as Silvan Shalom, the deputy Prime Minister of Israel, stepped

up on stage. About a dozen people clapped gently and, well, nobody

stood up for Shalom. Shalom apparently took the first ever direct

flight from Israel to Tunisia that morning. Shalom was actually born

in Tunisia and hadn't been back until the previous day - the local

folks mentioned that there had been quite a bit of upset about the

Tunisian government letting an Israeli diplomat into the nation,

since the two countries have no diplomatic relations. Shalom went on

at length about his love for Tunisia and his desire to establish (and

re-establish) relations with North Africa and the nations of the

Muslim world.

But then he took a pretty surprising tack and strating talking about

terrorism on the Internet and how the Internet lets terrorism spread.

That the same counter-terrorism principles that apply offline should

apply online - he cited that Hamas alone has eight websites in

seven languages as an example of the Net supporting terrorism. This

made me kind of uncomfortable; what awas Shalom suggesting? That we

censor websites or access to websites? That certainly seemed to be

his gist.

I then managed to sneak into the Media-only hall where Nicholas

Negroponte was in process of launching his $100 laptop. It was a small

room full of reporters. Nick was obviously tired but cheerfully and

patiently explained the device to attendant reporters. Most of the

comments and questions were mixed incredulity and praise for the

device, although the singular functioning laptop on hand took several

minutes to boot and was so slow as to not be obviously engaging or

useful. Nick claimed that in "book" mode (passive/reflective lighting),

the laptop could get a 30:1 ratio on handcrank power (for every one

minute that the handcrank is turned, the laptop will function for 30),

and possibly a 10:1 ratio for "interactive" mode (active lighting). I

was puzzled as to why he seemed able to give a lot more details about

the passive mode than the active mode - he apparently doesn't know how

much juice active mode will take, as if the technology is still very

up in the air. Apparently the CPU is a custom modified AMD Geode GX-2.

Alan Kay, the purported inventor of the original laptop, was on hand

as well and seemed to largely be playing the role of the dour old Unix

guy who's seen everything forty times over and is almost palpably sick

of living. I asked them both to autograph the copy of Annan's speech

that was distributed - I believe I was the only person to do so,

making me the possessor of the only dual-signed (Kay & Negroponte)

announcement of the $100 laptop. :)

I think I was most struck when Nick preemptively answered a question

about why he wanted to work with governments. He said that people

wondered why he was doing as much, since governments are slow and

inefficient and private industry is fast and effective. But education

is a government venue, and an effort to bring free laptops to *all*

should be the domain of government. "And it's okay if it takes a long

time," said Negroponte, "I plan to devote the rest of my life to this

project." There was something genuine and passionate in that statement

that grabbed everyone in the room. It's a powerful statement when

someone so smart and powerful and connected makes such a committment

to a Real Cause.

I then decided to go and warwalk WSIS to get a feel for the wireless

setup here. I found 196 access points (!). All of the official APs

were on channels 1, 6, and 11.

Only 44 of 196 had encryption on, and only 26 were 802.11g.

At the Senegal booth, there are a mob of people crowding in;

I find out later they were giving out USB flash sticks with

the Senegalese flag emblazoned. I guess chotchkies work just

as well here as at any other conference. Go gadgets?

The Japanese representation, much like Vivendi Universal,

seems completely detatched from the realities of the conference

that we're attending. They're showing off next generation HDTVs,

superslim formfactor cell phones, and other fancy toys that

absolutely have nothing to do with bridging the digital divide

or creating a global information society. The "envisioned future"

demo is a little creepy, showing a tough looking guy with auto-

tracking glasses and two mean looking bodyguards enter a

building, attend a meeting and give an unneccessarily complex

presentation, and winning an award for the presentation. He

does not look like a guy who cares about a global information

society. He looks like he wants to beat people up. I guess

that's what Japanese marketers consider cool.

Some of the big companies and delegation have sensible

targeting, though - Microsoft in particular has done a valiant

job at presenting on-theme material, even while being

metaphorically violently assailed by the number of Free Software

booths and excitement around Open Source.

The booths with lounges and free coffee / tea are fairng pretty

well. Since most of the value of the conference is not to actually

walk from booth to booth but instead to meet people, lounges seem

a very welcoming and effective way to encourage this. Naturally,

the more colorful, interesting, and visually engaging booths are

doing better. Booths that are either smeared with books' worth of

text or conversely completely empty are getting no traffic. There

are actually not many "booth babes" here; those that are have

been lambasted enough in the press that I think there probably is

not much a worry of this becoming a big trend in the future.

I dropped into the joint ISOC / ICANN / NRO press conference,

where the mood was naturally upbeat, since it was just announced

that after all of the governance hoo-hah talk, nobody actually

wants to muck around with a system that's pretty open and has a

really astoundingly shining track record. Like they say, if it

ain't broke, don't fix it. What I found particularly stunning

was the size and location of the conference room, especially in

light of the fact that so many people have been grippingly

interested in the issue of Internet governance. But the joint

release room was about 15' x 20' and had about 25 people in it,

most of whom seemed to work for affected organizations such as

ARIN, RIPE, or APNIC. (The APNIC folks were especially helpful in

the post-meeting dialog.) The room was the only place in the

conference hall where I noticed flies, and there were lots of

them. It was also a roofless room, and the surrounding area was

very loud; the speakers were unamplified. It absolutely boggled

me that the resolution to what many saw as being the primary

issue of a conference of 22,000 people would take place in a tiny,

noisy, fly-filled room in the back of the conference, and have to

have ushers literally hawking the meeting: "Please, come in!" I

think there were probably about ten reporters, myself, and staff.

Lynn St. Amour of ISOC is "delighted that WSIS debate has moved

beyond technical issues." I bet. She's very happy about having

consultative body with no actual powers.

Paul Twomey of ICANN called this "A win for everyone. By this,

I mean all the countries, all the users, everyone." and that by

this ICANN would be "all inclusive - designed to listen to

everyone...just like ICANN has all along."

Axel Pawlik (who wins some kind of cool name award in my book) of

NRO is glad this is over (for the time being), with no need for

"parallel structures". Whew. He is "happy that WSIS is drawing to

a close and that we can return to our work".

So overall, the message was "whew, we've dodged that bullet for

five years. Back to work, everyone."

I asked about the impending AS Number Crunch that hasn't been

a huge focus in the same way that the IP Number Crunch has been.

It was mentioned that there are proposals for a larger AS space

that are currently being formalized. Folks seemed to generally

be pretty relaxed about the issue; my concerns stem from the

fact that standards take time and implementing them takes longer;

even if we're several years out from a really serious AS crunch,

if it takes a year or two for the standard and years for the core

routers to be upgraded, we could already be set in a race against

time. I was applauded for being the only person in the whole

process to actually ask a technical question, even if I was pretty

much blown off.

Declan McCullogh, who I can corresponded with pre-Tunisia with

the intent of meeting up, turned out to be sitting next to me.

He asked the panel what's changed? The answer? Pretty much

nothing, which is good.

Afterwards, I got Paul Twomey's autograph (yay!) and hung out

with Declan for a bit, talking about Tunisia, wikis, and the

summit. He's such a cool guy! I think I've persuaded him to

at least give helicopter flight a shot when he gets back, and

I think we're going to start actually hanging out, which would

make me quite happy.

Declan snuck me into the Media area on the premise of

interviewing me, and here I sit, with a real, honest-to-God,

wired connection to the Net (150ms pings FLAT - wow), power,

and a chair. And there are free snacks! Score one for media.

Score a few for Declan.