Inside Foo Camp

If technologists arent religiously tracking the moving targets launched by Redmond, then what are they watching? Answer: the Net, the Net, and the Net. There was an overwhelming sense, in looking at the session topics as they were posted, that the Net is bigger than all of us but that it desperately needs protection from our worst herd behaviors. Tim Bray convened a session on the future of search that drew attendees including former ICANN chair Esther Dyson, with whom I traded bleak scenarios of "real search" (for example, todays Google) versus "faux search" (for example, a retail-site facility that looks like a search tool but really just takes you to the things theyre pushing that day).

Esther and I also joined Internet infrastructure pioneer Paul Vixie for a discussion of the Verisign SiteFinder brouhaha: he shared his dilemma over whether he should deliberately break the BIND protocol to block the Verisign hijacking of .com and .net spelling errors, then decided that "I cherish my relevance: I was assured that there would be a version of BIND with that functionality, that week, and that I could either do it or let someone else do it."

Paul also shared some interesting statistics on the fall-off of Verisign referrals from sites in China, compared to that in the rest of the world, suggesting that the mechanisms that once blocked Chinese users access to politically sensitive Google retrievals are still alive and well and ready to be used against any other site that incurs that countrys displeasure.

Also on hand at foo camp were lots of great toys: robots roaming around underfoot, electronic musicians tools in the late-night "electronic jam" on Saturday, some impressively complex board games and a Segway scooter: the new, smaller-wheeled version that may bring the price down to the $2k-3k range fairly soon.

I feel sort of guilty about sharing all of this, because the event is limited by space available: its not as if readers have the option of deciding that they really ought to go next year. But people should know that there are folks who will sleep on the ground for two nights in order to have the privilege of talking with each other, all weekend, about how to make the Net a better platform for the decades to come, and about how to build better ways to use it—and apply other technologies in other ways—to make things more interesting and more fun today.

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