Paul Walsh, the Irish Opportunist

ICANN has finally seen the light. The board has agreed to sign ICM Registry’s contract which allows them to sell the new .xxx TLD. With more than 200,000 domains pre-ordered already, I expected ICM to sell at least 300,000 as soon as the gate opens to the general public and at least 20,000 per month thereafter. That’s a lot of adult sites labeled in a way that enables parents filter out inappropriate websites for their children.

This is a victory for child protection advocates.

Where does the time go?! I know, it goes into researching and developing a new standard, technology and company.

With Symantec’s acquisition of VeriSign for $1.2bn and Intel’s acquisition of McAfee for $7.7bn, the trust/certificate market has started to consolidate over the past couple of years. So it’s now time for a new player (MetaCert!) to enter this fast growing market and provide an alternative technology. Check out the new website. You can’t yet buy a product, but it will give you some insight to what MetaCert is all about.

Following more than 5 years of research and development, we are almost ready to launch a new technology company that will offer a brand new revenue stream for Web Hosting Companies, Internet Service Providers, Registrars, Agencies, Application Service Providers, System Integrators, and Value-Added Resellers, by enabling them to resell trust and standards compliance certificates direct to website owners.

Our method of classifying, labeling and certifying content is based on the open standard POWDER, which we helped to create back in 2006. Rather than launch yet another proprietary technology, we helped to instigate the creation of a W3C working group, chartered with creating a new industry standard for labeling content. Following four and a half years of the usual W3C review process, POWDER became a Full Recommendation, formally replacing PICS - the now-out-of-date standard still in use by Microsoft Internet Explorer 9 Content Advisor!

This method of labeling and certifying content is more flexible and granular than any other technology or method of tagging in use today. While SSL certificates and labeling methods such as PICS only allow website owners to make a claim about an entire website, POWDER allows you to classify and label entire websites and individual web pages.

It’s not easy and it takes a developer about 4 hours, to write the POWDER metadata, create the visual certificate and do all of the linking etc. However, at MetaCert, we have built a web application that enables a non-techie to classify and label a website in less than a couple of minutes. And for resellers, the process is completely automated through our suite of APIs.

Our products will be sold in a similar fashion to SSL Certificates. Although, our products are much easier for website owners to implement - no tags or scripts required - making it easier for partners to resell them.

I’m extremely proud to announce JP Rangaswami as our Chair, with Geir Rasmussen and Angus Bankes as Advisors. Sheetal Mehta Walsh is heading up International and Partnerships and Graham Anderson is our Technical Product Manager. I’d like to thank David, Aido and Kamrul for their continued hard work - 5 years is a long time to work on a project under the radar.

I’d like to thank Phil Archer. When Phil was the CTO at ICRA, he approached me for advice in how to increase the confidence in the ICRA brand by providing a Segala-verified label for child protection. (Un)fortunately we signed a contract with ICRA, but I later decided to wait and do a better job via MetaCert. ICRA has since stopped labeling sites altogether, which means the new Internet Explorer 9 is not only using an unsupported standard, it’s also using a standard that is no longer in use by Industry. I’d also like to credit Phil with coming up with the original idea to replace PICS. Together we kicked off the W3C’s first incubator project to get POWDER under way. And the rest as they say, is history.

You can sign up on the site if you would like to be kept informed of our launch date.

If you are a potential partner and looking to become one of the first to resell MetaCert’s trust certificates, please get in touch with Sheetal (sheetal@metacert.com).

Please let me know if you find any issues with the site.

Check out the new website

I read today, an article about Garda Síochána’s Michael Moran, on secondment to Interpol for the last five years as Coordinator of the Crimes Against Children team, who slammed ICANN and the Internet Industry for not doing enough to help stop child abuse imagery being posted online. He says

Accurate Whois is a joke. It just doesn’t happen,” Moran said. “We don’t see it, we never get it. Even if we do see something within it that might give us indications, it’s always a dead end and it’s a waste of time even trying. What’s the point in having a Whois database if it can’t be accurate? Somebody has to be responsible for having that accurate, and whoever that somebody is, can you please step up to the plate and do your work?

His comments came during a session on DNS abuse at ICANN’s 40th public meeting, which is being held all week at the Westin St Francis hotel in San Francisco.

Domain registrars are generally reluctant to implement technical measures, such as identity verification, as it’s an extra step in the buying process.  The argument is that pre-checking Whois information for accuracy would only truly be of value to police if it was obligatory industry-wide practice, otherwise criminals would simply shop around for registrars with lax controls. And they do, they buy .com…

This is exactly why .XXX will help protect children online. ICM Registry, the company behind the new .xxx TLD, will enforce a strict measure to verify the identity of every company/individual that buys a .xxx domain.

Fingers crossed that ICANN announce its decision to finally sign the ICM contract today in San Francisco.

Dear reader, it has been almost four months since my last blog post… and here I am writing about something that couldn’t be less important to me or my businesses. Perhaps I’ll write an update on what I’ve been doing of late, in case there are any readers still subscribed - and who are still interested in my blurb. And to think that this blog had a decent number of readers at one point. Shame I didn’t continue to embarrass myself with bad grammar and typos in every post

Anyhoo, back to this post… I picked this one up from the founder of my favourite hosting provider (Ireland’s only ICANN Accredited Registrar). It’s about ICANN’s use of a leprechaun in a promotional picture (see above). Personally I really don’t like it, especially because the leprechaun is holding a pint of beer. It’s imagery like this that prolongs the perception of all Irish people being alcoholics. I don’t mind this kind of banter generally, but I dislike it because it doesn’t do any favours for Irish entrepreneurs in this space. Would they be as quick to use a golly wog?

But guess what?! The use of this image doesn’t even come close to the imagery used by an Irish person on a site entitled “Techludd, Doin’ it Valley style”.

Now. That. Was. Embarrassing.

I’m not sure if it’s worth me asking “what do you think?” as I kinda feel like I’m writing a letter to myself instead of a few thousand smart commentators. Anyone out there [echo... tumble weed blowing across the screen]

I read this post on TechCrunch this morning with great interest - it’s related to the UK Government’s creation of an ‘Entrepreneur’s forum advisory board’ to advise Government with business and enterprise policy. As soon as I read the list I quickly came to the conclusion that they appointed more women than men for PR reasons. Then, I read Vince Cable’s quote:

a significant proportion of the forum are women and increasing the rate of female entrepreneurs is one area the forum will be encouraged to look at.

I know a few people on the list. Some good. Some not-so-good (I’m being very diplomatic). How are people chosen? Who’s consulted to find out who should be involved?!

It’s good to see more women involved in such initiatives, but has Cable appointed lots of women for the sake of it? I think he has.