Recently I had a short email exchange with someone at Sprint about obtaining access to their LBS information for the use in my company’s products. My company targets a small vertical niche market and the reply from Sprint was basically along the lines of “we don’t deal with small fish”. This is a very unfortunate fact since it now seems that the mobile world is the last place where restrictions are put on users and developers solely for commercial gain – unlike the rest of the Internet. In any case, you can judge their reply for yourself:

The situation is this. Using the location capabilities on the CDMA platform requires partnership with Sprint. The economics of the underlying platform are such that access to the platform needs to be controlled and used by firms with compelling applications and offers which would appeal to a large number of potential customers. At the present time, the Business Solutions group is not accepting new partners, but plans to begin considering new applications in Q3 2006.We are in the process of coming up with some new business models which would open up this platform to developers such as yourselves who target more limited groups of customers. Unfortunately, those processes are not yet in place and will take some time to develop.

In essense “Direct Push” is a propertiary protocol running over HTTP. However, unlike RIM’s solution which uses an intermideary NOC to store the email, DirectPush simply provides this ability to Exchange users without a requirement for an intermideary (and pricy fees). However, in essense RIM users will be exchanging one propertiery solutions for another.

A better way maybe to go with open standards as this article suggests. If in essense, all this does is check the Exchange server every few minutes, there is no reason why IMAP or POP3 with server-side storage cannot do the trick the same way. I myself have been trying out SnapperMail which provides Blackberry-like functionality on a Palm without requirement for custom protocols. Rather, it uses IMAP and POP3.

Of course giving up custom protocols opens up ability to install any mail server you want. Any reason why RIM or Microsoft might hate that idea?

Another thought while I am at it – if you ever use Java Servlets, and wonder why everything stops working after switching to “multi-form” format – its not a bug but a feature. Pick up a copy of Apache Commons / File Upload package to fix the problem.

Well, the past week or so has been pretty busy. The ASRG had seen some pretty heavy posting volume although today it has slowed down a little. We finally got all of the various RMX people together so they can start working on a common proposal and lots of other good efforts are under way as well.

Also, ICANN has announced a meeting to discuss Verisign’s recent behavior – it will be held October 7th in Washington, DC. I looked over the invitees list and there are 23 people listed as of right now, whose affiliations are very interesting. They seem to me to line up as follows:

Defendants – Verisign and the company providing the whole DNS/search thing – Paxfire
Competition – mainly other gTLD Registraries – EDUCAUSE (.edu and they are non-profit), Neustar (.us, .kids.us, .cn and .biz), and Afilias (.info and they also provide the backend for .org, which is operated by PIR / ISOC), etc.
“Uncle Sam” – NTIA – they OWN (in the fullest sense of that word) the DNS system which ICANN operates under contract further subcontracting .COM and .NET to VeriSign
Lawyers – someone from the Cardozo School of Law, plus I am sure many others
Internet standards folks – IETF and affiliated private individuals, etc.
Big Business – AT&T, Namespace Strategy Group, etc.
Non-Profits – SDF, etc.
Consultants – Summit Strategies International?, others, etc.
Others – all the ones I can’t decipher

Pretty interesting possibilities, eh? So the defendants will argue that they didn’t do anything wrong, the competition and big business will either defend them so they can do the same thing, or attack them in hopes of getting the .COM and .NET contracts while the non-profits and the IETF folks will preach standards adherence. Lawyers and consultants will hover over like vultures in hopes of getting some carrion from whomever loses (just think “class action lawsuit” – don’t even think, there are a few filed already!). Meanwhile ICANN and “Uncle Sam” (who legally is the owner of the DNS system and is the final decision maker), will try to decide who is right (although if the US Government owns DNS, and taxpayers own the government, that means I own the DNS system, and I get to decide to who wins…). Anyway, this sounds like a bad joke – “a lawyer, a businessman and a g-man….” ANYWAY, I wish that someone from the anti-spam community would be there but maybe the IETF folks will keep anti-spam solutions in mind when discussing the issue. So we’ll see what happens with this…

But in any case, the IAB has already stated:
“Proposed guideline: If you want to use wildcards in your zone and understand the risks, go ahead, but only do so with the informed consent of the entities that are delegated within your zone.” and that “We recommend that any and all TLDs which use wildcards in a manner inconsistent with this guideline remove such wildcards at the earliest opportunity.”
Now the IAB “provides oversight of, and occasional commentary on, aspects of the architecture for the protocols and procedures used by the Internet.” And I think they are pretty experienced with the Internet, since they were around since back in 1979.

So in conclusion I think we should trust what they recommend that “any TLDs which use wildcards…” (hint, hint) “remove such wildcards at the earliest opportunity”

http://www.whois.sc/verisign-dns/