Two things Tucows can always get behind are open source software initiatives, and computer science education.

Recently we’ve been able to put our money where our mouths are by helping to sponsor the UCOSP (Undergraduate Capstone Open Source Projects), being run by Greg Wilson out of the University of Toronto.

To paraphrase their own website:

Starting in September 2009, computer science students from several universities in Canada and the US are taking part in a set of joint capstone projects in order to learn first-hand what distributed development is like. Each team will have students from two or  three schools, and will use a mix of agile and open source processes under the supervision of a faculty or industry lead.

What it really means is that students from schools all over Canada (and some from the US and Caribbean) get to earn course credits by working in teams on an open-source project – for example, ElmCity, Ingres, Thunderbird, Eclipse4Edu, etc. It’s a multi-layered challenge for them as they need to figure out how to work in a distributed team, plan their time vs. their other courses, learn how to participate in an open-source project, and…oh yeah, code useful contributions!

MarkUs: Young coders that participated in the UCOSP Code Sprint

The kickoff was back at the beginning of October, when all participants were brought together in Toronto for a weekend to meet each other, learn about their projects, and figure out how they would coordinate their efforts. From there the students have been working remotely using Agile methodologies, and blogging their progress.

For us at Tucows it’s great to get involved with some bright, budding talent and help them get a taste for delivering in ‘the real world’.

If you want to know more about the program, or get involved, go ahead and visit the website!

Jody Stocks is the Senior Director of Software Engineering at Tucows Inc.

The photo is courtesy of Greg Wilson, UCOSP.

TORONTO, Nov. 11 – Tucows Inc. (NYSE AMEX:TCX, TSX:TC), a global provider of domain names, email and other Internet services, today reported its financial results for the third quarter of 2009 ended September 30, 2009. All figures are in U.S. dollars.

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TORONTO, Oct. 28 – Tucows Inc. (NYSE AMEX: TCX, TSX: TC) plans to report its third quarter fiscal 2009 financial results via news release on Wednesday, November 11, 2009 at approximately 4:00 p.m. (ET). Tucows management will host a conference call the same day at 5:00 p.m. (ET) to discuss the results and the outlook for the company.

Participants can access the conference call via the Internet at http://tucowsinc.com/investors.
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Some experiences in the last couple weeks have me thinking about the need for registrars to rethink their approach to the secondary market for domain names and how we deal with each other when high-value domain names are hijacked. In this post I would like to briefly examine this and make a specific suggestion that I believe will help in credibility and therefore efficiency.

There is no question that the secondary market for domain names has become much more efficient. The number of transactions involving high-value domain names has greatly increased which can be seen simply by looking at the weekly results from Buy Domains and Sedo (for the purposes of this post I am thinking about transactions greater than $500). We can also see greater efficiency with the maturing of the various listing services (DDN, DLS, MLS) and with greater integration by registrars of secondary market domain names in their domain name search results.

The last few years have seen a huge increase in the importance of the secondary market for domain registration relative to the whole domain name economy. While many of the major players are the same, there are also important differences and those differences require some fresh thinking about how to make the secondary market more efficient and more effective.

Of course as this market becomes more lucrative it attracts more “bad guys”. Anecdotally, all the large registrars are seeing increases in the number of hijacking attempts. When aimed at registrars themselves, these seem to be well dealt with, but when these hijackings stem from a hack aimed at third-party email services there is little that registrars can do at a system security level.

We have been involved in two situations recently, one where we were in receipt of a domain name that was thought to be obtained illegally and one where a registrant of ours had a third-party email address compromised. In the first, we worked with the losing registrar and, with the proper protections, returned the domain name to them. In the other, the gaining registrar felt their obligation was to their customer who claimed to have obtained the allegedly stolen domain name from a third-party. They would not help us at first instance. I expect this latter situation to be worked out but it did have me thinking.

With the secondary market the players are different. There is essentially no registry involvement and, probably more importantly, there is no formal role for ICANN to play other than as it relates to its contracts. As well there are additional players, specifically owners of high-value names and the various secondary market marketplaces.

These secondary market transactions are of a much higher dollar value than those in the primary market. They warrant a different approach.

Of course there are best practices and additional security measures and services that all owners of valuable domain names should avail themselves of. I expect these services to greatly increase in both scope and sophistication in the coming year. And of course their adoption will not be universal.

I believe that registrars should develop a more standardized approach as to how they deal with these situations. We should set out appropriate practices. Of course there will be exceptions and of course any guidelines cannot be too proscriptive. BUT if we are effective in doing this we will accomplish two things. First, we will make the market safer for those customers who own high-value domain names. Second, we will make things much more difficult for those who attempt to steal the property of those rightful owners AND for those who provide liquidity for the hijackers by buying the stolen property, often with little repercussions.

While in Korea this week for the ICANN meeting I will have the opportunity to meet with representatives of most of the major registrars. We all have an interest in making the market cleaner and more efficient. It is still early days and I have no doubt that this will be warmly received as would any input from other interested parties.

Tucows is looking for a Community Lead who will invigorate and inspire our network of over 9,500 resellers, partners, and colleagues!

If you reply with a resounding “YES!” to the statements below, then this very well could be the perfect job for you!

• I love helping people solve their problems and enjoy using that experience to make things even better.
• I like working hard and thrive on the excitement of a goal-oriented team.
• I am a creative self-starter who loves running with things while keeping everyone in the loop.
• I am insanely passionate about all things Internet.
• My fans, friends and followers anxiously await my next blog/Twitter/Facebook post.
• I spend a lot of time online and stay up-to-date on new, fun things out there for web-savvy users as well as regular folks.
• I enjoy learning and am curious!
• I’m not scared off by geeky acronyms and terms like gTLD, DNS, ICANN, SMTP, or SSL.

If that sounds like you then apply to join our dynamic team. You can finally tell your friends and family that all those late nights connecting people and sharing ideas online has paid off!

In response to poor results in recent OECD tables and a number of other benchmarks, Canadian telcos and cablecos have fought back by commissioning a “study” to respond to criticisms about the (in my view abysmal) state of the Canadian broadband market. The author concludes “Canadians have access to some of the most affordable services, while also benefiting from some of the world’s fastest connection speeds for both wireline and wireless broadband services”.

Sadly, it seems only he agrees. In my role at Tucows I have the pleasure of traveling all over the world and having customers who are service providers all over the world. We are always discussing access markets. I could bore you with story after story but very few countries have slower, more expensive access offering than us in Canada. A fantastic study done for the FCC by the Berkman Center for Internet Studies at Harvard is just the most recent to confirm the sad state of broadband in Canada.

It is not that the author is incorrect, rather he is misleading and the document is more of a telco/cableco marketing document than a study. I will identify some specific criticisms.

First, and most importantly, is the definition of “broadband” which sets the benchmark from which all measurement and conclusion flows. The “study” uses 1.5mbs as its threshold. 1.5mbps! I believe this was the launch speed for Bell Canada’s dsl service in 1998. 1.5mbps as “broadband” borders on nostalgic. This, more than anything else, takes this from “study” to “attempt at persuasion”.

It is as if we were talking about hunger and debating how many Canadians are starving. I, and many others, are lamenting how hungry we are. We are complaining that in a country like Canada we should be eating MUCH better. Eating is important for health and innovation and jobs. And the telcos and cablecos have produced a “study” that assures us that we are in great shape. That in fact the whole country has access to a bowl of gruel every day. That we should be celebrating our leadership, not lamenting our laggard status. That we have healthy, competitive markets that are doing just fine thank you very much.

My second complaint is in the $/mbps analysis wherein the author concludes that we are not nearly as bad as other studies indicate. He uses as his sole basis for the analysis a Videotron service that is $80/mo for 50mbps. First, he ignores that this service is very limited in coverage and that a similar service from Rogers is $125/mo. Second, he lauds the fact that this moves us from 28th to 8th on the world tables. Never mind that this is only for OECD countries and that there are dozens of non-OECD countries who have far superior offerings. But 28th to 8th? It is like watching CBC coverage of Canadian athletes in the summer Olympics! “Just look at that top ten finish!”. Last, and most importantly, it completely ignores upstream bandwidth.

Rogers recently launched a 50mbps service to limited areas in Toronto. It is only “up to 2mbps” upstream! Quick story. My son (11) spent last weekend hard at work on a video for a charity project that his class was engaged in. After many hours and missing much of the weekend’s fun he finished his slightly over 3-minute video which naturally included some video clips that were HD. To upload that video to Vimeo took three tries and 45 minutes (and this was after failing to upload on a couple tries to youtube due to ?). Total time spent on the upload was well over two hours. AND, worst of all, after finishing we were obviously placed in to some kind of copyright-infringing bandwidth hogging penalty box at Rogers and the Internet basically crapped out and took some waiting and a number of router reboots to return to normal.

What parent wouldn’t want their son spending hours on the weekend filming, editing, doing voiceovers, poking at software to make a video FOR SCHOOL. FOR CHARITY! sadly, the current Canadian broadband market not only discourages, but punishes this behavior.

I want, and there is no reason we cannot have, at least 100mbs full symmetrical bandwidth. It is a global competitive imperative. Telcos, Cablecos, I do not want your lousy bowl of 1.5mbps gruel. Please sir, may I have some more?

(Thanks to Flickr user kainr for the photo and for releasing it under a Creative Commons license)

TORONTO, Oct. 15 – Tucows Inc. (AMEX:TCX, TSX:TC) a global provider of domain names, email and other Internet services, announced today that it has added an email feedback loop (FBL) service in partnership with Return Path, the leader in email reputation services. The addition of this FBL further demonstrates Tucows’ commitment to making the Internet, and email in particular, both easier and more effective.

Through OpenSRS, its wholesale Internet services division, Tucows provides and manages millions of mailboxes on behalf of its network of over 9,000 resellers around the world.
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TORONTO, Oct. 7 /CNW/ – Tucows Inc. (NYSE AMEX:TCX, TSX:TC) a global provider of domain names, email and other Internet services, announced today the final results of its modified “Dutch auction” tender offer, which expired at 5:00 p.m., New York City time, on October 2, 2009. Tucows will to purchase 784,643 shares of its Common Stock at a purchase price of $0.60 per share, for a total of $470,785.80.
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TORONTO, Oct. 5 /CNW/ – Tucows Inc. (AMEX:TCX, TSX:TC) a global provider of domain names, email and other Internet services, announced today the preliminary results of its modified “Dutch auction” tender offer, which expired at 5:00 p.m., New York City time, on October 2, 2009. Tucows expects to purchase 784,643 shares of its Common Stock at a purchase price of $0.60 per share, or a total of $470,785.80.
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There was big news in the ICANN world today with the announcement of the “Affirmation of Commitments”. This is the document which will now govern the relationship between ICANN and the US government (”USG”) as well as the rest of the world (”ROW”).

This is an important step in ICANN’s evolution in two respects. It signifies a significant move away from formal USG control of ICANN and it further solidifies ICANN’s role in governing the Internet and that governance being global in nature, NOT controlled by the national governments of the world.

Remember that ICANN was created in 1999 and has had three different types of documents governing its relationship with the USG. We have gone from a “Memorandum of Understanding” to a “Joint Project Agreement” to now an “Affirmation of Commitments” (AoC). To quote Bret Fausett, in this ever lightening chain of commitments, what is the next step? Facebook Friends?

Seriously, this removes a serious problem for ICANN. Since its inception ROW has been troubled by the exclusive oversight that the USG had over ICANN. The Internet is global, so should the oversight be. This has led from time to time for calls for the UN, the ITU or some other quango to take over from the USG. The AoC addresses this and gives the ROW a large say in appointing the group that provides oversight to ICANN. This is a HUGE step forward.

Notice I did not say that the ROW has a say in oversight, just in appointing the group that provides oversight. This is equally important. The terms of this oversight are laid out in the AoC and what happens if ICANN does not abide by these terms is also spelled out, the AoC fails and we are back to where we were to try again. This is a fantastic way to allow ICANN to flourish independently and to keep ICANN a global, not international organization. Think of this as a trust and those appointed as trustees. They will determine whether the terms of the trust have been abided by. If there have not been complied with then ICANN reverts to its previous state of USG control and we start again.

In its day to day operations this will not make a lot of difference. There were VERY few circumstances where the USG had a heavy hand. The dis-allowance of .xxx and the occasional burst of input when big IP interests would complain about domain names and copyright are the few exceptions. The USG deserves a thanks for its role to date.

It is also very important that we (and by “we” I mean “we the Internet”) have avoided the UN or the ITU. Either would have been disastrous for ICANN in my view.

All in all a good day and another positive development in the young regime of Rod Beckstrom as ICANN CEO. Now let’s see if he can thread a needle on new gTLDs!