Featured Blogs

Russian Internet Pioneer Sentenced to Two Years in Prison

Last month, Russian Internet pioneer Alexey Soldatov was sentenced to two years in a labor colony on charges of "abuse of power." Soldatov, the co-founder of Russia's first Internet service provider, Relcom, was convicted for his role as a co-founder and director of the Russian Institute for Development of Public Networks (RIPN). RIPN was founded in 1992 to support research and education networking. more

The Dos and Don’ts of DNS Management

The domain name system (DNS) is vital for businesses as it facilitates customer access to online services and resources. Strategic DNS management plays a pivotal role in cybersecurity, safeguarding against threat vectors and ensuring secure global connectivity across online channels including apps, email, websites, application programming interfaces (APIs) and more. more

Today’s CISOs Are Contending With Oft-Changing Disclosure Standards

When it comes to breach disclosures, today's chief information security officers (CISOs) are struggling with an especially turbulent regulatory environment. Security teams are understaffed, and systems are more extensive, making them harder to monitor and defend, while threats are becoming more sophisticated, more frequent, and more varied. It's at precisely this difficult juncture that regulations and enforcement are rapidly changing, leaving CISOs feeling like they are running up the down escalator. more

Will Starlink Harm the Ozone Layer?

There was a paper published in June in the peer-reviewed Geophysical Research Letters titled Potential Ozone Depletion from Satellite Demise During Atmospheric Reentry in the Era of Mega-Constellations. As can be deduced by the lengthy title, scientists have uncovered a new risk coming from the reentry of low-orbit satellites through the atmosphere. more

Setting the Record Straight - Myths vs. Facts about .com

Over the past several weeks, there has been significant discussion about Verisign and its management of the .com top-level domain (TLD) registry. Much of this discussion has been distorted by factual inaccuracies, a misunderstanding of core technical concepts, and misinterpretations regarding pricing, competition, and market dynamics in the domain name industry. more

Is 5G Faster than 4G?

Ookla recently tackled this question in one of its research articles. Ookla compared the time it takes to load pages for Facebook, Google, and YouTube on cellphones using 4G LTE networks versus 5G networks. Ookla thinks that page load speed is a great way to measure cellphone experience. The time needed to load a web page is directly impacted by latency, which measures the lag between the time a phone requests a website and that website responds. more

Human Rights and Standards Development Organizations

Do human rights come into the picture when technology and policy work are involved? If so, where? This is a question that has come up multiple times during the last dozen years, and occasionally even before, in Internet Governance discussions. These discussions have included debates on whether human rights were specifically applicable to protocol design or to the organizations developing protocol standards. more

The Role of Chronic Radio Interoperability Impediments in the Butler, PA Assassination Attempt

There are many inconvenient truths about radio spectrum sharing and transceiver interoperability that require full ventilation and resolution. Spectrum users want exclusive access and - news flash - they do not like to share! Campaign events, like the Trump Bulter, PA rally, require short notice, forced cooperation between and among federal, state, and local law enforcement officers, as well as a variety of other government agencies. more

Broadband Anywhere: The New Trend Bringing Connectivity to Campers and Remote Locations

A new broadband trend has quietly entered the market. Both Starlink and T-Mobile are advertising broadband that can be used practically anywhere and are aiming new products at campers, hikers, and others that go to remote locations. According to T-Mobile, this is a huge market, with 15 million households taking RV trips yearly and 59 million people camping. more

Can Cellphones Capture the Broadband Market?

Linda Hardesty wrote an interesting article in FierceNetwork that asks the question, "What if, in ten years, young people don't subscribe to fixed broadband at all?" Her story is based on a U.K. research group that predicts that within ten years, there will be a lot of young people who will never have subscribed to a landline broadband product. more

Harmonizing WHOIS With NIS2 Article 28 - the Rubber Is About to Meet the Road

ICANN must act now to harmonize its domain name registration data (commonly known as WHOIS) policies with Article 28 of the European Union's Network and Information Security (NIS2) directive, first to adhere to applicable laws as it fulfills its oversight responsibilities and, second, to keep its word to the community to preserve WHOIS to the fullest extent possible under law. more

Phishers Exploit the Cybercrime Supply Chain Despite the Availability of Effective Countermeasures

Interisle Consulting Group today released its fourth annual Phishing Landscape report investigating where and how cybercriminals acquire naming and hosting resources for phishing. Our study shows that cybercriminals evolved their tactics for obtaining attack resources, including sharply increasing their exploitation of subdomain and gateway providers. more

An Unnatural .Bond: A Study of a ‘Megacluster’ of Malware Domains

A recent news story, following research from security provider Infoblox, highlighted the case of the 'Revolver Rabbit' cybercriminal gang, who have registered more than half-a-million domains to be used for the distribution of information-stealing malware. The gang make use of automated algorithms to register their domains, but unlike the long, pseudo-random ('high entropy') domain names frequently associated with such tools, the Revolver Rabbit domains instead tend to consist of hyphen-separated dictionary words (presumably so as to obfuscate their true purpose), with a string of digits at the end. more

The Future of AI in Broadband: Impacts on Network Demand and Power Consumption

AI technology seems to be a hot topic in every industry, and broadband is no exception. It seems inevitable that AI will be used to help monitor and control complex broadband networks. It looks like the biggest ISPs are already phasing AI into the customer service process. Nobody seems to be able to answer the big question of whether AI will change the amount of broadband the average household uses. more

Analysis of the Global IT Breakdown Caused by Microsoft-CrowdStrike

The Optus outage in Australia from last year was immediately on my mind when on Friday afternoon a similar event swept, this time, across the world. Also, in this case it was a software update that caused the problem. This time from global security software provider CrowdStrike. The culprit appears to be an update to the CrowdStrike Falcon platform, a security monitoring tool widely deployed by businesses and organisations on Microsoft desktop computers and notebooks. more