Featured Blogs

How to Make DNS Green

The Dutch Internet registry SIDN has launched a unique program in partnership with CleanBits to identify what proportion of .nl domain names were hosted on a green or CO2-neutral basis. The results show a strong trend towards the 'greening' of the .nl internet zone. Nearly 30 per cent of .nl names were found to have green hosts. more

Cloud Computing’s Concealed Complexity

James Urquhart claims Cloud is complex - deal with it, adding that "If you are looking to cloud computing to simplify your IT environment, I'm afraid I have bad news for you" and citing his earlier CNET post drawing analogies to a recent flash crash. Cloud computing systems are complex, in the same way that nuclear power stations are complex - they also have catastrophic failure modes... more

The Case of Mobile Users’ Bandwidth Consumption and Causality

It started with a report in the New York Times, citing a study from Arieso, saying that "Top 1% of Mobile Users Consume Half of World's Bandwidth". Arieso said that part of the reason for the increase in download volumes may be Apple's Siri voice feature on the iPhone 4S which allows consumers to dictate to the phone and enter more text and data... Other news outlets picked up the story and lost all perspective. more

ICANN’s Final Preparations for New gTLDs

I think it's fair to say that ICANN is in a state of near meltdown at the moment. With less than a week to go before the new gTLD program's first application window is opened, on Thursday January 12, 2012, the amount of work being done is mind-bending. The ICANN Board held a special meeting on January 5 to determine the program's state of readiness ahead of the launch. more

IBM Predicts the Future for 2016 and It Includes No Spam

IBM published a video where it predicts what the world will look like in 2016 (see bottom of this post for the link). It includes the following five predictions. I want to start with the last one -- that junk mail (i.e., spam) will disappear. You'll need to watch the video to get the nuances of the prediction, but IBM says that in five years, Junk Mail will become a thing of the past. more

2011 Domain Name Year In Review: Top 10 Biggest Domain Stories

Who would have ever believed that .XXX would finally be approved AND launched, total domains registrations would continue to grow at 10% year over year, ICANN would be in the process of preparing for the launch of new gTLDs in the face of harsh criticism, and that both Go Daddy and Group NBT would be acquired by private equity firms. As we look back over the past year, here are the top 10 biggest domain stories of 2011. more

The 5 Stages of gTLD Shock

PCWorld lists new gTLDs among the 5 major changes facing the Internet in 2012. No doubt the sudden introduction of hundreds of new gTLDs will have a significant impact on the Internet. I postulate that users will react to new gTLDs by going through the following stages... more

In an Internet Minute

Intel sent an interesting infographic: What Happens in an Internet Minute. Looking at the traffic data, Intel asks if there is sufficient attention being paid to investment in infrastructure. Imagine the state of the network in three years, when the number of connected devices is projected to be double the world's population. Can our networks scale to handle predicted traffic and meet consumer expectations for immediate access from multiple devices? more

Advantage of Commercial Clouds vs. HPC for Scientific Research

The Department of Energy (DoE) recently came out with an excellent report, called the Magellan report, on the advantages and disadvantages of using commercial clouds versus in house High Performance Computers (HPC) for leading edge scientific research. The DoE probably supports the largest concentration of HPC facilities in the world. I agree with the report that for traditional applications such as computational chemistry, astrophysics, etc. will still need large HPC facilities. more

CircleID’s Top Ten Posts of 2011

Here are the top ten most popular news, blogs, and industry updates featured on CircleID in 2011 based on the overall readership of the posts for the year. Congratulations to all the participants whose posts reached top readership and best wishes to the entire community for 2012. Happy New Year! more

DNS Policy is Hop by Hop; DNS Security is End to End

The debate continues as to whether ISP's can effectively filter DNS results in order to protect brand and copyright holders from online infringement. It's noteworthy that there is no argument as to whether these rights holders and their properties deserve protection - nobody is saying "content wants to be free" and there is general agreement that it is harder to protect rights in the Internet era where perfect copies of can be made and distributed instantaneously. What we're debating now is just whether controlling DNS at the ISP level would work at all and whether the attempt to insert such controls would damage Secure DNS (sometimes called DNSSEC). more

Antispam Law Draws Backlash

I was reading in the Canadian Lawyer Mag that businesses in Canada are now coming to grips with the Canadian Antispam law that was passed last year. Canada's antispam law is much tougher than most jurisdictions. Aside from the penalties of the law, which are steep, what differentiates it the most from the US law is that Canada's law is an opt-in law; marketers who send commercial email must be able to demonstrate that they received consent in writing in order to market to people. As expected, people who are most affected by the law - marketers - are upset about the lack of wriggle room and how it could affect their business. more

TLD Expansion: ICANN Must Not Back Down

ICANN's plan to open up the domain name space to new top level domains is scheduled to begin January 12, 2012. This long overdue implementation is the result of an open process that began in 2006. It would, in fact, be more realistic to say that the decision has been in the works 15 years; i.e., since early 1997. That is when demand for new top-level domain names, and the need for other policy decisions regarding the coordination of the domain name system, made it clear that a new institutional framework had to be created. more

Abuse Reporting: Names vs Numbers

For email usage, abuse reporting requires cooperation between senders and receivers. That's why RFC 5965 specified a standard format for it. However, Wikipedia lists only 18 feedback providers today. It is often said that the number of legitimate mailbox providers in the world is rather small, possibly some hundreds of thousands, but certainly more than that. more

Filtering Spam at the Transport Level

An interesting new paper from the Naval Postgraduate School describes what appears to be an interesting new twist on spam filtering, looking at the characteristics of the TCP session through which the mail is delivered. They observe that bots typically live on cable or DSL connections with slow congested upstreams. ... This paper tries to see whether it would be practical to use that info to manage spam in real time. more