Featured Blogs

The Rising Technical Challenges of Networking at Home

For me, one of the more interesting sessions at the recent IETF 81 meeting in July was the first meeting of the recently established Homenet Working Group. What's so interesting about networking the home? Well, if you regard challenges as "interesting", then just about everything is interesting when you look at networking in the home! more

Cloud Brokerage and Other Business Opportunities

The market for cloud computing is getting more interesting every day. There is still a long way to go, as the success of cloud computing depends not only on high-speed networks, but also on capacity, robustness, affordability, low latency, ubiquity, security, privacy and reliability. Of course, the ideal infrastructure would be nationwide FttH networks, but obviously we can't wait for that... more

Who Will Give Birth to the gTLD’s First Billion-Dollar Domain Baby?

When all you have is a hammer, everything appears to be a nail. The generic Top-Level Domains (gTLDs) are not just about trademark filing and battle posturing or cyber-squatting. They are about the potential to create unusual global intellectual properties offering multiple opportunities for rapid image expansion and - most importantly - the achievement of market domination via name identity. more

.Nxt - You Are All Cordially Invited

There are only a few occasions in any of our lifetimes where what we know and have grown used to is turned on its head. We have now lost the generation that heard radio for the first time; there are only a few who can recall the first television pictures; but many, many more saw color appear on their screens for the first time. more

ICANN, the New gTLD Program, and Our Responsibility for the Internet

When ICANN approved the New generic Top-Level Domain (gTLD) Program in Singapore in June 2011, it pushed the activities in this space to a new level. I think we will all agree that everyone involved are very busy working on new gTLD applications and getting organized per the Applicant Guidebook requirements. This to be ready in time for the 12th of January 2012 ICANN new TLD Program launch date. However, good activities also brings along bad activities. more

Comparing IPv4 and IPv6 Performance

The active measurements the RIPE NCC carried out on World IPv6 Day on 8 June 2011 included ICMP (Internet Control Message Protocol) and ICMP6 (ICMP for IPv6) measurements from our vantage points to selected hostnames of World IPv6 Day participants and other dual-stacked parties. We used these measurements to determine the performance of IPv4 versus IPv6 connections. more

Desperate Attempts to Drag the USA Into the Digital Economy

In the USA an interesting initiative has been taken by a number of leaders in the telco industry who are frustrated with the inability of the country to start building the high-speed broadband infrastructure that is needed for the development of its digital economy. While the Obama Administration has the right vision to make this happen - and the American National Broadband Plan is a good example of this - the dysfunctional political state of the country makes it impossible to establish the industry transformation needed to make this happen. more

DNSSEC Baby Steps Reported at ICANN 41

The Internet is slowly beginning to adopt the new DNSSEC domain names standard, but significant challenges remain. That was the main takeaway from a four-hour workshop on the technology held during the recent ICANN 41 public meeting in Singapore, which heard from many domain registries, registrars and other infrastructure providers. more

Does ICANN Need to Evolve Its Code of Conduct?

If you follow the Internet governance world like I do, you've no doubt had time to ponder the news of former ICANN Board Chair Peter Dengate Thrush's appointment as Executive Chairman of Top Level Domain Holdings Limited (TLDH). This was a seemingly fast jump from the body that coordinates the Internet (whose most recent milestone was to approve the creation of new gTLDs) to one of the key companies that stands to actively benefit from this burgeoning part of the domain name industry. Further, he's taken up a position that, according to reports, will allow him to benefit substantially as well. more

Is Cybersecurity a Priority? You Wouldn’t Know It If You Go by Top Level Defections

In the US administration, we see important people like incoming Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta say at his Senate confirmation hearing that "a strong likelihood that the next Pearl Harbor" could well be a cyberattack that cripples the U.S. power grid and financial and government systems. He also said that cybersecurity will be one of the main focuses of his tenure at the Pentagon. But when you look at what is actually happening in cyber security, there is more position jockeying than there is real progress. more

Getting Out of the Broadband Box

Today's official launch of Gig.U, a consortium of universities to facilitate next-generation community broadband opportunities, has tremendous potential. John Markoff has a story about the launch in today's New York Times. Here's why I'm hopeful for this project. more

Six Key Issues About Operating a TLD Registry

Brand owners unfamiliar with the domain name system (DNS) are hearing that their first step in registering a top level domain (TLD) is to select a back-end TLD registry provider. The fear instilled in them is that if they don't act quickly, all available service providers will have reached their capacity. Given ICANN's tight and inflexible application submission schedule, brands don't want to be left at the starting gate. more

Alignment of Interests in DNS Blocking

I've written recently about a general purpose method called DNS Response Policy Zones (DNS RPZ) for publishing and consuming DNS reputation data to enable a market between security companies who can do the research necessary to find out where the Internet's bad stuff is and network operators who don't want their users to be victims of that bad stuff... During an extensive walking tour of the US Capitol last week to discuss a technical whitepaper with members of both parties and both houses of the legislature, I was asked several times why the DNS RPZ technology would not work for implementing something like PROTECT-IP. more

DNSSEC Maintenance - Just Like Mowing the Lawn

DNSSEC is a hot topic. It's a technology newly unleashed on popular networking, which has led to countless articles and posts on the subject, including right here on CircleID. The way a lot of articles try to get your attention is to talk about a technology, like DNSSEC, in a way that makes the technology either seem really significant or really complicated. That is why a lot of articles about DNSSEC make it sound like something huge, complicated, and scary. But it's not. more

The Network of Probabilities

At eComm, I interviewed on stage Neil Davies, founder of Predictable Network Solutions. (Disclosure: they are a consulting client, we are working together to commercialise their technology.) The transcript of the interview is up on the eComm blog, titled The Internet is Not a Pipe and Bandwidth is Bad. Neil's achievement is a breakthrough advance in the use of applied mathematics to describe behaviours of statistically multiplexed networks. more