Featured Blogs

Could This Be the Silver Bullet for Cloud Computing

This article on cloud appeared in the Economist.com on April 12th 2001 titled "The Beast of Complexities" Stuart Feldman of IBM, mentions these examples. Quote 'Picture yourself as the product manager of a new hand-held computer whose design team has just sent him the electronic blueprint for the device. You go to your personalized web portal and order the components, book manufacturing capacity and arrange for distribution. With the click of a mouse, you create an instant supply chain that, once the job is done, will dissolve again." unquote. ...In the same article he also lamented that so far, nobody has found a silver bullet to kill the Beast of Complexity. more

What’s Wrong With the FCC’s Consumer Broadband Test?

The FCC recently published some tools to let consumers measure some internet characteristics. The context is the FCC's "National Broadband Plan". I guess the FCC wants to gather data about the kind of internet users receive today so that the National Broadband Plan, whatever it may turn out to be, actually improves on the status quo. The motivation is nice but the FCC's methodology is technically weak. more

EI, EI - NO!

For those closely following the ICANN Meeting in Nairobi this week, the EOI (Expression of Interest) model seemed like a foregone conclusion. In fact, ICANN had scheduled a webinar on March 18th to explain the process despite the complaints of the community and large-scale disagreement amongst proponents of the EOI. more

Another One (Partially) Bites the Dust

Following in the footsteps of Lethic, Waledac and Mariposa, yet another botnet has been taken offline. Not completely, though, it was only a partial disconnect. The Zeus botnet, also known as Zbot, is a trojan password stealer that captures passwords and sends them to the attacker. more

ICANN Board Meeting Spoiler Alert

For those participants that have been working rearranged hours and participating remotely in connection with ICANN's Nairobi meeting, here is a chance to sleep in. While ICANN Board tea leaf reading is not an exact science, there is a great deal of predictability to ICANN's actions so here are my big three predictions for tomorrow. more

The Free Internet in Jeopardy

The venerated BBC World Service recently commissioned a polled involving more than 27,000 people across 26 countries. The findings are unremarkable: some 87% of Internet users believe that Internet access should be a basic right, and more than 70% of non-users believe that they should have access to it. more

ICANN’s Board Decisions in Nairobi Will Determine Its Credibility and Respect for Years to Come

Today is the morning of the most revered Thursday in the ICANN meetings calendar -- The public forum. It is tradition personified. It is the day when the show and the showcasing really begin. It is the stage and the choreography of the open microphone that can help influence ICANN decisions one way or another and make the supposed bottom up model appear at its best. more

Whither .XXX?

What's going to happen this week on .XXX? Nairobi is the first public board meeting since the independent review panel's nonbinding declaration in February that ICANN acted against its own rules in refusing to go ahead with .XXX. Reports that ICANN is going to 'do something' about .XXX have gone around the world via BBC news, and even surfaced on the radio in rural Ireland. The ICM team are out in force here in Nairobi, and there is endless speculation about what will happen at the Board's meeting on Friday. more

American National Broadband Plan Good First Step

The National Broadband Plan that the FCC will present on 17 March will set the USA on a completely different telecoms path. This plan will hopefully show Congress that it is worthwhile making the legislative changes that will deliver the social and economic benefits of a national broadband infrastructure. more

ICANN Takes a Wrong Turn on New TLD Contracts - “Post Signature Revision Process?”

The pen is mightier than the word...or should be. When ICANN Chairman Peter Dengate-Thrush --­ an accomplished attorney -- said last year that he wouldn't let one of his own clients agree to a contract that could be unilaterally changed after it was signed, the Internet community breathed a sigh of relief. But when the Chairman backed away from that stance earlier this week in Nairobi, it became clear that we should have held our breath a little bit longer. more

A Little Flexibility from ICANN and We Might Just Get IDNs… for Everyone

Nobody doubts that some time in the near future there will be Internationalized Domain Names (IDNs) in Chinese, Russian or Arabic scripts. The Chinese, Russian and Arabic-character-using worlds are large -- encompassing hundreds of millions of current and potential users. They are politically influential blocs, with the ability to demand action in international meetings. And perhaps most importantly, they are -- at least when taken together -- rich. Everybody knows that access on the web in these languages is not a matter of if, but simply a question of when... more

OTT Threat to Telco’s Middleware Opportunities

I recently participated in two Comverse events, and once again the message was driven home to me about the enormous opportunities that lie ahead of the industry in the field of new telecoms applications. The middleware and cloud applications that are now appearing at the edge of the network will of course, be further developed once high-speed broadband becomes available, but already they are having an enormous impact on the telecoms market. The new user experiences that can be obtainable through these applications will enrich fast broadband networks beyond recognition. What we now have is, on the one hand, the Over-The-Top (OTT) applications that have conquered the world... more

LTE and Spectrum Stupidity

Mobile operators are counting on Long Term Evolution (LTE) technology to handle surging demand for mobile data access. But LTE developers made some poor choices, cutting spectral efficiency and thus driving up operator costs. LTE was envisioned as an all IP system, but the RF allocations follow the voice-centric approach of earlier generations. While LTE standards allow for either Frequency Division Duplexing (FDD) or Time Division Duplexing (TDD), all initial LTE equipment uses FDD. FDD requires two separate blocks of spectrum... more

Are Portable Email Addresses Possible?

News reports say that the Israeli government is close to passing a law that requires portable e-mail addresses, similar to portable phone numbers. Number portability has been a success, making it much easier to switch from one provider to another, and address portability might ease switching among ISPs. But e-mail is not phone calls. Is it even possible? more

Authorities Take Down the Mariposa Botnet

There are a number of sources talking about the takedown of the Mariposa botnet... Spanish authorities, working with researchers from Panda Labs, Defence Intelligence and a couple of other educational institutions, took down the Mariposa botnet (Mariposa is the Spanish word for "butterfly"). The Mariposa botnet is an absolutely enormous with around 12 million (!) nodes doing its bidding. It was involved in things like credit card phishing and identity fraud. more