The Internet has two billion global users, and the developing world is just hitting its growth phase. Mobile data traffic is doubling every year, and soon all four billion mobile phones will access the Net. In 2008, according to a new UC-San Diego study, Americans consumed over 3,600 exabytes of information, or an average of 34 gigabytes per person per day. Microsoft researchers argue in a new book, "The Fourth Paradigm," that an "exaflood" of real-world and experimental data is changing the very nature of science itself. We need completely new strategies, they write, to "capture, curate, and analyze" these unimaginably large waves of information. more
No one can have failed to notice that the last IPv4 address will soon be allocated. We have lived with a shortage of addresses for 15 years, but when the last address is allocated, the shortage will become acute, instead of just a pain, as it is today... In The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, Douglas Adams describes the least expensive and most effective method for making something invisible. You simply decide that it is Someone Else's Problem or SEP, if you abbreviate. This is an approach that is frighteningly similar to the Swedish public sector's view of the address shortage on the Internet. "It is not our problem -- if we ignore it, it will probably go away." more
The press, the blogosphere, CircleID - everybody has been discussing Craig Mundie's comment on the need for an "Internet Driver's License". Most of the reaction has been from privacy advocates fearing that this is simply another way to kill anonymity on the Internet. Oh well... that's the usual set of reactions. Now... the fun part is, a driver's license also shows that you have the competence to drive... more
In 1998, the United States government might have taken a different path in asserting its control over the technical administration of the DNS. It might have asserted full U.S. governmental control, or it might have turned over the functions to an international body such as the International Telecommunications Union. Instead, it created a "private-public partnership", incorporated as a California "nonprofit public benefit corporation", with a charter giving the company a dual mission of quasi-governmental functions combined with responsibility for operational stability of the Internet. more
We learned from The Wall Street Journal yesterday that "Federal Communications Commission Chairman Julius Genachowski gets a little peeved when people suggests that he wants to regulate the Internet." He told a group of Journal reporters and editors today that: "I don't see any circumstances where we'd take steps to regulate the Internet itself," and "I've been clear repeatedly that we're not going to regulate the Internet." We're thankful to hear Chairman Julius Genachowski to make that promise. We'll certainly hold him to it. But you will pardon us if we remain skeptical... more
About a week ago, I posted that Australia was getting ISPs to boot infected computers off of their network. I commented on whether or not this was a good policy. However, there was one thing in that article that I wanted to comment on but didn't... more
A common security prediction for 2010 is the continued rise of malware and phishing attacks on mobile phones. The MarkMonitor Security Operations Center recently detected an interesting twist on this theme involving a popular smartphone and the latest smart technologies used by cybercriminals. In this case, instead of compromising a smartphone to steal its information, cybercriminals used phishing techniques to clone smartphones. more
Over time, people have grown accustomed to most Web site addresses ending in .com, .edu or .gov. Yet a proposed expansion of the generic top-level domain (gTLD) space by the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) will change the way we look at domain names forever... For businesses, this change means that protecting their trademarks and searching for and watching gTLDs will become increasingly complex. more
Mobile operators face soaring data demand. The natural evolution of 2G/3G/4G infrastructure delivers about 2X additional capacity every 24 months. That's a major disconnect! (At least) two solutions are on the table, Femtocells and Wi-Fi offload. Both approaches solve the backhaul issue by using customer or 3rd party links (DSL, DOCSIS, T1/E1, WISP or otherwise)... As a solution for mobile data capacity, Wi-Fi wins, for many reasons. more
This is a new development in the VoIP market. This is how one of my colleagues, Cullen Jennings explained it to me. Today we have two widely deployed global identifiers for reaching people. One is delegated address out of DNS and the other is phone numbers. So I consider an address like email: [email protected] or xmpp:[email protected] to roughly be out of the DNS namespace and phone number to be out of the E.164 name space. Phone numbers have lots of parts that are not cool, but they also have some cool parts... more
Maybe you saw the stories recently about comments that were made at a recent World Economic Forum debate on cyberwarfare. As one of them notes, Hamadoun Toure, Secretary General of the International Telecommunications Union, proposed a treaty in which countries would pledge not to attack each other without having been attacked. This post isn't about Mr. Toure's proposal. It's about a comment the story attributes to Craig Mundie, Chief Research and Strategy Officer for Microsoft. According to The Raw Story, Mundie "called for a `driver's license' for internet users." more
SWITCH, the registry for .CH and .LI domain names, enabled DNSSEC on day two of the annual Domain Pulse conference in Luzern yesterday. SWITCH became the third ccTLD registry to enable DNSSEC giving registrants of .CH domain names added security following .SE (Sweden) and .CZ (Czech Republic). more
The 2010 Domain Pulse, hosted by SWITCH (the .CH registry) was held in the snowy Swiss city of Luzern. Domain Name Security (DNS) was of particular importance in this year's meeting with DNSSEC being implemented in the root zone in 2010 by ICANN, and by many registries in the next few years. ICANN plan to have all root servers signed with DNSSEC by mid-2010 Kim Davies, Manager, Root Zone Services at ICANN told the meeting, starting with the L root server, then A root server with the last being the J root server as all are gradually signed. more
The arrival of the iPhone, Android and iPad will raise the stakes higher in the mobile broadband market. The fact that iPhone alone has over 140,000 Apps over sort of open networks, not portals, shows the demand for mobile applications. This will put an enormous strain on the infrastructure of the mobile operators and will require them to build fibre networks to all mobile stations, as well as invest in more spectrum and new technologies such as LTE. At the same time the mobile subscriber markets are becoming saturated and competition is driving margins down. more
Again on the subject of new Top-Level Domains (TLDs) ... One of the "issues" that concerned a number of people is the concept of "vertical separation". The basic idea is that domain name registries and registrars should be kept separate. While that is a wonderful Utopian ideal, the reality is that in the real world companies own other companies, people trade in stocks and shares etc., etc. So it's far from being a simple "cut and dried" situation. more
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