Featured Blogs

Why US Broadband Service Continues to Stagnate - Some Simple Numbers to Drive the Point Home

I've been fascinated by the recent announcement that Australia is spending $31 billion USD to upgrade its broadband. With all the excitement and fuss over the broadband stimulus funding in the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, it may seem strange to be claiming that the $7.2 billion is a pitifully small amount -- but let me bring this home for you... more

Cyber Security and the White House, Part 2 - Cyberwarfare

This is a follow-up to my previous post on Cybersecurity and the White House. It illustrates an actual cyberwarfare attack against Estonia in 2007 and how it can be a legitimate national security issue. Estonia is one of the most wired countries in eastern Europe. In spite of its status of being a former Soviet republic, it relies on the internet for a substantial portion of everyday life -- communications, financial transactions, news, shopping and restaurant reservations all use the Internet. Indeed, in 2000, the Estonian government declared Internet access a basic human right... more

Cyber Security and the White House

A few months ago, an article appeared on arstechnica.com asking the question "Should cybersecurity be managed from the White House?" During the recent presidential elections in the United States and the federal elections in Canada, the two major players in both parties had differing views that crossed borders. In the US, the McCain campaign tended to favor free market solutions to the problem of cybersecurity, and the Conservatives in Canada took a similar position... more

Another Attack, Another Reason for the Urgency of DNSSEC Adoption

News broke this week about an attack in Puerto Rico that caused the local websites of Google, Microsoft, Yahoo, Coca-Cola, PayPal, Nike, Dell and Nokia to be redirected for a few hours to a phony website. The website was all black except for a taunting message from the computer hacker responsible for the attack... more

“.Pol”, a “.Com” for Political Candidates

In the coming months, ICANN will ambitiously expand the number of top-level domains (TLDs). ICANN could add ".movie" and ".paris", among others, to the existing ranks of ".com", ".org", ".gov", and ".edu". Here's another they should consider: a new ".pol" TLD that is reserved exclusively for political candidates and entities. A ".pol" TLD is needed to alleviate problems linked to a now-common phenomenon called political cybersquatting... more

IPv6… Canada About to Score?

USA-Canada World Championship hockey games never fail to elicit great excitement. In the IPv6 adoption world league however, the US seems to have a convincing lead over their northern neighbour but the game is not over yet, here come the Canucks. Internet evolution, and IPv6 in particular, were the major themes at the ISACC (ICT Standards Advisory Council of Canada) Plenary meeting in Ottawa mid April... more

Blame Yourself, Not ICANN

Domain name owners have traditionally complained that ICANN does not listen to us, and there is indeed plenty of evidence demonstrating the group’s obliviousness to community input. Nevertheless, as domain owners, we need to begin giving ourselves a share of blame too. It’s time to reflect on our failures so we can come up with an actionable solution... more

Per Capita, Netherlands Is the World’s ccTLD Leader

The Netherlands, a country with just 16 million people, accounts for more than 3 million ccTLDs. That's an impressive ratio of people to domains -- one ccTLD per 5.3 people -- and it the highest ratio of any country with more than five million residents. Germany comes in a close second, with a ratio of roughly one ccTLD per 6.5 people... more

Working With ICANN’s IRT and Not Against is in Order

ICANN realized during the Mexico City public meeting that its draft proposals for new generic Top-Level Domains (gTLDs) did not take sufficient account of the trademark problems that might arise if the new top level domains become havens for cybersquatters. ICANN sensibly asked the trademark and brand owners to propose rules and procedures that might address these problems... more

In Support of ICANN’s New Trademark Protection Rules (Mostly)

Yesterday, I sent ICANN my comments about the draft recommendations from ICANN’s Implementation Recommendation Team (IRT), which has been tasked with coming up with a trademark protection scheme for new top-level domains. For the most part, I think they did an excellent job... more

ICANN IRT Report Open for Comment With Short Timeframe?

The Intellectual Property Constituency's draft report on trademark issues is now available for comment. The draft report was put together behind closed doors, which would appear to go against the normal policy development process at ICANN, which is quite worrying. Its contents, however, are even more disturbing... more

Domain Name Registries Must Do More to Protect Highly-Trafficked Domains

With the recent attacks against high-profile New Zealand domain names including Coca-Cola.co.nz and F-Secure.co.nz, fingers are naturally pointing to Domainz, the registrar of record for these domains, as the party responsible for this lapse in security. While domain name registrars certainly need to ensure the security and stability of their systems, domain name registries must also step up and take responsibility for mitigating risks posed by hackers... more

Commerce Department: Headed Toward ICANN 3.0?

The NTIA has published a Notice of Inquiry, Assessment of the Transition of the Technical Coordination and Management of the Internet's Domain Name and Addressing System, in advance of the expiration of the Joint Project Agreement in September 2009. The document outlines the history and evolution of the Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) between the Department of Commerce (DoC) and ICANN, and the questions posed cover fairly standard territory. However, the following might be worth paying attention to... more

Global DNS SSR Recap

This past February, around 100 DNS industry experts met in Atlanta, GA for the "The Global DNS Security, Stability, & Resiliency Symposium." Organized by ICANN and hosted by Georgia Tech, this event was to strengthen personal relationships between operators and review what we know about the DNS infrastructure... The content included three breakout groups over two days: Enterprise Use of DNS, DNS in Resource Constrained Environments, and Combating Malicious Use of DNS... more

A Few More Thoughts on Email Authentication… errr… Trust

Mike Hammer's thoughtful article, A Few Thoughts on the Future of Email Authentication, should trigger thoughtfulness in the rest of us. Email abuse has been around a long time. Anti-abuse efforts have too. Yet global abuse traffic has grown into the 90+% range, with no hint of trending downward. The best we hear about current effectiveness is for last-hop filtering, if you have the money, staff and skills to apply to the problem... more