Featured Blogs

Ladies and Gentlemen, China’s Netizen Day…

Just after the government announces a crackdown on Internet smut. Yesterday, they announced plans for "Netizen Day" on September 14th, which apparently marks 15 years since the first e-mail message was sent from China in 1987. The new celebratory day (I don't think it's an official holiday) was unveiled at an official ceremony presided over by Chinese government officials and Internet execs, many of whose companies - including Google, Sina, and Sohu, who were named in the smut crackdown just 24 hours before. more

ICANN Should Pay Even More and Increase Its Spending Several Fold

Where does this idea that the employees of all non-profit organizations alike shall lead a public-transportation lifestyle come from? ICANN's monetary resources do not come from war widows and pensioners, for ICANN to feel guilty about every penny that it spends on administration. Nor does its resources, wherever they come from, are any that are earmarked to be spent on famine relief or on basic health care for the most unfortunate. more

ICANN Uses For-Profit Companies as “Comparables” in Its Employee Compensation

According to page 123 of ICANN's annual report: "...Commitment to continued payment in the salary span of 50th to 75th percentile of for-profit market place of companies of a similar size and complexity to ICANN..." Note that the comparables have been "for-profit". This is obviously ridiculous, given the purported non-profit nature of ICANN, with its inherent job security... more

China’s Latest Internet Crackdown

Seven different government agencies, including the Ministry of Public Security and the State Council Information Office declared war on Internet smut today. 19 Internet companies, including Google, Baidu, Sina, and others, were cited for "violating public morality and harming the physical and mental health of youth and young people."... Another Chinese language report, including video of a TV report with footage of computer servers being confiscated by police at an unknown location and unknown time... more

More Privacy, Bit by Bit

Before the Holidays, Yahoo got a flurry of good press for the announcement that it would (as the LA Times puts it) "purge user data after 90 days." My eagle-eyed friend Julian Sanchez noticed that the "purge" was less complete than privacy advocates might have hoped. more

The Problem With HTTPS SSL Runs Deeper Than MD5

The recent research highlighting the alarming practice of Secure Socket Layer (SSL) Certificate Authority (CA) vendors using the MD5 hashing algorithm (which was known to be broken since 2005) has shown a major crack in the foundation of the Web. While the latest research has shown that fake SSL certificates with MD5 hashes can be forged to perfection when the CA (such as VeriSign's RapidSSL) uses predictable certificate fields, the bigger problem is that the web has fundamentally botched secure authentication. more

VoIP: Beyond the Status Quo

On New Year's Eve 2008 I felt compelled to respond to the stories being written about the Death of VoIP which lead to my recent blog post: VoIP is NOT Dead!. Since then, I've enjoyed many of the conversations that have continued to take place in the comment sections of a number of blogs, including this one. My belief is the future is unwritten and if the conditions are right people will return to the space. But we need to embrace innovation and change and encourage people to be disruptive. What follows is a continuation of the conversation. more

Who Pays for Email?

An acquaintance wondered why the people who run the systems that receive mail get to make all the rules about what gets delivered. After all, he noted: "The sender pays for bandwidth and agrees to abide by the bandwidth provider's rules." It is useful to think of the Internet as a collection of tubes, all leading from the periphery to the middle, where the middle is approximately "the peering point." The sender has paid for the tubes leading from himself to the middle... more

Why Government Investment in Broadband Is Justified Now

Bobbie Johnson, technology correspondent for The Guardian, was kind enough to quote me along with Vint Cerf (nice to be in good company) on the importance of building an online economy and an online government. Vint said: "You know how they say opportunity lies on the edge of chaos? Maybe that's going to be true here too." So far our telecommunications infrastructure has largely been privately built and financed. Why should that change now? It's unusual for government to do anything as well as the private sector. more

ITU: The Communication Wonderland

I kept wondering if all that I had said about Dr Toure was fair -- I hadn't met him before and had written so much to comment on the transcript of his speech at ICANN, Cairo . My discomfort was short-lived and even before a month elapsed I met him at the Internet Governance Forum, Hyderabad. Exchanged pleasantries before saying "I wrote some strong comments about your speech at Cairo". Dr Toure looked happy to see me, beamed with a bit of surprise and said he read my comment... more

Top 10 Spam Stories of 2008

Well, it's a yearly tradition in the western hemisphere that at the end of the year, we compose a top 10 list of the 10 most . Since it is now 2009, I thought that I would create my own list of the top 10 spam stories of 2008. Now, not all of these will be universally applicable to everyone, they are the top 10 stories as seen by me. more

IPv6… The Dangers of Prolonged Inter AS Tunnel Vision

Tunnel vision is a rather serious medical condition and the Internet or at least a number of service providers could be at risk if not treated soon enough. Symptoms of inter AS (Autonomous System) tunnel vision are many slower connections with IPv6 compared to IPv4 with some failing all together. Reason is that tunnels, especially inter-AS tunnels, can lead to long paths and non-optimal routing. more

CircleID’s Top 10 Posts of 2008

Here is a list of the most viewed news and blog postings that were featured on CircleID in 2008... Best wishes for 2009 and Happy New Year from all of us here at CircleID. more

VoIP in 2008: “I’m Not Dead”

VoIP remains a hot topic in the IP communications world, but it's definitely evolving. The following is my most recent article for a column that I write for TMCnet, and it's a year-end review on VoIP as well as my outlook for how it's changing for 2009. Colleague Alec Saunders posted his response to my article yesterday, and it's a good read. If you're interested in where VoIP is headed, then my article should help keep that dialog moving along within the CircleID community. Here we go... more

2008: The Year That VoIP Died

It seems highly likely to me that at some point in the future we'll all look back and say that 2008 was the year that the VoIP industry finally died... Voice over IP is just a transport and signalling technology. It's plumbing. It may come as a surprise to some of you to know that in the late 1980's and early 1990's there was a TCP/IP industry as well. TCP/IP is inarguably plumbing. As the IP stack became common on all computing devices, TCP/IP went from being a differentiator to a commodity. more