Featured Blogs

Comcast’s Network Management Practices: A Brief Analysis

Late last week, Comcast officially disclosed to the FCC details of its network management practices which have been a subject of considerable discussion here on CircleID. (My thanks to Threat Level from Wired.com for providing a convenient copy of Comcast's "Attachment A" in which this disclosure is made.) There's not a lot of startling disclosure in this document, but it does provide some useful concrete facts and figures. I'll quote the more interesting parts of the document here, and offer comment on it. more

Japan Domain Market Demystified

Ever sat at one of the VeriSign "State of the domain" meetings at any of the ICANN meetings? Or read their reports about countries with the greatest opportunity in domains? Almost without question you will learn that Japan is earmarked as the country with the greatest opportunity for growth in the domain market. They take into consideration important factors such as GDP of a country, internet population, and current domain registration levels... more

The Wall Street Lesson for Net Neutrality

As the institutions of Wall Street continue to crumble one after another, there's a lesson to be learned for those of us who want to make sure the Internet remains as free and open in the future as it has been in the past. The collapse of Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac, Bear Stearns, Merrill Lynch, Lehman Brothers, AIG and the rest didn't happen overnight. The situation has been brewing for years. The subprime mortgage crisis may have precipitated the immediate tragedy, but underpinning the whole mess is a philosophy about business and government. more

IGF Meeting Blacklisted

I got an e-mail from someone currently attending the Internet Governance Forum (IGF) meeting in Geneva. The e-mail ended up in my spam folder because the IP address used for the wireless LAN at the meeting is on a spambot/virusbot blacklist, namely cbl.abuseat.org. Apparently some guy there has his computer infected by a spambot or a virusbot... more

Cloud Computing and Privacy

There has been a good deal of talk of late on the important topic of security and privacy in relation to cloud computing. Indeed there are some legitimate concerns and some work that needs to be done in this area in general, but I'm going to focus today on the latter term (indeed they are distinct -- as a CISSP security is my forte but I will talk more on this separately). more

Will John McCain Help the NEXT Blackberry Creator?

Today a senior McCain advisor, Doug Holtz-Eakin, proudly held up a Blackberry and declared: "You're looking at the miracle that John McCain helped create." Bloggers on all sides of the partisan divide are having a field day with this -- suggest that the McCain campaign is out of touch, desperate, or trying to top the trouble VP Al Gore got into, when he was falsely accused of claiming to have invented the Internet... more

Why It Doesn’t Matter That the Virginia Anti-Spam Law was Struck Down

If the headlines are to be believed, spam is now entirely legal in Virginia and anyone can send whatever they want without any fear of reprisal, ever. Looking beyond the headlines, it appears that the Virginia Supreme Court's ruling in AOL's case against formerly convicted spammer Jeremy Jaynes declares that the Virginia anti-spam law violates the Constitutional protection of anonymous speech, and thus is null and void. more

Virginia Court Throws Out Spam Law; One Spammer Gets Away With It

The 2004 criminal spam case against large-scale spammer Jeremy Jaynes, which I've covered in several previous blog entries, appears to have come to an ignominious end with the state supreme court throwing out the law under which he was convicted. The Virginia anti-spam law was one of the first in the country with criminal provisions, but it failed due to the way that First Amendment cases are treated differently from all other cases. more

Google Chrome: Cloud Operating Environment

Rather than blathering on to the blogosphere about the superficial features of Google's new Chrome browser I've spent some time studying the available material and [re]writing a comprehensive Wikipedia article on the subject which I intend for anyone to be free to reuse under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 license rather than Wikipedia's usual strong copyleft GNU Free Documentation License (GFDL). This unusual freedom is extended in order to foster learning and critical analysis, particularly in terms of security. more

Caring About Cybersecurity or Preparing the Ground for an I-Patriot Act?

Few months ago in a talk given at the Institution of Engineering and Technology organised here in London by the Society for Computers and Law, Professor Lessig recounted a conversation he had with former US Counter Terrorism Czar Richard Clarke, where Larry asked the question that many had in mind... how the US Government managed to conceptualize, design and draft a piece of legislation as vast and complex as the USA PATRIOT Act in such a short period of time (a month and 15 days after 9/11), and the answer was what many people had imagined... more

Satellite Internet Access That Could Be Good

According to The Wall Street Journal, a company called O3b Networks LTD Traditional is planning to launch up to 16 satellites by the end of 2010 to provide Internet access in Africa, the Middle East, and parts of Latin America. This satellite plan, unlike many others, could be good. These are low earth orbit satellites or LEOs so they will be able to avoid the latency problems which are unavoidable with the geostationary satellites used by companies like WildBlue and Hughes to provide "last resort" Internet access in the US. more

Help Define ICANN’s Future

Mention ICANN in Internet circles and you will always find a multitude of views of what the organization should do, needs to do, and should have done; how it has to change, and why; and what it needs to focus on. Well, the time has come to make those views known and to try to persuade the rest of the community that they represent the best step forward. more

Soon in a Mail Box Near You: Internationalized Email Addresses

The EAI working group of the IETF has finished (part of) its work on the interationalization of email addresses. This, together with Internationalized Domain Names (IDN) will make it possible to send email messages to non-7 bit ASCII addresses... There are 3 RFCs, covering changes to the SMTP protocol, e-mail message format and delivery Status Notifications. more

Cyber Crime: An Economic Problem

During ISOI 4 (hosted by Yahoo! in Sunnyvale, California) whenever someone made mention of RBN (the notoriously malicious and illegal bulletproof hosting operation, the Russian Business Network) folks would immediately point out that an operation just as bad was just "next door" (40 miles down the road?), working undisturbed for years. They spoke of Atrivo (also known as Intercage). The American RBN, if you like... more

Unreasonable ccTLD Registry Price Increases!

It highly concerns me when domain registries controlling a certain Top-Level Domain (TLD) raise the wholesale prices they charge to registrars (domain retailers) without consultation to domain registrants (domain buyers). When this happens, all the registrars will need to pay more to the registry for every domain which they register or renew for a customer. They will in turn raise their prices to cover the additional cost to them. Transferring the domains to a different registrar will not help, as all the registrars for that TLD will be forced to raise prices as they all have to pay more to the registry. Don't think it hasn't happened before? more