A press release on the ICANN web site says that ICANN and Verisign have agreed to settle all pending lawsuits, and there’s a new .COM agreement, all tentative but if history is any guide, nothing short of DOC action is going to stop it. The good news is that VeriSign has agreed not to make unilateral changes like Sitefinder. They have to give prior notice to ICANN for any material change in the operation of the registry, and if ICANN has any concerns there’s a lengthy process full of expert panels and Consensus and the like to decide whether they can do it. more
ICANN has announced today that it has tentatively agreed to settle a longstanding dispute with VeriSign Inc. The dispute which began in part from SiteFinder, a controversial search service VeriSign created in late 2003 for users who mistype Web addresses. The following is an excerpt from today's press release... more
The Measurement Factory and Infoblox have announced results of a survey of more than 1.3 million Internet-connected, authoritative domain name system (DNS) servers around the globe. The results of the survey indicate that as many as 84 percent of Internet name servers could be vulnerable to pharming attacks, and that many exhibit other security and deployment-related vulnerabilities. The surveys consisted of several queries directed at each of a large set of external DNS servers to estimate the number of systems deployed today and determine specific configuration details. more
A paper by Tony Hain was recently published in the Internet Protocol Journal which sparked a debate on Slashdot. Particularly, Tony's paper suggested that IANA will run out of IP addresses in 5 years or less. However, there is another paper written by Geoff Hutson which projects that we have enough IPv4 address until 2022. The differences got most people confused. So who is right? more
Suddenly internet governance has become a hot topic. Words and phrases fly back and forth but minds rarely meet. We do not have discussion, we have chaos. We are not moving forwards towards a resolution. It's time to step back and review some basic principles. 1. Principle: The internet is here to serve the needs of people (and organizations of people); people are not here to serve the internet. Corollary: If internet technology does not meet the needs of users and organizations than it is technology that should be the first to flex and change. more
The Collaboration for International ICT Policy for East and Southern Africa (CIPESA) recently published "ICANN, Internet governance and Africa", a public briefing on the current status and key points of the debate that provides essential background for the second phase of the World Summit on Information Society (WSIS). During the last few years the relationship of African stakeholders with ICANN has received greater attention, largely driven by a few key individuals within African governments, the technical community, and civil society organizations. Meanwhile, the broader topic of Internet governance has been put on the public agenda in the context of the WSIS. ...Decisions taken at the upcoming second phase of the WSIS (to occur in Tunis in November 2005) are likely to have a profound impact on ICANN and the field of Internet governance more generally. more
A number of people, notably Viviane Reding, the European Commissioner for Information Society and Media, have been asking about how to Break The Internet. Since Mme Reding seems to have absolutely no prior experience in the Information Technology, Computing or Telecommunications industries, I have prepared this brief HOWTO. "1. Declare the creation of a new Root Zone. This is the easy bit - all you have to do is spout great volumes of hot air at a conference in Geneva, and then storm out in a huff when other people refuse to take you seriously. Then you get the PFY who services your photocopier to declare the creation of a new European Root Zone! Hooray!" more
One of fastest growing trends of electronic communications is digital identity. The simplest way of establishing digital identity is to get a domain name and create a web site and email accounts. While this might have been a fairly complex undertaking some ten years ago, today it is a trivial matter. So trivial in fact that spammers and phishers can ply their trade with very low costs of entry. These low cost of entry have made the Internet a commodity business as traffic is handled in the aggregate and competitive pricing has made being an ISP a difficult business model. It also has created aggressive growth and adoption curves. The Internet is also the lowest common denominator... more
Most commentators on Vixie's astounding message have gotten sidetracked. People don't seem to see the most important feature of his statement: Vixie's endorsement of Open Root Server Network (ORSN) is based on explicitly political criteria. As ORSN says on its web site: "The U.S.A (under the current or any future administration) are theoretically and practically able to control "our" accesses to contents of the Internet and are also able to limit them. A manipulation of the Root zone could cause that the whole name space .DE is not attainable any more for the remaining world - outside from Germany." So ORSN sees this as a "backup"... more
The UN's WSIS Prepcomm in Geneva has ended on a divided note. The US Government's Ambassador Gross pre-announced war-cry "The United Nations will not be in charge of the Internet. Period." had been met by a nearly unanimous global response from nations for some sort of government control of the Internet on a multilateral basis. A raft of proposals to alter the current situation are on the table -- most of them fairly benign, but none supportive of the indefinite continuance of unilateral US control of the root zone authorisation. more
Ever since Neustar announced they signed a deal with GSMA to oversea global database for the mobile operators last week (see also Washington Post), there are many debates about the deal online. "Neustar, a company that should certainly know better, has announced that they're going to create a .gprs TLD to serve the mobile phone industry This, of course, requires creation of a private root zone, against the very strong warnings in RFC 2826" said Steven Bellovin. To the more supportive John Levine: "This isn't quite as stupid as it seems. The GSM industry needs some way to maintain its roaming user database, the database is getting considerably more complicated with 3G features, and it looks to me like they made a reasonable decision to use DNS over IP to implement it rather than inventing yet another proprietary distributed database." more
As a long time supporter of the universal namespace operated by IANA, it may come as a surprise that I have joined the Open Root Server Network project (ORSN). I'll try to explain what's going on and what it all means. ...If one of my kids, or anybody anywhere, sits down in front of a web browser and keys in a URL, it ought to just work. They ought to see the same web page that anybody else would see, no matter what country they're in or what their ISP wants or what their local church or government wants. This universality of naming is one of the foundations on which the Internet was built, and it is how the Internet fosters economic growth and social freedoms. It's what makes the Internet different from old Compuserve, old AOL, old MSN, old Minitel, and everything else that has come -- and gone -- before... more
The House Committee on Science recently held a hearing to "examine the extent of U.S. vulnerability to cyber attacks on critical infrastructure such as utility systems, and what the federal government and private sector are doing, and should be doing, to prevent and prepare for such attacks." Specific issues addressed at the hearing included whether: 1) the U.S. is able to detect, respond to, and recover from cyber-attacks on critical infrastructure; and 2) is there a clear line of responsibility within the federal government to deal with cybersecurity... more
On Thursday the 22nd, Robert Braver, an Oklahoma ISP owner who is a long time activist against both spam and junk faxes, received a default judgment of over $10 million against high profile spammer Robert Soloway and his company Newport Internet Marketing. Soloway has frequently been cited as one of the ten largest spammers in the world. more
Is it just a coincidence that some of the leading Internet-based application companies are pushing aggressively into network connectivity at exactly the same time the major telephone companies are pushing into content? Or are we witnessing the end of the Internet as we know it? Think back to the online world fifteen years ago. There was AOL, there was Compuserve, there was Prodigy, and there was Apple's eWorld. Sure, there were researchers and students posting to Usenet newsgroups and navigating through Gopher sites, but the Internet was a sideshow for individuals and business users. ...the online world of those days was fragmented and small. Every online service was an island. Are we going back to those days? more
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