Featured Blogs

As DENIC’s CEO Jörg Schweiger Prepares to Step Down, He Speaks About His Time at DENIC

In January Jörg Schweiger, DENIC's CTO from 2007 to 2014 and CEO since 2014, announced he was stepping down from his position in December. It's been quite a ride, and the domain name industry has evolved quite a lot. So we asked Jörg a few questions about his time with DENIC and the changes he's seen... he came up with some insightful views on why he thought new TLDs missed a great opportunity to do something with "innovative new business models," the importance of security to DENIC... more

Chinese Space Situational Awareness and Traffic Management Regulations and Procedures

In a recent issue of the Dongfang Hour Newsletter, Blaine Curcio pointed out that China's powerful State Administration of Science, Technology, and Industry for National Defence (SASTIND) had published a notice intended to promote the orderly development of microsatellites and strengthen safety management. The notice defines microsatellites as being below 1,000 kilograms, which would include those making up China's planned GwoWang/SatNet broadband constellation. more

Big Cable Co’s Touting 10G – Really?

Earlier this year, at the CES show in January, the big cable companies discussed their vision for the future. They introduced the concept that cable networks would be able to deliver 10-gigabit broadband in the future. They labeled the promotion at the show as 10G. I didn't write about it at the time because I assumed this was a gimmick to give some buzz to this show in the middle of the pandemic. But lately, I've seen that they are still talking about the 10G initiative. more

Examining Real Examples of DNS Abuse: A Summary Overview of the 2nd DNS Abuse Forum

It was not without a little trepidation that I planned the 2nd DNS Abuse Institute Forum to focus on the long-standing and often contentious definitional issues surrounding DNS Abuse. While the risk of getting stuck in the usual entrenched positions was real, it seemed to me that we had an opportunity to provide some clarity and if not change minds, at least provide perspective. more

DNS Level Action to Address Abuses: New Tools for DNS Operators and Legislators

The ways in which the Internet is embedded in our daily lives are too varied and numerous to catalogue. The Internet delivers information, access to goods, services, education, banking, social interaction and, increasingly, work space. The global pandemic has only heightened our dependence on the online world, which is why efforts to ensure that the Internet remains a trusted and secure environment are more important than ever. more

A Digital Bill of Rights (& Responsibilities), Part 1: Why Do We Need It

Using the lingo of Internet Governance, the "stakeholders" of digital technologies currently live in a state of confusion about their rights and responsibilities in the digital age. Digital technologies confront us with many questions we thought had been answered long before. We have a pretty clear understanding of our rights and responsibilities as citizens of our country, how a state should be governed, and how the private sector should conduct its business. more

Privacy, Legal vs. Natural Persons, and the Never-Ending ICANN EPDP

It has been just over 3 years since the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) came into effect, and the work within ICANN (type "EPDP 2a" into your acronym decoder ring) to develop a permanent Registration Data policy is progressing at a snail's pace. At issue is a proposed mandatory requirement for Contracted Parties (really just Registrars), to differentiate between "legal persons" (a fancy way of saying corporations and similar organizations) and "natural persons" (the kind that eat and breathe and schedule Zoom calls). more

Centrality and the Internet

The IRTF is a research-oriented part of the larger IETF structure. It has a number of research groups, one of which, DINRG, is looking at decentralized Internet Infrastructure. That's a big topic, and one could certainly look at distributed decentralized blockchain frameworks applied to ledgers, used by Bitcoin and similar, or self-organizing systems that perform orchestration without imposed control or distributed hash tables. more

The U.S. Fiber Expansion Craze

I've written several times recently in blogs that there is a growing backlog in buying fiber cable. Some of the backlog is due to the general supply chain malaise that seems to be affecting almost everything we buy. During the recent gas shortages in North Carolina, I found out that there is a shortage of truck drivers. Apparently, many truck drivers found something else to do during the pandemic, and now there is a shortage of drivers to deliver the many goods that are shipped by truck. more

Why Is Verisign Ignoring New Revenue?

Last month saw a much-anticipated decision handed down in the Independent Review Panel (IRP) proceeding examining the controversial 2015 auction for the .web generic top-level domain name registry (gTLD). This decision has been covered by others, including Kevin Murphy's DomainIncite, and has been the subject of unsurprisingly incongruous statements by both Verisign and Afilias, who are both contending for the .web concession privilege. more

The Risk of Descriptive Subdomains: Are We Revealing Too Much?

Subdomains help organizations sort different sections of their websites neatly. Looking at the subdomains of some websites, for example, we usually see subdomains like shop[.]domain[.]com and blog[.]domain[.]com, which help users navigate the sites efficiently. But we couldn't help but notice subdomains that might be revealing a lot about a company's Internet infrastructure and resources. more

Illusory Correlation and Security

Fear sells. Fear of missing out, fear of being an imposter, fear of crime, fear of injury, fear of sickness ... we can all think of times when people we know (or worse, people in the throes of madness of crowds) have made really bad decisions because they were afraid of something. Bruce Schneier has documented this a number of times. For instance: "it's smart politics to exaggerate terrorist threats" and ... more

New Hair-Like Plastic Polymer Cable Can Transmit Data Ten Times Faster Than Copper

Scientists and engineers are always looking for ways to speed up and more efficiently configure computing devices to maximize data flow. There are a lot of applications today that require the exchange of huge volumes of data in real-time. MIT scientists have created a hair-like plastic polymer cable that can transmit data ten times faster than copper USB cables. more

Are the Broadband Stats We Are Seeing Somehow Overinflated? What Did the Pandemic Hide?

The growth of broadband customers has looked spectacular over the past year during the pandemic. It's easy to chalk up higher broadband customers nationwide to the need for households to be connected during the pandemic. But as I look back on what's happened during the last year, I can't help but wonder if the broadband stats we are seeing are somehow overinflated. more

Your Cybersecurity is Only as Strong as Your Weakest Vendor

Managing the risk of third parties has become a compliance focus for many large organizations. Companies even work with third-party service providers and external vendors just to manage this risk. The recent SolarWinds attack escalates the critical need for chief compliance officers to collaborate with their business counterparts to identify and mitigate potentially unknown threats that lie within third-party supply chains. Yet how can companies manage this risk when it's not if but when you're attacked? more