Featured Blogs

Contributory Cybersquatting and the Impending Demise of Domain Name Proxy Services?

This case involves an alleged domain name theft. Solid Host is a web host and initial owner of the domain name solidhost.com, which it registered through eNom in 2004. Solid Host claims that in 2008, a security breach at eNom allowed an unknown interloper (Doe) to steal the domain name and move the registration to NameCheap. Doe also acquired NameCheap's "WhoisGuard" service, a domain name proxy service that masked Doe's contact information in the Whois database. Solid Host contacted Doe and sought the domain name; Doe asked for $12,000, and Solid Host took a pass... more

IPv6 Deployment: A Very Complex Time Bomb with an Uncertain Trigger Date

I did a 2 hour interview on October 23rd with John Curran, Board Chair of ARIN the North American Regional Internet Routing Registry for the last decade. I now understand what is at stake with IPv6. Outside of a key core group of network engineers I think darn few people do understand. And not all of them agree on how the scenario plays out though virtually all say the situation is very serious. John believes that it is huge. It is as big as Y2K except no one knows a precise date by which everything has to be done... more

Is Africa Ready for a dotAfrica gTLD Future?

It's approximately 2 months to go before the grand application process for the new gTLDs begins, ICANN the international internet body made a revolutionary announcement in June that is going to change the entire internet namespace. With the current 21 gTLDs, the world is bracing for a surge of close to 500 new applications. Among the domains of my interest is the .Africa gTLD. more

Letter from EU to UN Secretary General

Today the Swedish IT Minister Åsa Torstensson together with the Commissioner Viviane Reding sent a letter to the UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon. I think the letter is extremely well written, but when I twittered about it, some people contacted me and asked what was so special with it? Let me try to explain... more

The Internet’s Climate Quandary and the Inconvenience of Practicing What We Preach

It all started earlier this year in June. I was coding transcripts of the past global Internet Governance Forum (IGF) meetings as part of a data mining exercise for DiploFoundation's Geneva Internet Platform (GIP). Pouring over transcript after transcript, the work was tedious, but I was learning a great deal about the Internet governance community as well. My interest was piqued by the conversations, the familiar names I came across, and the multi-stakeholder manifestation of politics, perspectives, and positions. more

Number Misuse, Telecommunications Regulations and WCIT

Another twenty five years has just zoomed by, and before you know it, it's all on again. The last time the global communications sector did this was at the WATTC in 1988, when "the Internet" was just a relatively obscure experiment in protocol engineering for data communications. At that time the Rather Grand telephone industry bought their respective government representatives... to the Rather Grandly titled "World Administrative Telegraph and Telephone Conference (WATTC) in November 1988 in Melbourne, Australia and resolved to agree to the Rather Grandly titled "International Telecommunication Regulations." more

If the Stakeholders Already Control the Internet, Why NETmundial and the IANA Transition?

Last weekend C-Span, the public service network that broadcasts proceedings of the U.S. Congress and other U.S. government functions, aired a segment of its series "the Communicators" featuring ICANN CEO Fadi Chehade; C-Span describes the show as "Half-hour conversations with the leaders who shape our digital future". While the interview is actually just 28 minutes long, and appears to have been recorded on January 28th, it contains some surprising statements that raise some intriguing questions. more

Overture to Take Over Internet Governance: ITU at ICANN Meeting, Cairo

ITU is 143 years old and it has done a lot of good work. But it is so huge and powerful that it has been monopolizing (or mono-unionizing) Telecommunications for the last 143 years. ITU's hold over communications has been sweeping. But during the last ten years, ITU's member Telcos have seen several challenges from the open Internet architecture... ITU and the Internet organizations did not quite get along for this and several other reasons Especially the ITU has had its share of differences with the ICANN. Dr. Hamadoun Toure, Secretary General of the ITU addressed the ICANN Annual Meeting at Cairo on 6 November 2008. Here are some excerpts from the Secretary General's speech with my comments. more

The Continuing ITU Meltdown

It is rather like watching the episodes in the new season of a soap opera. When we last left the ITU at its WCIT treaty conference in Dubai in December, fifty-five nations got up and left, refusing to sign a profoundly broken scheme to regulate anything and everything related to telecommunications, information systems, and the Internet. Eighty-nine nations signed - notably Russia, China, Korea, and most of the Middle East and African countries. This G55 versus G89 split fundamentally fractured the legal basis of the ITU and the role of its standards making body. more

Can We Create a Secure Caller ID For VoIP?

Can we create a "secure Caller ID" for IP-based communications, a.k.a. voice-over-IP (VoIP)? And specifically for VoIP based on the Session Initiation Protocol (SIP)? Can we create a way to securely identify the origin of a call that can be used to combat robocalling, phishing and telephony denial-of-service (TDOS) attacks? That is the challenge to be undertaken by the "Secure Telephone Identity Revisited (STIR)" group meeting tomorrow morning, July 30, 2013, at 9:00 am in Berlin, Germany, as part of the 87th meeting of the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF). more

Typosquatting Continues to Pose Dangers to Enterprises, Consumers

While typosquatting is not a new phenomenon, recent research highlights that it is being used to collect sensitive corporate information from employees and lure consumers to interact with dubious websites. ... Security consultancy Godai Group recently uncovered the use of a specific type of typosquat - a "doppelganger domain" - to collect sensitive enterprise information via email-based attacks. more

New Zealand Releases Revamped Three Strikes Proposal

The New Zealand government has released a revamped three strikes proposal that incorporates full court hearings and the possibility of financial penalties. A prior proposal, which would have resulted in subscriber access being terminated without court oversight, was dropped earlier this year following public protest. more

Actions Required by Developing Economies Against Spam

My OECD paper on spam problems in developing economies is now linked from the OECD Anti-Spam Toolkit page, as part of section 8 of the Anti-Spam Toolkit (Outreach). This ZDNet article provides a reasonably good summary of my paper as well. I welcome comments and suggestions from CircleID readers. "Spam is a much more serious issue in developing countries as it is a heavy drain on resources that are scarcer and costlier in developing countries than elsewhere..." more

Why App Stores Won’t Survive

The recent news that online retailing giant Amazon.com would open an app store to compete with Google's Android Market has set off a flurry of speculation about the future app store landscape. Within the next few months there will be no fewer than three major Android app stores... Several other major players have announced app store intentions though specifics are lacking. And of course, there are existing independent app stores that publish Android apps, such as GetJar, SlideMe and Appbrain. more

New gTLD Registration Strategies: Preparing for the Inevitable

As we draw closer to the first new gTLD registry launch, many companies are beginning the arduous task of developing their new gTLD registration and blocking strategies. And after speaking with dozens of clients, I can tell you that the planned approaches are ranging from very minimal registration and blocking strategies for one or two core brands, all the way through to registrations of multiple brands in every single new gTLD registry. more