Featured Blogs

Who Will Secure the Internet of Things?

Over the past several months, CITP-affiliated Ph.D. student Sarthak Grover and fellow Roya Ensafi been investigating various security and privacy vulnerabilities of Internet of Things (IoT) devices in the home network, to get a better sense of the current state of smart devices that many consumers have begun to install in their homes. To explore this question, we purchased a collection of popular IoT devices, connected them to a laboratory network at CITP, and monitored the traffic that these devices exchanged with the public Internet. more

Internet Governance Outlook 2024: “Win-Win-Cooperation” vs. “Zero Sum Games”?

The 2024 "To-Do-List" for all stakeholders in the global Internet Governance Ecosystem is a very long one. Not only the real world but also the virtual world is in turmoil. Vint Cerf once argued that the Internet is just a mirror of the existing world. If the existing world is in trouble, the Internet world has a problem. more

Ethiopia Shows That Congress Is Right to Be Worried About UN Control of the Internet

Today a key committee in the US Congress approved a resolution opposing United Nations "control over the Internet." While some in the Internet community have dismissed the bipartisan effort as mere political grandstanding, recent actions by some UN Member States show that lawmakers have good reason to be worried. Last month, UN voting member Ethiopia made it a crime -- punishable by 15 years in prison - to make calls over the Internet.  more

Oklahoma Spammer Fighter Loses Even Worse

Last December I wrote about Mark Mumma, who runs a small web hosting company in Oklahoma City and his battle with Omega World Travel a/k/a cruise.com. Mumma lost his CAN SPAM suit agains them in December, but Omega's countersuit for defamation went to trial last week, and I hear that the jury awarded Omega $2.5 million in damages, which Mumma is not likely to be able to pay. This may be painted in some circles as a huge defeat for anti-spam activists, but it's not... more

Universal White Spaces: Moving Beyond the TV Bands

The FCC's recent decision allowing license-exempt access to TV White Spaces, i.e. unused TV channels, is a small but very important step in spectrum policy. But, more important than the TV bands, is the policy approach and the fact that it was adopted in the face of extreme lobbying by well established vested interests. more

Brad Templeton in Response to Site Finder Controversy

A harmful, highly unilateral and capricious action. Tons of software out there depended on the ability to tell the difference between a domain name which exists and does not. They use that to give a meaningful, locally defined error to the user, or to identify if an E-mail address will work or not before sending the mail. Many used it as a way to tag spam (which came from domains that did not exist). It is the local software that best knows how to deal with the error. more

Comcast’s Impressive System for Notifying Infected Users

Pretty much as long as there've been computers, one of the biggest challenges has been user education. How do you create software smart enough to inform a user when they're about to do something potentially disastrous - or, worse, when something disastrous has been done to them? As one of the world's largest access providers, Comcast has put a ton of thought into developing a notification system for their users. The solution Comcast developed involves, in effect, hijacking HTTP requests... more

Wikileaks Calls for Boycott of Domain Registrar eNom

In the aftermath of the shutdown of Wikileaks.org by a court order issued at the request of Swiss Bank Julius Baer, Wikileaks has called for the boycott of registrar eNom. eNom is best known as the domain registrar that complied with the federal government's order to shut down a Spanish travel agency because it did business with Cuba -- the agency was not under U.S. jurisdiction and so was hardly violating U.S. law, but their domain was registered in the United States, and that was good enough for the feds. more

G7 vs. BRICS: One Cyberworld, Two Summits and Three Approaches for the Governance of the Internet?

Cybersecurity and digitalization were not at the center of the recent summit meetings of the presidents and prime ministers of G7 (US, Canada, UK, Germany, Italy, France, Japan) and BRICS (Brazil, Russia, India, China, South Africa). But cybersecurity and digitalisation are meanwhile too important issues to be ignored if world leaders meet. Insofar it was very natural that both the "XIV BRICS Summit Beijing Declaration" from June 23, 2022, and... more

TLD Domain Abuse: Threat Report - First Half 2011

When it comes to building a robust globe-spanning network of crimeware and making the victims dance to a tune of the cyber-criminals' choosing, you're guaranteed to find domain name abuse at the heart of the operation. DNS provides the critical flexibility and underlying scalability of modern command-and-control (C&C) infrastructure. Cyber-criminals that master DNS (and manage to maintain the stream of new domain registrations that keep it fed) tend to find themselves in command of the largest and most profitable crimeware networks. more

New gTLDs and Endangered Languages

While exploring the UNESCO's interactive atlas of the world's languages in danger, I am happy to see that new generic Top-Level Domains could help save some of these languages. .CAT for Catalan language already exist; .BZH will probably have the "Breton" language to help survive; "Basque" is vulnerable but there is a .EUS initiative; .CORSICA will certainly help the "Corsican" language to develop... more

Evolving the Internet Through COVID-19 and Beyond

As we approach four months since the WHO declared COVID-19 to be a pandemic, and with lockdowns and other restrictions continuing in much of the world, it is worth reflecting on how the Internet has coped with the changes in its use, and on what lessons we can learn from these for the future of the network. The people and companies that build and operate the Internet are always planning for more growth in Internet traffic. more

IPv4 Addresses Not Property, Canada Weighs in on the Nortel/Microsoft Transfer

The recent tempest in a teacup on ARINs PPML list over the transfer of IP address blocks from Nortel (a company in Chapter 11) to Microsoft has some interesting Internet Governance dimensions that are yet to be discussed. One aspect that has been overlooked amidst all the sound and fury, is the governmental perspective on IP address transfers. more

How to Keep Track of the New Generic Top-Level Domains (newgTLDs) Now Appearing Weekly

How do you keep track of what new generic top-level domains (newgTLDs) are now available? Particularly when there seem to be new ones being announced weekly? Because I've written about newgTLDs here previously, someone recently asked me those questions... Now, these are the newgTLDs that have been delegated by ICANN, meaning that they now appear in the "root zone" of DNS. This does NOT mean that you can go right now and register a domain underneath one of these new TLDs. more

Chromecast Set to Revolutionise the TV

The principle behind Chromecast is probably the magic formula that is needed to finally revolutionise television watching. Google's latest product was launched yesterday... TV revolution didn't come from the traditional broadcasters or their suppliers. Everything developed by them has been aimed more at protecting their traditional business than at looking for completely new opportunities - truly new TV innovations will most certainly come from the direction that the broader market has taken since the arrival of the smartphones and the tablets. more