Featured Blogs

Brand TLDs Become Official

It seems that pigs can, after all, fly. From the start of its new gTLD program, ICANN ignored what was obvious to pretty much everyone else: corporations might wish to apply for their brands and run them as closed ecosystem TLDs servicing only the brands in question. No longer. By releasing a proposed addendum to its registry contract, called Specification 13, ICANN has done two things it has always said it would never do: acknowledged that "brand TLDs" should be considered in the new gTLD program, and created a new category of TLD for this specific class of application. more

The 2024-2026 Root Zone KSK Rollover: Initial Observations and Early Trends

On Jan. 11, 2025, Verisign supported the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) in taking a major step to ensure the continued security, stability, and resiliency of the Domain Name System (DNS). While imperceptible to most users, this action - specifically, the introduction of a new Domain Name System Security Extensions (DNSSEC) Key Signing Key (KSK) in the root zone - is the next step of a multi-year-long process to change, or "roll," the cryptographic key that secures the root of the DNS. more

Live Streaming Apps: Piracy Trends Are-A-Changing

Until recently, digital pirates have used both P2P sites and cyberlockers to upload and share pirated content. But as Internet connection speeds have increased, the piracy landscape has changed, and the appearance of streaming content has proliferated. In fact, 38% of online sporting fans are watching live streaming of their favorite events. However, the recent introduction of live streaming apps is further compounding issues surrounding online piracy... more

Extraterritoriality

Black's Law Dictionary defines it as "the extraterritorial operation of laws; that is, their operation upon persons, rights or jural relations, existing beyond the limits of the enacting state, but still amenable to its laws. The term is used to indicate jurisdiction exercised by a nation in other countries, by treaty..." Extraterritoriality is also the most significant emerging development today in the law shaping virtual network architectures and services that includes OTT and NFV-SDN. more

Normalize inflated iOS 15 Email Open Rates with Unsupervised ML

Happy Holidays. In September 2021, Apple rolled out iOS 15. For high volume email senders, Apple Mail now essentially tracks every email sent as an "open." Seemingly if you are a campaign engineer, high volume sender or ESP, this change can radically affect 25% - 45% of your email subscriber base, across both B2B, B2C or D2C. Inside your email analytics platform, you should see the specific percentage of Apple Mail users in your database, thus a significant rate of change ( delta) regarding inflated "open rates." more

Is NIST’s Recent Letter on o.com a Bureaucratic Coup d’Etat?

Verisign recently informed ICANN that it had received a letter from the National Institute for Standards and Technology (NIST), an agency of the U.S. Department of Commerce, regarding the proposed auction of o.com described in the Second Amendment to the .com Registry Agreement agreed to by ICANN and Verisign in March 2019. This letter, which doesn't appear to be on official letterhead, is from a NIST Grants Officer and purports to overturn a letter raising objections to the auction... more

The Empire Fights Back!

Even as we increasingly discover that every facet of our modern lives now revolve around, and are dependent on the Internet, for which reason its availability, functionality, safety, stability and security are now of great and continuing concern to all of us. These issues have a profound impact on its overall governance. To most of us, during the past three decades, the Internet has always been available, stable, affordable and open; and it should continue this way even as it is controlled and administered in a secure manner... more

NASA Teething Troubles Teach a DNSSEC Lesson

On January 18, 2012, Comcast customers found they could not access the NASA.gov website. Some users assumed that Comcast was deliberately blocking the website or that NASA, like Wikipedia and Reddit, was participating in the "blackout" protests against the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) going on that day. As it turned out, the truth was much less exciting, but it offers important lessons about DNSSEC. more

President of easyDNS Responds to WLS Issue

When I came out of the Verisign Product Round-Table at the ICANN Meeting it became clearer to me why I sometimes feel that registries were dangerous things to put in the hands of a for-profit corporation. Here in Canada the .CA namespace is regarded as a "Key Public Resource", thus the registry is administered by a non-profit corporation. The monopoly over the root (which is what it is) is treated very carefully, almost with a "necessary evil" mentality, which if done properly cultivates private enterprise and competition at the registrar level, where it should be. more

What the ITU WSIS Spam Meeting Accomplished

The first week in July I went to an acronym-heavy World Symposium on the Internet Society Thematic Meeting on spam in Geneva. A few people have reported this as a meeting by "the UN", which it wasn't. Although the International Telecommunications Union is now part of the UN, it dates back to an 1865 treaty to manage international telegraph communication... more

How Bad is Goodmail?

Goodmail Systems made a big splash last week when AOL and Yahoo announced that they will be giving preferential treatment to mail that uses Goodmail's CertifiedEmail service, claiming (implausibly) that this has something to do with stopping spam... Since Goodmail charges senders for each message, some people see this as the end of e-mail as we know it. I have my concerns about Goodmail, but a lot of the concerns are either overblown or based on bad reporting... more

World Body Declares Cyber Security Top Issue

Sovereign nations around the globe have clearly defined borders, but as attendees were shown at a UN Conference several years ago, cybercrime is a borderless phenomenon. In 2011 Norton Security released statistics that showed that every 14 seconds an adult is a victim of cybercrime and the numbers are growing. As internet use grows, so does the amount and type of information streaming across the web. This information crosses transnational lines, public and private sectors. more

Egypt’s Internet Blocked - I Call on My Friend Tarek Kamel to Unblock It and Join His People

Internet all over Egypt has been blocked in an unprecedented revolt. I call on my friend Tarek Kamel, Egypt's Minister of Telecommunication, to overturn this oppressive decision and to unblock the Internet in all Egypt immediately and to join his people in their peaceful revolt. I have known Tarek Kamel for more than a decade and long before he became minister back in the days when he used to say he had no authority and that the decisions were in the hands of his boss and that he was a mere decision-less adviser to then Minister of Telecommunication, Mr. Nazif. more

Video: IETF Chair Jari Arkko Summarizes The Activities of IETF 87 In Berlin

The 87th meeting of the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) in Berlin, Germany, concluded on August 2, 2013. IETF Chair Jari Arkko recently published his summary of IETF 87 on the IETF Blog highlighting what he felt were some of the more important aspects of what was a very successful IETF meeting. I also had the privilege of interviewing Jari on video about the meeting. more

The Christmas Goat and IPv6 (Year 1)

The city of Gävle in Sweden have a special Christmas tradition for which it is quite famous. Every year in December a giant Christmas Goat in straw is put in to place in one of the central town squares. In relation to this tradition a sub-tradition has emerged which the city is even more renowned for -- to burn down the poor Christmas Goat. This is of course an "illegal" act, but still of quite some interest! Web-cameras showing the status of the Christmas Goat have been put up by the city of Gävle, primarily in a purpose of control. However, when someone sets fire to the poor Goat, the traffic and need for bandwidth tend to go sky-high for these cams. more