Featured Blogs

How Big is the Storm Botnet?

The Storm worm has gotten a lot of press this year, with a lot of the coverage tending toward the apocalyptic. There's no question that it's one of the most successful pieces of malware to date, but just how successful is it? Last weekend, Brandon Enright of UC San Diego gave a informal talk at the Toorcon conference in which he reported on his analysis of the Storm botnet. According to his quite informative slides, Storm has evolved quite a lot over the past year... more

IETF and Crypto Zealots

I've been prompted to write this brief opinion piece in response to a recent article posted on CircleID by Tony Rutkowski, where he characterises the IETF as a collection of "crypto zealots." He offers the view that the IETF is behaving irresponsibly in attempting to place as much of the Internet's protocols behind session level encryption as it possibly can. ... Has the IETF got it wrong? Is there a core of crypto zealots in the IETF that are pushing an extreme agenda about encryption? more

Spamhaus Policy Block List Update

Recently, I wrote about the Spamhaus Policy Block List (PBL), suggesting senders encourage their network/connectivity service providers (whomever they lease or purchase IP addresses from) to list their illegitimate email-sending IPs as a step towards improving the overall email stream on the internet. The initial PBL was seeded with listings from the Dynablock NJABL ("Not Just Another Bogus List"), which at the time of the cut-over was at more than 1.9 million entries... more

Give Us TVoIP, Not IPTV

A buzzword in the cable/ilec world is IPTV, a plan to deliver TV over IP. Microsoft and several other companies have built IPTV offerings, to give phone and cable companies what they like to call a "triple play" (voice, video and data) and be the one-stop communications company. ...I'm at the pulver.com Von conference where people are pushing this, notably the BellSouth exec who just spoke. But they've got it wrong. We don't need IPTV. We want TVoIP or perhaps more accurately Vid-o-IP. more

Comcast vs the FCC - A Reply to Susan Crawford’s Article

This is a reply to Susan Crawford's circleid article "Comcast v. FCC - "Ancillary Jurisdiction" Has to Be Ancillary to Something". I started writing a reply to her article, adding some comments I had and also reminding her that she'd predicted this herself, in an earlier circleid article, but it turned out long enough that I decided to submit it as a circleid post instead. On the whole, the facts agree with this CNET article. This court decision was correct, and expected... more

Big Brands Trying to Corner Generic Domain Namespaces?

Trying to make sense of the nearly 2000 new TLD applications is not something that anyone can do quickly. Sure, you can look at the list and see who has applied for what, but it's only when you actually read the "public" part of their submission that you can get an insight into their plans. Let's call a spade a spade. If a big brand wants to get its own TLD then it's pretty much their own business how they use it, as long as they don't do any "harm" to the rest of the internet ecosystem... more

Thought Leaders Create New Trends & Solutions, Followers Just Follow - Which Are You?

Last week I asked on a post elsewhere, why we, at the MLi Group, chose to consider speakers, panelists, supporters and sponsors at our Global Summit Series (GSS) as "Thought Leaders" and "Trend Setters? Many wrote me directly offering their answers and then it dawned on me that my answer may (or may not) get appreciated by many at the ICANN community. So here is why we do. more

The Design of the Domain Name System, Part III - Name Structure and Delegation

In the previous installments, we looked at the overall design of the DNS and the way DNS name matching works. The DNS gains considerable administrative flexibility from its delegation structure. Each zone cut, the place in the DNS name tree where one set of DNS servers hands off to another, offers the option to delegate the administration of a part of the DNS at the delegation point. more

How Rise in Nationalism and Industry’s Lack of Foresight Could Mean a Fragmented and Isolated Web

I have been thinking a lot lately on the topic of the free flow of information on the internet -- what kinds of tools are available now and in the future for governments (especially repressive ones) to control content, isolate their people and keep any contrary viewpoints censored. I had an interesting conversation with a Practice Lead from IFTF.org. The Institute for the Future (IFTF) is a California based independent, nonprofit research group with 40 years of experience in identifying emerging trends that will transform global society... Turns out they are quite concerned about the fragmentation and control of the Internet as well. But will it be an inevitability? more

Recovering Domain Names Lost to Fraudulent Transfer

Domain Names composed of generic terms and combinations – dictionary words, random letters, and short strings – have achieved ascending values in the secondary market. DNJournal.com (Ron Jackson) reports on his year to date chart, for example (just a random sampling from the charts) in August 2019 joyride.com was sold for $300,000, in June voice.com sold for $30 million, in July rx.com sold for $1 million, and in January california.com sold for $3 million... The magnitude of the reported sales suggests that businesses have come to depend on resellers than go to the trouble of inventing brand names from scratch. more

Is There Such a Thing as Technical Internet Governance?

In ICANN's "President & CEO Goals for Fiscal Year 2021", Göran Marby went out to make a curious distinction in the document's second stated goal, according to which he intends to "Implement a common strategy for Internet governance (IG) and technical Internet governance (TIG)". Proceeding to state that "we will begin by identifying the most important issues we need to address, followed by an assessment of where and how we can intervene, the venues we should use, and the resources required to be effective". more

Open Ends: Civil Society and Internet Governance - Part II

This is the second part of a three-part series interview by Geert Lovink with Jeanette Hofmann, policy expert from Germany, where she talks about her experiences as a member of the ICANN's Nominating Committee and her current involvement as a civil society member of the German delegation for the World Summit of the Information Society (WSIS). "So much in the current debates over global governance seems to go back to the issue what place governments and individual nation states have within global governance. What has been your ICANN experience? Ideally, what would be the place of the state? Do you believe in a federal structure? Should, for instance, bigger countries, in terms of its population, have a great say?..." more

DITL Data Isn’t Statistically Valid for This Purpose (Part 2 of 4)

For several years, DNS-OARC has been collecting DNS query data "from busy and interesting DNS name servers" as part of an annual "Day-in-the-Life" (DITL) effort (an effort originated by CAIDA in 2002) that I discussed in the first blog post in this series. DNS-OARC currently offers eight such data sets, covering the queries to many but not all of the 13 DNS root servers (and some non-root data) over a two-day period or longer each year from 2006 to present. more

FCC’s Stanford Hearing on Broadband Practices

About 300 people attended to the net neutrality hearing Thursday hearing which began with testimony from Larry Lessig, a Stanford Law School professor and founder of the Center for Internet and Society... The meeting was called by the FCC in reaction to the news that US net firm Comcast had been exposed as managing traffic by stopping some of its 13m customers uploading files to BitTorrent and other peer-to-peer networks. The FCC has started a formal investigation to see if Comcast merits a fine for its actions. more

CENTR Replies to ITU Study on ccTLD Governance

The Council of European National Top-Level Domain Registries (CENTR) announced today their response to Professor Michael Geist's draft survey report "Government and country-code top level Domains: A global survey", which was conducted on behalf of the International Telecommunication Union (ITU) in December 2003. "In the last decade the general trend has been to de-regulate markets in the Communications Industry, which continues to stimulate economic growth and innovation, and it seems perverse that this ITU supported report is seeking to go against the proven successful trend," said Paul Kane, chairman of CENTR. more