Featured Blogs

Monster.com Response to Security Breach Unacceptable

As some of us are continuing to learn this week the Monster.com service has again been successfully hacked. According to a security bulletin posted on Monster.com on January 23rd, 2009, the intruder gained access to the user database, while no resumes were apparently compromised... As a user of Monster.com what I find incredibly upsetting about this situation is that I had to find out about this through a security blog. more

Dear Industry Canada, Is Now a Good Time to Replace CIRA?

Today we have sent following to the Minister of Industry Canada, James Moore, as well as the Canadian Internet Registration Authority (CIRA) Board of Directors. This is in response to the revelation that CIRA is positioning to enter the managed DNS space. As we outline in the letter, we are fine with more competition (in fact Google just entered the domain and DNS space too... No, competition is a fact of life, what we want is more of it, not less. Here's what we wrote to The Honourable James Moore. more

Three Reasons Why CISOs Need to Understand Domain Security

Domain name abuse is one of the most dangerous and under-regulated issues in digital business security today. An attack on a web domain can lead to the redirection of a company's website, domain spoofing, phishing attacks, network breaches, and business email compromise (BEC). Domains used as a company's online world are part of an organization's external attack surface and need to be continuously monitored for cybercrime attacks and fraud. more

Who Pays for Email?

An acquaintance wondered why the people who run the systems that receive mail get to make all the rules about what gets delivered. After all, he noted: "The sender pays for bandwidth and agrees to abide by the bandwidth provider's rules." It is useful to think of the Internet as a collection of tubes, all leading from the periphery to the middle, where the middle is approximately "the peering point." The sender has paid for the tubes leading from himself to the middle... more

.COM - The Riskiest Top-Level Domain?

A couple of weeks ago, NetworkWorld published an article indicating that the .com TLD was the riskiest TLD in terms of containing code that can steal passwords or take advantage of browser vulnerabilities to distribute malware... It is unclear to me what they mean by TLD's being risky. The number of domains, 31.3% of .com's being considered risky, what does this actually mean? Is it that 31% of .com's are actually serving up malware or something similar? If so, that seems like a lot because for many of us, nearly 1 in every 3 pages that most people visit would be insecure... more

ICANN and the Hyper-Aggressive Trademark Owners: The “Monster Test”

We read and hear a lot of complaints from trademark interests about allegedly rampant cybersquatting and other forms of trademark infringement, but it's rare to see a story about reverse domain name hijacking and other abuses committed by them. That's what made it so refreshing to see an article in the Saturday, April 4th Wall Street Journal titled "The Scariest Monster of All Sues for Trademark Infringement – Fancy Audio-Cable Outfit Defends Its Brands; A Mini Golf Course Fights Back". more

Domain Pulse 2008: Day 2 Focuses on DNS Security

Day two of Domain Pulse 2008 last Friday (see review of day one) focused on online security issues giving the techies amongst us details of security issues, and the more policy-orientated amongst us something to chew on in a few other presentations. Kieren McCarthy, these days of ICANN, also gave some insights into the drawn out sex.com drama with more twists and turns than the average soap opera has in a year! And Randy Bush outlined the problems with IPv6. Among other presentations... more

League of Nations, United Nations, Next: United Cyber Nations

Though the "Techies" have been heavily involved in many initiatives like Internet Governance, Internationalized (Multi-lingual) Domain Names, Identity Management, Information Security, Access Rights Management etc., they still have to correctly apply the technologies at hand to be able to replicate many accepted norms that have matured in the physical world such as federated identities, non-repudiation, notarizing, witnessing, co-signing etc. more

What the ICANN Brussels Meeting Means for New gTLDs

ICANN's 38th get-together, in Brussels, may become known as the meeting where the dust finally began to settle. Long-standing issues were settled, compromises were reached, no-one complained too much about the latest version of the Applicant Guidebook, and the Board stood by its project plan dates, even scheduling a Board retreat to solve remaining issues. Finally, there were no surprise "gotcha!" delays that generic Top-Level Domain (gTLD) applicants have been used to seeing at ICANN meeting. With one possible exception... more

Top Ten Internet Law Developments of 2012

I'm pleased to share my list of top 10 developments of 2012... I'm surprised whenever I read about a new European ruling that's adverse to a Silicon Valley company, because at this point I assume that everything Silicon Valley companies do in Europe is already illegal. Google, Facebook and other Silicon Valley players are under constant legal attack in Europe on countless fronts. Everyone might be happier if the Silicon Valley players just got out of Europe altogether. more

Phishing Moving to the Web Channel

Today we received one of the first phish attempts to be made as a web spam (comment spam/blog spam) attempt. I wasn't convinced, and thought that perhaps it was a way to gather and verify RELEVANT online identities. Someone put me straight. It's phishing. I've often in the past had run-ins with the good folks in the anti virus realm back between 1996 and 2005 who thought Trojan horses and then spyware were not part of their business. Years later the AV business people ruled it is part of their business and ran to catch up. Same with botnets. more

Are the LEOs Going to Disrupt the Telco Market?

We are getting closer to using alternative broadband solutions offered by international companies. Local telecommunication entities will, in this respect, be relegated to resellers. The reality of accessing low Earth-orbiting satellite (LEO) services is now clearly on the horizon. Most of the telcos and governments are not prepared for the potential shock this might cause to the structure of local telecommunications markets. more

Download Speeds of GSM and 3GSM Networks

ARCchart is selling a new report entitled Mobile Broadband Performance of Carrier Networks. I can't personally justify the purchase, but I notice this wonderful graph in their sample. ARCchart gave mobile users free speed test applications... more

Software Defined Data Centre Needs DNS

During 2012, Software Defined Networking (SDN) seemed to be all the rage. The VMware acquisition of Nicira during the summer doldrums for US $1.26 billion validated the fact that the SDN paradigm is expected to have some serious legs over the coming years. I guess the same applies to virtualized network services in general, although the acquisitions in that space were not quite as high-profile as the ones in SDN. more

IANA Checkmate - Fool Me Once, Shame on You, Fool Me Twice Shame on Me

In connection with the recent publication of the IANA RFP, there have been some commenters that have proclaimed that removing the requirement of the Contractor to document the consensus of relevant stakeholders in connection with the delegation of new gTLDs from the original draft Statement of Work as a win for ICANN. However, when reading the recently revised IANA RFP language in light of the Government Advisory Committee (GAC) Dakar Communiqué, a rather compelling legal case can be made... more