Featured Blogs

Why ICANN Needs Fresh Blood: A Deeper View

I grew up in a utopian community in India.

I make this statement -- which may seem at best tangential to an article on the DNS -- at the outset because it suggests that I know something about ideology and ideologically charged debates.

Like the town where I grew up, the Internet was the product of dreamers, people who believed in the possibility of surmounting reality. In Code, Lessig compared early Internet euphoria to the euphoria that met the downfall of communism. He could just as well have compared it to the utopianism that accompanied the birth of communism. The point is that Internet pioneers were inspired by ideology, by a fervor to change the world. more

The End of Broadband Networks as We Know Them

A group of major telecommunications companies -- Vodafone, BT, Telefonica and Deutsche Telekom -- recently announced something a bit unexpected. In the Open BNG Operator Position Paper, they call for a fundamental, industry-wide change to the way broadband networks are built. Specifically, they advocate for collaboration throughout the telco world, with a convergence around open broadband network gateways (BNGs). more

The Future of Europe’s Fight Against Child Sexual Abuse

Like much of how the Internet is governed, the way we detect and remove child abuse material online began as an ad hoc set of private practices. In 1996, an early online child protection society posted to the Usenet newsgroup alt.binaries.pictures.erotica.children (yes, such a thing really existed) to try to discourage people from posting such "erotica" on the assumption that the Internet couldn't be censored. more

Questions About the Robustness of Mobile Networks

With mobile phones having become a utility, people are beginning to rely completely on mobile services for a large range of communications. All mobile users, however, are aware of some level of unreliability in these phone systems. Blackspots remain all around the country, not just outside the cities, and in busy areas the quality of the service goes down rather quickly. Drop-outs are another fairly common occurrence of mobile services. more

Aged Security Flaw Renews Open/Closed-Source Debate

The recent announcement of a 13-year old security flaw found in an Open Source security library has renewed the debate between open source and closed source software. The library, crypt_blowfish, allows for fast two-way password encryption. The flaw introduces the potential for passwords to be easily compromised and affects PHP and a number of Linux distributions that include the crypt_blowfish library. more

Whose Network Is It?

A reader sent me a link last week to a piece that doesn't speak highly of net neutrality. Clyde Wayne Crews wrote an article called "Dumb Pipes, a Dumb Idea: Net Neutrality as 21st Century Socialism" that calls for legislators to reject "nut" neutrality. "Elevating the principle of mandatory net neutrality above the principle of investor ownership and wealth creation in pipes and spectrum deflects market forces away from the infrastructure development that we need..." Did anyone else see a touch of irony in a letter to the editor... more

Net Neutrality Reflection

So this afternoon my charge is to lay out all the Net Neutrality (NN) issues to a bar association that doesn't have a telecom subcommittee... Cringely says that "In the end the ISPs [network providers] are going to win this [network neutrality] battle, you know. The only thing that will keep them from doing that is competition, something it is difficult to see coming along anytime soon..." more

On DNS Openness

When we deregulated the telephone industry, we replaced these national monopolies and their vertically bundled structures with a collection of separate enterprises whose actions are orchestrated by market forces rather than by the dictates of the incumbent monopoly telco. This was a comprehensive upheaval to the telecommunications industry, and one aspect of this broad sweep of changes was in the role of the regulator. Previously it was a rule-based framework: Is the incumbent playing by the rules we imposed on them? more

Macro Musings for Digital Strategies Using Unstructured Data

When Doug Dawson wrote his article in February on Artificial Intelligence, he felt that #ai is saddled with too much hype as is its current counterpart, 5G. Certainly, there is a great deal of technology out there that deserves the hype and others that do not. After receiving a certification (Intro to AI) from IBM (while using Watson), I'm here to share that artificial intelligence, and its subsets of machine learning and deep learning definitely deserve a soundbite. more

It’s Time to Put a Bow on the URS: Our Work is Almost Done

For years our community has struggled with the rules of the URS - the Uniform Rapid Suspension - aimed at taking down the "worst of the worst" domain name registrations in a manner faster and cheaper than its predecessor, the Uniform Domain Name Dispute Resolution Policy - the UDRP. On June 27, in Prague, a diverse group met to discuss the fate of the URS. To my surprise, it was a rare "kumbaya" moment, and that makes it worthy of comment. more

eco: 100K PCs Cleaned Through Anti-Botnet Center

eco, the German ISP association, mentions on its website today that the 100,000^th PC was cleaned from infection through its PC cleaning program. Since 15 September, German account holders could visit the website to download tools to clean up computers from digital infections. Botfrei ("botfree", translation WdN) is a cooperation between eco and the German government. First figures seem to prove that this is a successful public-private partnership, worth looking into for other countries as a best practice. more

The Day The Routers Died

I hear this has been all over the network operator lists, so here it is for the rest of us. With apologies to Don McLean... more

WIPO Snafu Over britishmuseum.org Case?

WIPO just published a decision regarding the domain dispute over the britishmuseum.org domain name. At first glance, everything seems alright. The world famous British Museum won in a default judgment as the current registrant (the respondent) never replied). However, drill a little deeper and something is amiss. The "parties" section of the case lists the respondent as "British Museum Resources, Limited, West Bay, George Town, Kentucky, United States of America." more

Jugaad Innovation and Applications of DNSSEC

It would be one of the ironies of global technology development that the West has effectively so far followed a Jugaad principle of "good enough" innovation for DNS security, whereas India could well embrace all the latest advances in DNS security as its Internet economy grows. Like most other protocols from the early Internet, the DNS protocol was not designed with security built in. For those protocols, security services were typically either implemented at a different layer of the protocol stack, or were added on later. more

Ignore The Chicken Littles: Let’s Give New Web Domains a Try

Before the experiment has gotten off the ground, some critics have expressed concern about applications to operate domains referring to a "generic" product or service, like .car, .book, or .app. News reports indicate that Microsoft and other Google competitors have filed complaints about Google's applications, while authors' organizations have raised questions about some of Amazon's applications. These complaints assert that giving these applicants the right to operate these new domains would provide an unfair competitive advantage. more