Featured Blogs

AOL Has a Security Hole, and It’s Our Problem

Two weeks ago I wrote about Yahoo's unfortunate mail security actions. Now it's AOL's turn, and the story, as best as I can piece it together, is not pretty. Yahoo used an emerging system called DMARC, which was intended to fight phishing of often forged domains like paypal.com. A domain owner can publish a DMARC "reject" policy which, oversimplifying a little, tells the world that if mail with their name on the 'From:' line didn't come from their servers, it's not from them so you should reject it. more

Crypto War III: Assurance

For decades, academics and technologists have sparred with the government over access to crypographic technology. In the 1970s, when crypto started to become an academic discipline, the NSA was worried, fearing that they'd lose the ability to read other countries' traffic. And they acted. For example, they exerted pressure to weaken DES... The Second Crypto War, in the 1990s, is better known today, with the battles over the Clipper Chip, export rules, etc. more

The Next Network Policy Battle

I've said it before, and I'll say it again. The biggest threat to the Internet innovation ecosystem from network operators is not discrimination but terms of interconnection. Metered billing, bandwidth caps, and wholesale transit fees can all be implemented consistently with net neutrality rules. And in practice, net neutrality will be limited to "legal" content... more

Reflections on NANOG 66

The North American Network Operators Group (NANOG) continues to be one of the major gatherings on network operators and admins, together with the folk who work to meet the various needs of this community. Their program committee produces a program that never fails to provide thought provoking interest. Here are my reactions to some of the presentations I heard at NANOG 66, held in San Diego in February. more

Fixing WHOIS (and Some Other Stuff Too)

ICANN is the only institution with responsibility for the functioning of DNS. And so it is natural that when there is a DNS problem for people to expect ICANN to come up with the solution. But having the responsibility to act is not the same as having the ability. Like the IETF, ICANN appears to have been designed with the objective of achieving institutional paralysis. And this is not surprising since the first law of the Internet is 'You are so not in charge (for all values of you). more

Popular ccTLDs for Domain Name Disputes

As I've written before, the registry operators for many country-code top-level domains (ccTLDs) have adopted the Uniform Domain Name Dispute Resolution Policy (UDRP) or a variation of it, while other ccTLDs have crafted their own dispute policies, or none at all. Although no ccTLD appears as frequently as .com in domain name disputes, it's interesting to see which ccTLDs are subject to dispute the most often. more

Big Telegraph

On my flight back from Washington, DC last night, I prepared much of what follows, minus references. Today, while looking for references, I uncovered a very recent (6 June 2012) posting to the ITU blog that seemed entirely appropriate to mention here. It is fascinating reading, and I especially like one snippet "we are not about to take over the Internet - that suggestion is frankly ridiculous". I quite agree and hope that the ITU is genuinely interested in working with others to ensure that nothing of the sort happens. Now on to what I had prepared. more

Virtual Extortion?

Maybe you saw this story: A Chinese man (whose name is not given) has been sentenced to serve three years in prison for extorting "virtual items and currency" from a "fellow Internet café user." The currency was worth 100,000 yuan or $14,700. The man who's sentenced to three years and the three friends who helped him also "extorted virtual equipment for online games" from their victim. The friends only seem to have been given a fine; the primary extortionist got both a fine and a jail time. The virtual currency was QQ coins... As I'm sure all of us know, there's a thriving market in virtual goods and currency... more

Sprint’s Big Deal: New Life for WiMax

The Wall Street Journal is reporting the terms of a yet unannounced deal which will finance a massive rollout of WiMax by a Sprint-Clearwire joint venture. Outside funding is to be provided by Intel, Google, Comcast, and Time Warner Cable as well as Bright House, a small cable company. Assuming the deal is for real, this is good news for US users of broadband and, indirectly, other users around the world. more

Is 5G Faster than 4G?

Ookla recently tackled this question in one of its research articles. Ookla compared the time it takes to load pages for Facebook, Google, and YouTube on cellphones using 4G LTE networks versus 5G networks. Ookla thinks that page load speed is a great way to measure cellphone experience. The time needed to load a web page is directly impacted by latency, which measures the lag between the time a phone requests a website and that website responds. more

The Central IPv4 Pool is Gone

Yesterday, the Asia-Pacific registry got the last two blocks in the central IPv4 pool. The IANA has been sitting on five /8s (one per regional registry), and these will be handed out (along with the fragments from the legacy class B space), one to each registry. The IANA IPv4 registry doesn't yet reflect this. more

ICANN 53: Accountability, Brand Policy & New Round of New gTLDs

In June, MarkMonitor joined our colleagues once again at the Internet Corporation of Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) 53rd public meeting in Buenos Aires, Argentina. Several high-profile and contentious issues were on the agenda, many of which have significant impact on the interests of intellectual property and brand owners. Among these are the ongoing ICANN Accountability issues and the impending departure of ICANN CEO Fadi Chehadé; registrant information (Whois) transparency, accuracy and accessibility; and the timing of the next round of new gTLD applications/delegation. more

ICANN: Governance & Authority

It is almost 25 years since the Internet was privatized by the U.S. government. ICANN was formed by Esther Dyson and Jon Postel as a California-based non-profit with the responsibility to administer the Internet. However, the U.S. government retained limited control, primarily through the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority (IANA). It was the revelations, in 2013, of highly classified National Security Agency (NSA) documents by Edward Snowden that sparked global concerns over the U.S. dominance of the Internet.  more

ICANN and DOC Announce New Three-Year Agreement

The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) and the United States Department of Commerce (DoC) today announced that they agreed to extend their joint Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) for three additional years until September 30, 2006. more

Big Rumble in Tokyo Over JPRS’s Announcement to Offer gTLD Domains

In an announcement at a registrars meeting in Tokyo on October 19th 2010, JPRS announced that they would be offering generic Top-Level Domains (.com, .net, .org, etc.) to their .jp accredited registrars in the near future. JPRS is already famous for their double-dipping practices, acting as both registry and registrar for .jp domains, for their dubious "campaigns" which are aimed at being dis-advantageous to smaller registrars and for their famous registrar back-end "system" which is circa 1995 technology and even prone to accidental DOS attacks by registrars trying to simply drop-catch domains. more