Featured Blogs

Canada: Paying for E911 and Not Getting It - A Dangerous Proposition

While this article specifically discusses the issues of E911 service in the Canadian hinterlands, I fear that the same fiscal shell game is being played by wireless providers all over North America... Grant Robertson writes in The Globe and Mail: Every month when cellphone bills arrive, Northern Canadians are forced to pay for a 911 service they can't access. more

BGP Hijacks: Two More Papers Consider the Problem

The security of the global Default Free Zone (DFZ) has been a topic of much debate and concern for the last twenty years (or more). Two recent papers have brought this issue to the surface once again - it is worth looking at what these two papers add to the mix of what is known, and what solutions might be available. The first of these traces the impact of Chinese "state actor" effects on BGP routing in recent years. more

Personalized Search Opacity

Google announced Friday that it would now be "personalizing" all searches, not just those for signed-in users. If your browser has a Google cookie, unless you've explicitly opted out, your search results will be customized based on search history. Danny Sullivan, at Search Engine Land, wonders why more people aren't paying attention. more

ICANN Announces Blocking Usage Review Panel

Culminating a year-long policy development process, ICANN today launched its new Blocking Usage Review Panel (BURP). The BURP provides long-needed oversight over services that block Internet traffic. "While everyone understands that national laws such as the U.S. CAN SPAM define what traffic is or is not elegible to block, legal processes can be slow and cumbersome," said a spokeswoman. "Since the Internet is global and traffic often traverses multiple countries, the array of different laws cause uncertainty." more

A Year in Review: 14,000 Routing Incidents In 2017

How was the state of the Internet's routing system in 2017? Let's take a look back using data from BGPStream. Some highlights: 13,935 total incidents (either outages or attacks like route leaks and hijacks); Over 10% of all Autonomous Systems on the Internet were affected; 3,106 Autonomous Systems were a victim of at least one routing incident; 1,546 networks caused at least one incident. more

Getting On Board With DNSSEC - A Personal Recount

I first became familiar with DNSSEC around 2002 when it was a feature of the Bind9 server, which I was using to setup a new authoritative DNS platform for customers of the ISP I was working for. I looked at it briefly, decided it was too complex and not worth investigating. A couple of years later a domain of a customer got poisoned in another ISPs network. And while the DNS service we provided was working properly, the customers impression was we hadn't protected them. more

Leadership and Persuasion: Internet Freedom

Secretary Clinton's major address on internet freedom made the connection between humanity and technology. We've been waiting a long time for our political leaders to have the courage to express thoughts like this, to have a vision about the role of the internet in human history, and yesterday the day arrived. The speech wasn't an isolated event, of course. more

Initiative for the Future of the Global Internet

When reading some of the nonsense constituting this initiative occurring in Washington, one wonders what planet the proponents live on. It is like peering through some perverse wormhole back to a 1990s Washington view of the world that saw “the internet” as some salvation for all the problems of humankind. For a world now focused on rolling out 5G virtualization infrastructure and content-based services and meshed devices, the challenges of cybersecurity and network-based harm to society, the initiative makes the U.S. Administration seem utterly out of touch with reality. Simply goofy. more

What Modern Businesses Need to Know Regarding Geo Names and Jurisdiction in Domain Name Disputes

The Internet has provided an unprecedented number of opportunities while raising far-reaching legal issues. It has created a complex matrix of national laws, global circumstances and new definitions -- or, at least, definitions in progress. The turmoil over Brexit and the international implications of the EU General Data Protection Regulation are signs of the times; as are issues surrounding domain names. more

Pew’s Broadband Home 2010 Research: Is It Truly Representative?

A Pew Home Broadband 2010 Summary reports in a sub-headline, a dramatic absence of continued growth in broadband adoption across the United States; while at the same time reporting increases in demographic adoption in a particular ethnic group. That sub-headline seems contradictory by indicating an overly dramatic slowing of adoption more

Stay Current, Achieve Excellence: 4 Emerging Cloud Techniques

How do you achieve excellence in the cloud? Enterprises know it's not enough to simply locate and leverage the services of a cloud provider: using cloud resources effectively marks the difference between "adequate" and "excellence" in achieving long-term IT and revenue goals. But to maximize cloud use, you need to know what's next for this disruptive market: here are four emerging techniques. more

Will LTE Steal the Broadband Revolution?

There is no doubt that LTE is going to take a prime position in broadband developments. With competitively priced services, innovative smartphones and an increasing range of very innovative apps this market is set to continue to boom. So how will all this impact the overall broadband market? ...this is not an 'us or them' issue between fixed and mobile broadband. As a matter of fact, the companies that are rolling out LTE are increasingly dependent on deep fibre rollouts as they need to handle massive amounts of data, to which the mobile infrastructure technology is not well-suited. more

Use STIX to Block Robocalls

It is one of those oddities that occurs around Washington from time to time. During the same hour today, the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) was meeting at its downtown headquarters trying to stop robocalls, while a large gathering of government and industry cybersecurity experts were meeting a few miles away at Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Lab advancing the principal means for threat information sharing known as STIX. more

Unregistered Gems Part 4: Other Brandable Domain-Name Styles

In the fourth in this series of articles exploring how the application of appropriate tools, algorithms and analysis techniques can identify the existence of attractive, unregistered brandable domain names, I consider the prevalence of a few additional styles of name. more

The Ultimate Differentiator: Reliability!

Every company that monitors their site or application performance focuses on two key metrics Availability and Speed. However, there is a third metric, Reliability, which is often misunderstood or in some cases ignored by companies. Reliability measures availability, accuracy, and delivery of a service within a time threshold. Reliability is difficult to define and measure as it is different for each company and service. To simplify it, you can think of Reliability as how consistent are you in delivering the "service". more