Featured Blogs

Deceptive Assurances of Privacy?

Earlier this week, Facebook expanded the roll-out of its facial recognition software to tag people in photos uploaded to the social networking site. Many observers and regulators responded with privacy concerns; EFF offered a video showing users how to opt-out. Tim O'Reilly, however, takes a different tack... O'Reilly's point - and face-recognition technology - is bigger than Facebook. more

Google and China: What Business Are Telcos Really In?

It seems like there's a different headline story about Google every day lately, and there's a lot here that service providers should be paying attention to. The launch of Nexus One around CES earlier this month is especially important for all mobile operators as well as the handset vendors partnering with them. A few days later, we started hearing noise about Google Energy. 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

Deadline of Dec 21 To Submit Nominations for 2016 Internet Society Board of Trustees

Are you passionate about preserving the global, open Internet? Do you want to help guide work to connect the unconnected and promote / restore trust in the Internet? Do you have experience in Internet standards, development or public policy? If so, please consider applying for one of the open seats on the Internet Society Board of Trustees.
The Internet Society serves a pivotal role in the world as a leader on Internet policy, technical, economic, and social matters, and as the organizational home of the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF). more

Securing a Cloud Infrastructure

George Reese (author of the new book Cloud Application Architectures: Building Applications and Infrastructure in the Cloud) is talking at Gluecon about securing cloud infrastructures. Two recent surveys found "security" was the number one concern of companies considering a move to the cloud. George says the key to making customers comfortable with cloud security is transparency... more

The Reality Virus

There's a new virus infecting the Internet that's more pernicious and more dangerous than any virus that has gone before. It's the first example ever of a hybrid Internet-human virus and probably the universal common ancestor of all hybrid Internet-human viruses to come. The condition the virus leaves behind is increasingly well recognised and goes by the understated label of "post-truth" but the virus itself is so far anonymous and so I propose we name it after the effect it has on those it has infected who, put simply, can no longer distinguish reality from fiction, hence the reality virus. more

A Multistakeholder Model if We Can Keep It: 25 Years of ICANN

I go back to the International Forum on the White Paper (IFWP). (Like Jeff, I was very young.) The Department of Commerce had just issued the White Paper, and there was a proposal that we pass control of the critical Internet identifiers to a new not-for-profit corporation with a bottom-up Multistakeholder way of making policy and an international board of directors. more

Suggestions for the Cuba Internet Task Force

The Cuba Internet Task Force (CITF) held their inaugural meeting last week. Deputy Assistant Secretary for Western Hemisphere Affairs John S. Creamer will chair the CITF, and there are government representatives from the Department of State, Office of Cuba Broadcasting, Federal Communications Commission, National Telecommunications and Information Administration and Agency for International Development. Freedom House will represent NGOs and the Information Technology Industry Council will represent the IT industry. more

Innovation and Cybersecurity Regulation

The market has failed to secure cyberspace. A ten-year experiment in faith-based cybersecurity has proven this beyond question. The market has failed and the failure of U.S. policies to recognize this explains why we are in crisis. The former chairman of the Security and Exchange Commission, Christopher Cox, a longtime proponent of deregulation, provided a useful summary of the issue when he said, "The last six months have made it abundantly clear that voluntary regulation does not work."... more

Satellite Internet Service Progress by SpaceX and Telesat

This has been a busy week in the race to deploy constellations of low-earth orbit (LEO) Internet-service satellites. In their quarterly report, Telesat mentioned progress in two, disparate markets. As I noted earlier, they have signed their first LEO customer - Omniaccess a provider of connectivity to the superyacht market. more

In Search of an Agenda for a New Netmundial

With the strong possibility of a new Netmundial-style event being organized under the stewardship of CGI.br in 2024, the Internet governance community ought to reflect upon the benefits that this could bring to all stakeholders. In a scenario of uncertainty over the several processes affecting the future of the global network, there is value in taking another look at the original event's collaborative outcomes document, which summarized much of what was then understood to be core principles of Internet governance. more

DotEco Bids Heat Up - Catfight Anyone?

The new Top-Level Domain (TLD) process is occupying a lot of people in the domain name industry at present. While some people are obviously very much against the entire concept of new TLDs, there are plenty of people and organisations who support the project. But what happens when you have more than one organisation vying for the same namespace? ...Seemingly the competition between two rival bids for .eco (doteco) has been getting more than a little dirty in the past few weeks. more

Why I Won’t Buy an E-book Reader - and When I Might

There have been many news stories lately about ebook readers. The New York Times said that they were prominently featured at the Consumer Electronics Show. Amazon is pushing its Kindle; Barnes and Noble has its Nook. There are many other aspirants, either on the market now or waiting in the wings. For now, though, I'm sitting on the sidelines. more

Everything You Ever Wanted to Know About Canadian Anti-Spam Bill C-27

CAUCE just posted a blog entry about C-27; we will be speaking to the Industry, Science, and Technology committee reviewing the bill this afternoon. The meeting will be webcast starting at 15:30 eastern... more

Telecom in China: After the Dust Settles

The long rumored reorganization of the telecommunications sector in China has begun. Now China will have three major companies, each with both mobile and fixed networks. The focus for fixed network growth is broadband Internet access. The focus for mobile will be continued growth in mobile subscribers and the launch of 3G services, with the three companies using three different 3G technologies. more