Featured Blogs

How Diverse Is ICANN? New Study Explores Organisation’s Makeup

ICANN is a strange beast. Even the term "ICANN", which is itself an acronym, has more than one meaning. There are at least two "ICANNs", one is the "community", which is made up of everyone who engages with the ICANN "circus" and then there is ICANN the organisation itself -- a California not-for-profit. While people outside the internet industry probably have never heard of ICANN or had any direct dealings with it, the policies that get decided at ICANN have a tangible impact on how the internet operates. more

Hyperconvergence, Disaggregation, and Cloud: The Foggy Future of Network Engineering

The world of networking tends to be bistable: we either centralize everything, or we decentralize everything. We started with mainframes, passed through Lotus 123 hidden in corners, then to mini's and middleware, then to laptops, and now to the cloud, to be followed by fog. This particular cycle of centralization/decentralization, however, has produced a series of overlapping changes that are difficult to decipher. You can somehow hear someone arguing about disaggregation and hyperconvergence through the fog -- but just barely. more

According to the Department of Homeland Security, Cybercrime Is a Bigger Threat Than Terrorism

An article in Forbes the other day reports on US Secretary of Homeland Security Janet Napolitano's comments that 'cybercrime represents the "greatest threat and actual activity that we have seen aimed at the west and at the United States" in addition to "or other than Al Qaeda and Al Qaeda-related groups."' ..."Napolitano cited a study commissioned by Symantec that put the total worldwide cost of cybercrime at $388 billion -- higher than the global market for heroin, cocaine and marijuana combined." more

Beyond Domains: What Did We Really Learn in 2009?

The beginning of every year is a time for introspection, an appraisal of the year that was, and planning for the year to come. It is also a time to follow tradition and to recap the biggest news of the year. But by now, I am guessing that we have all read our fair share about the people and events who have impacted the last 12 months... if we take a larger vantage point (than our own relatively small domain name industry), these lessons from 2009 -- in my view -- could teach us all and most importantly, really shape the year ahead. more

Can New TLDs Actually Co-Exist?

The new TLD program was a long time coming and now we have over 600 options for domain name endings, with more on the way. It made sense to a lot of people that options other than the already crowded .com space were needed but did we really envisage the plethora of ultimately "similar" TLDs that would rise from the ICANN process? more

April 8 2014: A World Less Secure

Not long after the message that Microsoft will stop updating Windows XP from 8 April onwards, after extending it beyond the regular life cycle for over a year already, came the soothing message that malware will be monitored for another year. That may be good news to some, but the fact remains that this is not the same as patching. Remaining on XP leads to a vulnerable state of the desktop, lap top and any other machine running on XP; vulnerable to potential hacks, cyber crimes, becoming part of a botnet, etc. more

Big Business Has Been Using the New TLD Concept for Years

By now we've all had a chance to digest the concept around the new TLD program and in some cases even come up with our own amazing ideas for the next .com or a niche TLD that will make us millionaires overnight! Well maybe some of us have... Others are taking a far more practical approach to the exciting new changes to the Internet and how it will be adopted and used, in particular within the corporate arena. more

RIM’s Secret Weapon

The US analyst community has been holding a wake for RIM in the last few days... It's a pile-on that has driven the stock price down from the upper fifties to the mid forties in the last month. And yeah, RIM's stock price is going to suffer in the short term, not just because of these analyst reports, but because their existing software technology is long-in-the-tooth, to put it politely... I wouldn't count them out, though. RIM's secret weapon is the man I nearly bumped into last week... more

What’s With the 32-Bit Numbers That the Internet Keeps Defying?

By now you might have read the news "How 'Gangnam Style' Broke YouTube?" What happened is that a YouTube video named 'Gangnam Style' by a South Korean singer Park Jae-sang, known by his stage name PSY, has been viewed so many times that it broke YouTube's view counter. YouTube's view counter is built on a 32-bit integer, which provides a view-tracking capability of nearly 2.15 billion views. more

Happy Birthday Wi-Fi

This year is the twentieth anniversary of the formation of the Wi-Fi Alliance and the launch of commercial Wi-Fi. Wi-Fi has become so ubiquitous in our lives that it's hard to believe that it's only been twenty years since all broadband connections came with wires. In 1999 most people were still using dial-up, and that's the year when early adapters started buying DSL. I remember having incredibly long phone cords so that I could use my laptop at different places around the house. more

Measuring IPv6 at the Network and the Customer Level

George Michaelson, APNIC's Senior Research and Development Scientist recently visited the RIPE NCC to collaborate on various research projects with his RIR colleagues. IPv6 measurements were one of the topics we looked at. Recent IPv6 statistics from the RIPE NCC show an accelerated uptake of IPv6 in Norway, both in terms of the number of allocated prefixes, and visible announcements in the routing system. more

The Internet Portal Strategy, Circa 2011

Ev Ehrlich over at High Tech Forum wrote an excellent piece yesterday about some recent comments by Google's Eric Schmidt. According to Schmidt there are four megafirms right now executing well on what he calls "platform strategies" - Google (search), Apple (gadgets/ecosystem), Amazon (online retailing) and Facebook (social connectivity). more

IPv6 Enabled Networks Before and After World IPv6 Day

In our last post on CircleID, Measuring World IPv6 Day - First Impressions, we showed exactly when World IPv6 Day participants switched on IPv6 on their networks (by way of announcing DNS AAAA records). Now, a few weeks after World IPv6 Day, it's interesting to see what the longer-term effects have been. more

Why Over Compliance With Sanctions at Internet Infrastructure Level Can Have Devastating Effects on Ordinary People

On Friday, Mykhailo Fedorov, Ukraine's digital transformation minister, asked Cloudflare and Amazon to stop serving Russian web resources and protecting Russian services. He said in a tweet that Ukraine was "calling on Amazon to stop providing cloud services in Russia." He also said that "Cloudflare should not protect Russian web resources while their tanks and missiles attack our kindergartens." more

Q&A With Rami Schwartz, Founder and CEO of .tube

After its initial launch in 2016 and with over 1,800 domains registered, the .tube TLD recently released over 25,000 previously reserved domains as part of a broader re-launch of its business and brand. I spoke with Rami Schwartz, Founder and CEO of .tube about the journey so far and about what's in store for .tube in the New Year... "We're used to fighting against companies much larger than us and prevailing - our history has seen us come up against the likes of the Mexican Government and Google..." more