Featured Blogs

The Early History of Usenet, Part V: Authentication and Norms

We knew that Usenet needed some sort of management system, and we knew that that would require some sort of authentication, for users, sites, and perhaps posts. We didn't add any, though -- and why we didn't is an interesting story. The obvious solution was something involving public key cryptography, which we (the original developers of the protocol: Tom Truscott, the late Jim Ellis, and myself) knew about: all good geeks at the time had seen Martin Gardner's "Mathematical Games" column... more

Dumb When They Want To Be…

David Akin pointed me to this article in the Ottawa Citizen which describes CRTC initiatives aimed at getting the cablecos to pay into a fund that would support, "the creation of high-quality, high-cost, scripted Canadian broadcasting content in the new media." In it, Ken Engelhart, senior vice-president of regulatory [affairs?] for Rogers Corp. is quoted saying... more

Twitter, DDoS and the Motivations Behind the Attack

As we all know by now, last week, on Thursday, August 7, Twitter was hit with a denial-of-service attack that took it down for several hours. Other social networking sites like Facebook, LiveJournal, Youtube and Blogger were also hit. They managed to repel the attack although Facebook was not quite as successful as the other larger players. The theory floating about at the moment is that this was a politically oriented play designed to target one guy: a blogger. We are nearing the 1-year anniversary of a the Russian/Georgian 2008 war. There is a pro-Georgian blogger by the username of "Cyxymu" who had accounts on all of these services. more

Domain Slammers Go Phishing

ICANN introduced a requirement for domain name registrars to send out annual notices to all their customers (registrants) to check the Whois on their domain names to ensure the information is correct. While this seemed fairly reasonable (if cumbersome), the fact is it confuses the heck out of people -- and creates a whole lot of confusion for registrants. But that was a problem we could deal with. Fast-forward to October, 2008... more

ICANN’s Accountability and Transparency – a Retrospective on the IANA Transition

As we passed five years since the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority transition took place, my co-authors and I paused to look back on this pivotal moment; to take stock of what we've learned and to re-examine some of the key events leading up to the transition and how careful planning ensured a successful transfer of IANA responsibilities from the United States Government to the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers. more

The Cuba Internet Task Force - a Win for Trump and Castro

President Obama began working on Cuban rapprochement during his 2009 presidential campaign. After over five years of thought and negotiation, the Whitehouse announced a major shift in Cuba policy, which included allowing telecommunications providers "to establish the necessary mechanisms, including infrastructure, in Cuba to provide commercial telecommunications and Internet services, which will improve telecommunications between the United States and Cuba." more

UK Ponders Net Neutrality, Overstating Broadband Competition

The recent declaration from the UK’s minister for communications that the Internet should be tiered, thereby allowing ISPs to charge for prioritised traffic (either rated by speed delivered or by content provider) is a knee-jerk response to network strain masking as a necessary network management tool, and is a potential threat to the concept of net neutrality. ...developments in the mobile data sector make it clear that capacity constraints are appearing on mobile networks as well, long before the anticipated launch of LTE-based services in the UK in 2013. more

Muzzled by the United Nations

The Internet Governance Forum is winding down today in Sharm El Sheikh, Egypt. There have been a lot of very constructive conversations in workshops and panels over the past four days about how to advance security, privacy, child protection, AND human rights and free expression on the Internet. Unfortunately, the biggest headline coming out of the forum so far has been an incident on Sunday... more

Internet Society Seeks Nominations for 2022 Board of Trustees

Are you passionate about preserving the global, open Internet? Do you have experience in Internet standards, development or public policy? If so, please consider applying for a seat on the Internet Society Board of Trustees. The Internet Society supports and promotes the development of the Internet as a global technical infrastructure, a resource to enrich people’s lives, and a force for good in society. Our work aligns with our goals for the Internet to be open, globally connected, secure, and trustworthy. more

The Explosive Growth of Worldwide Broadband Usage

Sandvine gathers data from the 160 largest fixed and wireless ISPs on the planet to understand Internet usage trends. The statistics discussed below come from the Sandvine January 2022 Global Internet Phenomena Report. Sandvine identifies several current industry trends... more

A Great Bit of DNSSEC and DNS at IETF 90 Next Week

For those people tracking the evolution and deployment of DNSSEC or who are just interested in "DNS security" in general there is a great amount of activity happening next week at IETF 90 in Toronto. I dove into this activity in great detail in a recent post, "Rough Guide to IETF 90: DNSSEC, DANE and DNS Security", and summarized the activity in a Deploy360 post... more

The First Month of Cuban 3G Mobile Internet Service

ETECSA, Cuba's government monopoly ISP, is offering a number of stopgap Internet services -- navigation rooms, home DSL and WiFi hotspots, but the recently rolled out 3G mobile service is the most important. The plot to the right shows the normalized rate of Cuban domain name requests to Oracle servers during the first full month of operation - a surrogate estimate of Internet traffic volume. more

Astronomical Increases in Domain Names: Low Constancy of Abusive Registrations

When ICANN implemented the Uniform Domain Name Dispute Resolution Policy (UDRP) in 1999, the number of registered domain names were in the low eight digits. Registered domain names passed the first million in 1997. Today, they are in the first third of nine digits, and continuing to grow. In its newly released publication gTLD Marketplace Health Index (Beta) (July 21, 2016) ICANN offers through a couple dozen metrics a picture of the multiple parts that corporately go into making a healthy marketplace. It's "Beta" because the Health Index is a work in progress. more

What Does It Mean to Deploy DMARC?

The IETF's DMARC working group is thinking about a maintenance update to the DMARC spec, fixing bits that are unclear and perhaps changing it where what mail servers do doesn't exactly agree with what it says. Someone noted that a lot of mailers claim to have "deployed DMARC," and it's not at all clear what that really means. ... I've suggested that we could write a DMARC deployment guide that describes the parts of DMARC, the ways they interact and in what sequence it's useful to deploy them. If you'd find that useful, leave a comment. more

Lies, Damn Lies, and Anti-Spam Vendor Press Releases

There's a lot of chatter about a recent study purporting to show that 29.1% of internet users has bought something from spam. As ITWire reported, "Marshal were not only interested in how many people were purchasing from a spam source, but also what goods and services they were buying. Perhaps less surprisingly this revealed that sex and drugs sell well online." But at downloadsquad, Lee Mathews discovered the shocking truth: "the survey only involved 600 people." more