Featured Blogs

Broadband Now or Later?

I just heard about a U.S. County that is using its American Rescue Plan Act (ARPA) funds to build fixed wireless broadband. This is a traditional fixed wireless broadband technology that will probably deliver speeds of 100 Mbps to those close to the towers, slower speeds to homes further away, and which will not reach all homes in the County. more

Observation from Seminar on IANA Function Stewardship Transition Held by CAICT

On August 16 of 2016, the US Government announced its intention to transit the stewardship of the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority (IANA) function to the multistakeholder community upon the expiration of the IANA function Contract as of October 1 of 2016, barring any significant impediment... This announcement attracts the close attention of Internet community around the world and also in China. more

Experts Call for Caribbean to Make Its Voice Heard on Global Internet Governance

The internet has come to play a vital role in the social and economic development of the Caribbean. Yet, countries in the region are, in the main, relying heavily on external interests to make important decisions about the technical specifications and security of the technology and rules that impact how the Internet is governed. "We find that the Caribbean governments are abdicating their seats at the table in global fora where major decisions are made regarding the future of the Internet. more

WiFi QoE Assurance with TR-069 - Part 2: Optimizing a Single Access Point

As we have seen in the first installment of this series, TR-069 offers unprecedented visibility into the customer premises network to highlight devices beyond the gateway, and in the case of WiFi, the issues affecting service quality. Insights into the surrounding WIFI landscape alone provide ample data to provision the access point (AP) to operate in a part of the spectrum with the least amount of interference. more

Technology Vendors Must Be Proactive in Dealing With COVID-19 Problems

Early action now on possible performance issues will "flatten the curve" of customer problems in the coming weeks and months. Here are three things technology and software vendors can do right now to get ahead of problems that may appear (if they are not already) with services such as development, implementation and support... Check your contracts to see whether there are any "material assumptions" that have failed or will fail - perhaps because of some governmental action or unavailability of personnel... more

Recursive DNS and You

In the world of DNS, there are two types of DNS servers, 'recursion disabled' and 'recursion enabled'. Recursion disabled servers, when asked to resolve a name, will only answer for names that they are authoritative for. It will absolutely refuse to look up a name it does not have authority over and is ideal for when you don't want it to serve just any query. It isn't, however, very useful for domains you don't know about or have authority over... more

Making the Most of the Cloud: Four Top Tips

Cloud computing is on the rise. International Data Corp. predicts a $195 billion future for public cloud services in just four years. That total is for worldwide spending in 2020 - more than twice the projection for 2016 spending ($96.5 billion). As a result, companies are flocking to both large-scale and niche providers to empower cloud adoption and increase IT efficacy. The problem? Without proper management and oversight, cloud solutions can end up underperforming, hampering IT growth or limiting ROI. more

EPDP Team Marches Toward Major Milestone

If it feels like the work of the latest group addressing registration data within ICANN has been going on forever, try participating in it! Since the summer of 2018, the team has regularly been meeting for several hours each week, participating in numerous face-to-face meetings and exchanging thousands of emails. Last week in Los Angeles, the team got together once again to continue our Phase 2 work creating policy that will (among other issues) govern the disclosure of non-public registration data to third parties. more

Security Against Election Hacking - Part 2: Cyberoffense Is Not the Best Cyberdefense!

State and county election officials across the country employ thousands of computers in election administration, most of them are connected (from time to time) to the internet (or exchange data cartridges with machines that are connected). In my previous post I explained how we must audit elections independently of the computers, so we can trust the results even if the computers are hacked. more

Resilience vs. Sovereignty: Implementation Challenges of RIR Emergency Operations Under the ICP-2 Framework

Under ICANN's ICP-2 framework, RIR emergency operations extend beyond technical redundancy to encompass legal relocation, policy divergence and geopolitical risk, exposing tensions between operational resilience and national sovereignty in safeguarding global internet governance. more

Satellite Broadband Rivals: Beyond Starlink’s Dominance

Starlink gets almost all of the satellite press in the U.S., which is fair since the company now serves many homes and RVs with broadband. The company currently has over 4,600 active satellites in orbit, and if it sticks with its original business plan, it will eventually have 30,000. But there are a few other satellite companies working in the broadband space that don't get the press. more

Trust and Insecurity

When I was first advocating home networking at Microsoft, we encountered a problem. The existing systems and applications had implicitly assumed they were inside a safe environment and didn't consider threats from bad actors. Early Windows systems hadn't yet provided file system with access control and other protections though there were some attempts to have separate logins to keep some settings separate. more

Euro 2020 Part Three: Domains (Revisited) and Other Channels

In this final article in the series of studies looking at Euro 2020-related infringements, we revisit domain name infringements and consider activity across other online channels, with a focus on social media and mobile apps. Following the original study, which looked at domains registered before May 2020 with names containing "euro2020" or "euro2021," we analyzed daily activity levels in the period immediately preceding and during the competition. more

ICANN SSAD Proposal Poised to Fail?

After years of work on a proposed standardized system of WHOIS data disclosures (referred to as SSAD), and over a year of operational assessment of the proposal by ICANN itself, the ICANN Board seems poised to reject the proposal. And rightly so. The proposed SSAD is entirely watered down, fractured, and affords no oversight powers to ICANN regarding disclosure decisions that would continue to be left to the complete discretion of individual registrars (the very parties ICANN oversees).  more

Massive African Internet Outage and the Fragility of Undersea Cables

Eight countries in West Africa reported Internet outages after damage was reported to four different undersea fiber cables. The most affected countries are Ivory Coast, Liberia, and Benin, with additional problems caused in Ghana, Nigeria, and Cameroon. Lesser impact was felt in South Africa, Senegal, and Portugal. There has been no official word on what caused the problem, but it's likely due to the shifting of the seabed due to seismic activity. more