Featured Blogs

Decision Day for ICANN: The End of the Beginning, or the Beginning of the End?

I've just arrived in Singapore, where ICANN's board will almost surely vote to launch an unprecedented expansion plan for generic top-level domains (gTLDs). As the new gTLDs start lighting-up over the next two years, we'll look back on this week as the "end of the beginning" since it ended several years of planning for the actual expansion. After the vote the real work begins: evaluating applications, implementing new mechanisms, and contract compliance on a scale far greater than ICANN has ever seen. more

IPv6 and MEID’s… Stop Choking on 32 Bits

Both the Internet and North American cellphones are choking under a 32 bit limitation and reactions from protagonists involved in both cases offer striking similarities. 1983 saw the debut of IPv4 and North American mobile telephony started in earnest with Bell's analog AMPS (Advanced Mobile Phone Service). Responding to the need to uniquely identify the growing number of mobile devices in order to bill their owner, the FCC ordered that handsets be equipped with a unique identification number embedded on a chip. This became the 32 bit ESN... more

Digital Rights Management or Digital Restrictive Management?

We are all accustomed to purchasing and/or using copyrighted material in one fashion or another. From music, movies-(BluRay), e-books-(Kindle), computers-(software), mobile phones-(iPhone) and games; the umbrella of companies wanting to restrict access to its products continues to grow and become increasingly restrictive. more

Is Comcast Impairing Vonage?

On the one hand, the big telcos are chanting the mantram, "We shall not block, impair or degrade any content, service or application." On the other hand, they're saying, "There's no problem. We don't need a law until there's a problem." Well, now. Mitch Shapiro over at IP & Democracy, points to Russell Shaw's post that says: "I have been noticing a growing number of posts in which many Vonage users and Vonage Forum Members have been complaining about the quality of Vonage calls over Comcast broadband connections..." more

Advantages of Crowdinvesting in Financing New gTLDs

The second-round new gTLD applicants have a tool they don't even know about: "crowdinvesting." That's when a venture sidesteps banks and venture capitalists and instead raises money by selling shares directly to the public. Usually this is done over the Internet, and often enough the investors can hope for a financial return that's far better than what banks and stocks offer. more

Disruptive Google Fiber Is Shaking up the Telco World

The Google Fiber project is receiving international attention. This in itself is a good thing, since it brings the benefits of high-speed FttH infrastructure to the attention of large numbers of people in business and government who will not have to deal with such developments on a regular basis... At the same time we have to look at Google Fiber from the point of view of operating in the American regulatory environment. Yes, we can all learn from its disruptive model, and particularly when the results of the more innovative elements of the services begin to kick in; but for other reasons there is no way that this model can be replicated elsewhere. more

Oil and Gas Cyber Security Forum

A reader recently brought to my attention an upcoming conference in London in the UK -- The Oil and Gas Cyber Security Forum. Here's a little blurb: "Despite investments into state of the art technology, a majority of the oil and gas industry remain blissfully unaware of the vulnerabilities, threats and capability of a malicious cyber attack on control systems..." I bring this up because it is relevant to the trends in cyber security that we see this year - that of the Advanced Persistent Threat. more

New Top-Level Domains Emerging

With all the buzz surrounding new Top-Level Domain (nTLDs) at the last ICANN meeting in Mexico, I am sure many of you have already encountered or read information regarding the latest applications. For those who haven't been staying abreast of the latest, here is a quick review... There are two different general types of TLDs -- gTLDs and ccTLDs. ICANN is now opening the possibility of adding further TLD extensions, which can virtually be anything... more

Happy Birthday .CAT and ICANN

Today, four years after the launch of the Catalan linguistic and cultural registry, Google reports that there are 90 million pages of Catalan content under the some 36 thousand .CAT domains. As imperfect as Google's tools are as a metric, the correct observation is that the use of .CAT by Catalans vastly exceeds the expectations of its initial proponents... more

Closed Generics Debate Rages On

The new gTLD program continues to throw up last-minute debates on what is acceptable as a TLDs and what is not. The latest such verbal joust centers around closed generics. These are generic terms being applied for by applicants whom, should they be successful, will not open the TLD up to everyone on an equal access basis. As an example, think .book being run by Amazon and only available to Amazon customers. more

Could SNET Become Cuba’s Guifi.net?

In an earlier post, I described Havana's community network, SNET, and wondered what it could become if the government and ETECSA were willing to legitimatize and support it. Spain's Guifi.net provides a possible answer to that question. Guifi.net is said to be the largest community network in the world. It began in 2004 and has grown to have 34,165 nodes online with 16,758 planned, 407 building, 612 testing and 4,043 inactive. more

Activists for Access to Medicines and Internet Rights Develop Brussels Principles for Online Sales

RightsCon, the world's leading summit on tech, society, and human rights has been called "the Davos of Digital Rights" (www.rightscon.org). At RightsCon 2017, the sixth event of the annual summit series on human rights in the digital age, the global human rights community came together in the heart of European politics and policymaking on March 29-31, 2017. More than 1,500 experts from 105 countries around the world, across diverse geographic and stakeholder lines, joined together to produce measurable outcomes on the most pressing and emerging issues threatening human rights in the digital age. more

Is the Internet a Tobacco Product?

Audacity by federal policy makers can be admirable, at least in some cases, but it can a bit more problematic in others. A case in point is the Food and Drug Administration's "deeming" of the internet to be a tobacco product. The FDA explained that it was exercising its authority under the Family Smoking Prevention and Tobacco Control Act which gave the agency an extensive set of duties, responsibilities and authorities over "tobacco products." more

Greylisting Still Works - Part I

Greylisting is a hoary technique for rejecting spam sent by botnets and other poorly written spamware. When a mail server receives an attempt to deliver mail from a hitherto unseen sending host IP address, it rejects the message with a "soft fail" error which tells the sender to try again later. Real mail software does try again, at which point you note that the host knows how to retry and you don't greylist mail from that IP again. more

Oh, Spammer, Where Art Thou?

A few weeks ago, I posted a piece on where individuals spammers were located in terms of sending IP. The United States was number 1, followed by China. This is in terms of total volume of spam that they send. However, a second piece of data that I did not take a look at was where all of the individual spam sites contained within the spam was located. For example, does a lot of spam sent from the United States point to spammy URLs hosted in China? more