Featured Blogs

NFL Super Bowl to Stream Live Today for Free - Who Will Be Measuring Statistics?

Today NBC is streaming the NFL's Super Bowl live for free through mobile apps as well as their NBC Sports website. Given the number of "cord-cutters" and mobile users out there, I suspect there should be a good number of people watching the event through the live streams today. more

You Cannot Tell Your Customers to ‘Shut Up’ Anymore - Consumer Review Fairness Act Signed Into Law

Bad idea: Set up a business and provide poor goods or services; receive bad reviews online for your poor goods or services. Worse idea: Instead of treating your customers' feedback as free expert advice and listening to their suggestions on how to improve your business, sue your customers -- experience the Streisand Effect -- resulting in increased media coverage highlighting your lousy goods, service, and treatment of customers. Ensure that negatives reviews of your business get the widest exposure possible. more

Is the Internet Becoming a Vast Wasteland?

I've written posts about trolls in Cuba, where Operation Truth is said to use a thousand university-student trolls and trolls in China where government workers fabricate an estimated 488 million social media posts annually. Now we are reading about Russian government trolls... The fake news and trolling revealed during the last few months of the US political campaign has sowed doubts about everything we see and read online. We're beginning the transition from "critical thinking" to "paranoid thinking." more

Facing Up to the Generational Privacy Divide

Last week hundreds of privacy regulators, corporate officers, and activists gathered in Jerusalem, Israel for the annual Data Protection and Privacy Commissioner Conference. ... Many acknowledged that longstanding privacy norms are being increasingly challenged by the massive popularity of social networks that encourage users to share information that in a previous generation would have never been made publicly available for all the world to see. more

Perhaps It’s Time to Regulate Microsoft as Critical Infrastructure?

My main argument is about the policy of handling vulnerabilities for 6 months without patching (such as the Google attacks 0day apparently was) and the policy of waiting a whole month before patching this very same vulnerability when it first became an in-the-wild 0day exploit (it has now been patched, ahead of schedule). Microsoft is the main proponent of responsible disclosure, and has shown it is a responsible vendor... I simply call on it to stay responsible and amend its faulty and dangerous policies. more

Internet Service Quality Measured from Thousands of Locations

RIPE Atlas, the new active measurements network maintained by the RIPE NCC, gives you a way to easily measure the quality of your Internet services. RIPE Atlas is designed in such a way that it can collect data for analysis from a great number of locations on the Internet. The actual measurement devices, or "probes", are so small that they can be easily deployed in a home environment. more

White Space in the Great White North

There is growing interest in the US for the FCC to look at White Space to enable more options for broadband wireless in rural areas. What is White Space? Last weekend, the Sunday NY Times published an article about wireless services that included this description: "In many areas, not all broadcast [television] channels are in use. The unused channels are "white spaces" of high-quality spectrum that could be made available to local Internet service providers. Unlike the much higher frequency of Wi-Fi, television broadcast frequencies can travel for miles and penetrate walls, providing a much broader range for Internet service." There is a coalition of eight technology companies driving the discussion in the US... more

Can Trademarks and Brands Help Save the Internet From Itself?

Trademarks and brands are often among a company's most valued assets. Customers associate trademarks and brands with producer integrity. They engender consumer trust. Without TMs and Brands, companies struggle for attention and find it more difficult to link the company's integrity and trustworthiness in the marketing of its goods and services. Representing company promise and customer expectations, they are uniquely positioned to symbolize common values and aspirations. more

ITU, the Internet, and a Very Contentious Footnote

I was part of a small APNIC delegation that attended the ITU Plenipotentiary Conference (PP-10) with a limited Sector Member role as an observer. Our aim was to be available to ITU Member States with questions on IP addressing issues and to follow Member State discussions on the ITU's role in Internet governance issues. Four adopted resolutions at PP-10 were of particular relevance to Internet management, of which one was new: "Facilitating the transition from IPv4 to IPv6". more

Smells like Cybersquatting? How the UDRP “Smell Test” Can Go Awry

The UDRP has the form of a substantive Policy, but it operates as a "smell test".1 If the evidence smells bad, the panel will likely order a transfer. If it doesn't, the panel won't. An aim of this article is to help improve UDRP panels' sense of smell when it comes to differentiating between domain name investors and cybersquatters. I will provide some insight into the business of domain name investing that I hope will be helpful to UDRP panelists in making more accurate inferences in disputes involving investors. more

Growth in Commercial Sinkholing Operations

The last couple of years have seen a growth in commercial sinkholing operations. What was once an academic method for studying botnets and other types of Internet-born threat, has more recently turned in to an increasingly profitable business for some organizations. Yesterday I published a blog on the DarkReading site titled Sinkholing For Profit, and I wanted to expand upon some aspects of the sinkholing discussion (there's only so much you can fit in to 800-ish word limits). more

Call for Participation - DNSSEC Workshop at ICANN 56 in Helsinki, Finland on 27 June 2016

Do you have an idea for an innovative use of DNSSEC or DANE? Have you recently deployed DNSSEC or DANE and have some "lessons learned" that you could share? Did you develop a new tool or service that works with DNSSEC? Have you enabled DNSSEC by default in your products? (And why or why not?) Do you have ideas about how to accelerate usage of new encryption algorithms in DNSSEC? more

DNSSEC Workshop Streaming Live From ICANN 51 On Wednesday, Oct 15

Want to learn about the state of DNSSEC usage in North America? Or what is new in DNS monitoring? Or where DNSSEC fits into the plans of operating systems? Or how DANE is being used to bring a higher level of security to email? All those questions and much more will be discussed at the DNSSEC Workshop at ICANN 51 happening on Wednesday, October 15, 2014, from 8:30 am to 2:45 pm Pacific Daylight Time (PDT, which is UTC-7). more

Nominations Now Open for Public Interest Registry (Operator of .ORG) Board of Directors

Would you be interested in helping guide the future of the Public Interest Registry (PIR), the non-profit operator of the .ORG, .NGO and .ONG domains? If so, the Internet Society is seeking nominations for three positions on the PIR Board of Directors. The nominations deadline is Monday, February 4, 2019, at 15:00 UTC. There are three positions opening on the PIR Board. Directors will serve a 3-year term that begins mid-year 2019 and expires mid-year 2022. more

Ask Not What ICANN Can Do for You, But What You Can Do for ICANN

In recent weeks, you may have seen several articles asking that "ICANN", the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers, move more expeditiously to open up the next application window for new gTLDs. As one commenter wrote "Ask a Board member or ICANN staff when they expect the next application window to open, and they will inevitably suggest 2020 -- another three years away. more