Credit Card Breaches a Salutary Lesson for DNSSEC Adoption

Maintaining an 150 year old house requires two things, a lot of time and a lot of trips to the hardware store. Since the closest hardware store to my house is Home Depot, it is rare that a weekend passes without at least one trip to Home Depot. So now in the wake of the Home Depot data breach I am through no fault of my own in a situation where any or all of the bank cards I use regularly could be cancelled if the issuer decides they might be compromised. And this is not the first time this has happened to me this year. more

Nobody Has Proposed a Sustainable Model for Internet Governance Yet

The idea that the US would maintain a strategic position in the Internet was always a pipe dream. Allowing the US to pick the DNS contractors is one thing, allowing the US the power to arbitrarily shut countries off the net is quite another. And that is what deployment of DNSSEC and the rPKI under the current models would do. The idea that some US congressman would promote a bill to force ICANN to drop Cuba, Palestine or the enemy of the moment off the Internet is really not far fetched. The US government was just shut down for over two weeks in a bizarre act of political theater. more

The Real Deployment Issue

When I see glib talk about the inevitable transition to IPv6 or DNSSEC, I have to wonder what industry people think they are working in. Let me give an example that has nothing to do with networking: storage capacity. Now if there is one constant that everyone in the computing industry can agree on it is that they expect storage media capacity to increase. more

Uncertain Knowledge

The establishment media frequently attack the Internet as spreading inaccurate, unchecked rumors as news. While that is certainly true, the Internet is also demonstrating that the establishment media is no better. In the past weeks we have been told that the Stuxnet virus was written by US and Israeli intelligence. The evidence? Some un-named Israeli intelligence officers grinned broadly at reporters when the subject was mentioned. Is that what it has come to? more

Net Neutrality and Google/Verizon

What surprises me about the Google/Verizon deal is not that they have come to agreement, but that they have taken so long to do so. What they have agreed to is essentially what I proposed they do back in 2006. What Google want and what Comcast, Verizon and the carriers want is not and was not incompatible. more

The Geo-Politics of ICANN vs ITU

Over the past couple of years I have had the opportunity to talk to US policy makers and have seen how ITU and ICANN have emerged as proxies for a much wider diplomatic dispute over who is going to control cyberspace. The Internet is now the engine of the new global economy. It is a communication infrastructure. Both have been correctly regarded as national security interests of the very highest level of priority. Some of the participants in the ICANN/ITU world are former participants in arms limitation circles. Their mode of thinking is illustrated by the frequent use of phrases such as 'why would we give up...'. more

DNSSEC Happy Talk Enters a New Era

So we finally have a signed root zone. Now when is someone going to answer the question I first asked over five years ago and have still not had an answer to: How do the domain name owner's keys get into the TLD? Before we have a system people can use there have to be technical standards, validation criteria and a business model. Where are they? more

Violet Blue on .XXX

We seem to hear quite a bit from ICM about their .xxx TLD proposal. People who might be interested in the view from the porn community might be interested in Violet Blue's article on the proposal. As you might expect, she is against and sees no real support from the porn world. She does not consider 153K defensive domain registrations as proof of demand. more

How to Fix WHOIS - Part 2

The key to fixing any part of the Internet infrastructure is to understand the business cases for the parties whose behavior you want to influence and design the technology accordingly. People who follow this approach (Sir Tim Berners-Lee and the World Wide Web) have a chance of succeeding. People who ignore it (DNSSEC, IPv6) will fail. The root problem here is that the ICANN DNS does not differentiate between the parts of the Internet that are accountable and those that are not. more

Fixing WHOIS (and Some Other Stuff Too)

ICANN is the only institution with responsibility for the functioning of DNS. And so it is natural that when there is a DNS problem for people to expect ICANN to come up with the solution. But having the responsibility to act is not the same as having the ability. Like the IETF, ICANN appears to have been designed with the objective of achieving institutional paralysis. And this is not surprising since the first law of the Internet is 'You are so not in charge (for all values of you). more