The past week in the 5G world was notable because of some major events in Reno in the 5G race to roll out the full 5G specifications known as Release 16. A set of seven major concurrent industry standards meetings were hosted there over five days last week. The metrics are indicative of who really participates in and shapes the rapidly emerging 5G platforms. more
The Paris Peace Forum (PPF), established by the French president Emanual Macron, was picked by the Global Commission for Stability in Cyberspace (GCSC) to launch its final report "Advancing Cyberstability" for good reasons: The Internet isn't just a purely technical issue with some political implications anymore. On the eve of the 2020s, the management of cyberspace is a global problem, a matter of international security, a question of war or peace. more
To understand some of our implementation choices, it's important to remember two things. First, the computers of that era were slow. The Unix machine at UNC's CS department was slower than most timesharing machines even for 1979 – we had a small, slow disk, a slow CPU, and – most critically – not nearly enough RAM. Duke CS had a faster computer – they had an 11/70; we had an 11/45 -- but since I was doing the first implementation, I had to use what UNC had. (Log in remotely? more
One of the more interesting rules-of-thumb in the industry is Nielsen's Law of Internet bandwidth, which states that: A high-end user's connection speed grows by 50% per year. This 'law' was postulated by Jakob Nielsen of the Nielsen Norman Group in 1998 and subsequently updated in 2008 and 2019. Nielsen started by looking at usage for himself and other big data users, going back to a 300 bps (bits per second) modem used in 1984. more
The announcement of the intended Internet Society (ISOC) sale of the .ORG registry to Ethos Capital has caused a lot of frustration and anger while raising a lot of questions.
It's more than just about the money. It's more than who is behind it. It's about the soul of the DNS and the ICANN community with its multi-stakeholder model. Let's remember that the Public Interest Registry (PIR) was created, with ISOC as its sole legal owner, to provide ISOC with the funds to operate and to run the registry more-or-less as a Social Business. more
ETECSA reports that over 110,100 Cuban households have DSL connectivity using their Nauta Hogar service. There are also shared facilites – 986 WiFi hotspots (127 in Havana) and 347 Navigation Rooms (44 in Havana) with 1,309 computers (304 in Havana). These services are dead-ends on the road to hoped-for "computerization." The Cuban population is around 11 million so, after three years, roughly one person in 100 lives in a Nauta home and the services are limited geographically... more
When we set out to design the over-the-wire file format, we were certain of one thing: we wouldn't get it perfectly right. That led to our first decision: the very first character of the transmitted file would be the letter "A" for the version. Why not a number on the first line, including perhaps a decimal point? If we ever considered that, I have no recollection of it. more
There was a planning meeting for what became Usenet at Duke CS. We knew three things, and three things only: we wanted something that could be used locally for administrative messages, we wanted a networked system, and we would use uucp for intersite communication. This last decision was more or less by default: there were no other possibilities available to us or to most other sites that ran standard Unix. Furthermore, all you needed to run uucp was a single dial-up modem port. more
Usenet -- Netnews -- was conceived almost exactly 40 years ago this month. To understand where it came from and why certain decisions were made the way they were, it's important to understand the technological constraints of the time. Metanote: this is a personal history as I remember it. None of us were taking notes at the time; it's entirely possible that errors have crept in, especially since my brain cells do not even have parity checking, let alone ECC. Please send any corrections. more
One of the most embarrassing and pernicious realities in the world of cybersecurity is the stark reality that some industry cybersecurity standards practices are themselves cyber threats. How so? Most industry and intergovernmental standards bodies serve as means for assembling the constantly evolving collective knowledge of participant experts and package the resulting specifications and best practices as freely available online documents to a vast, diverse universe of users. more