ICANN Announces Blocking Usage Review Panel

Culminating a year-long policy development process, ICANN today launched its new Blocking Usage Review Panel (BURP). The BURP provides long-needed oversight over services that block Internet traffic. "While everyone understands that national laws such as the U.S. CAN SPAM define what traffic is or is not elegible to block, legal processes can be slow and cumbersome," said a spokeswoman. "Since the Internet is global and traffic often traverses multiple countries, the array of different laws cause uncertainty." more

Verisign Doesn’t Think the Net Is Ready for a Thousand New TLDs

Yesterday Verisign sent ICANN a most interesting white paper called New gTLD Security and Stability Considerations. They also filed a copy with the SEC as an 8-K, a document that their stockholders should know about, It's worth reading the whole thing, but in short, their well-supported opinion is that the net isn't ready for all the new TLDs, and even if they were, ICANN's processes or lack thereof will cause other huge problems. more

The Spamhaus Distributed Denial of Service - How Big a Deal Was It?

If you haven't been reading the news of late, venerable anti-spam service Spamhaus has been the target of a sustained, record-setting Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) attack over the past couple of weeks... Of course, bad guys are always mad at Spamhaus, and so they had a pretty robust set-up to begin with, but whoever was behind this attack was able to muster some huge resources, heretofore never seen in intensity, and it had some impact, on the Spamhaus website, and to a limited degree, on the behind-the-scenes services that Spamhaus uses to distribute their data to their customers. more

DNS Reflection/Amplification Attack: Proved

Last year there was a "threat" by anonymous group to black out Internet by using DNS Reflection/Amplification attack against the Internet DNS Root servers. I even wrote a little article about it: "End of the world/Internet". In the article I was questioning if this was even possible and what was needed as general interest and curiosity. Well, looking at the "stophaus" attack last week, we are getting some answers. more

Live Webcast Thursday March 28 of ION Singapore IPv6 and DNSSEC Sessions

For those of you interested in IPv6 and/or DNSSEC, we'll have a live webcast out of the Internet Society's ION Singapore conference happening tomorrow, March 28, 2013, starting at 2:00pm Singapore time. more

SQL Injection in the Wild

As attack vectors go, very few are as significant as obtaining the ability to insert bespoke code in to an application and have it automatically execute upon "inaccessible" backend systems. In the Web application arena, SQL Injection vulnerabilities are often the scariest threat that developers and system administrators come face to face with (albeit way too regularly). more

So, How Big Is the Internet?

The results of an excellent study made, for reasons that will become clear, by an anonymous author reaches this conclusion... The problem is, to make the study, the author created a botnet - that is he wrote a small program that took advantage of insecure devices to enlist additional machines to help in the study. more

To Tax or Not to Tax

Well it is not new that the US has always maintained that the Internet should be a tax free zone as per the US Congress's Tax Freedom Act 1998 which following expiry continued to be reauthorized and its most recent re-authorization (legal speak for extension) was in October 2007 where this has been extended till 2014. It is unclear whether there will be another extension post 2014. There is a moratorium on new taxes on e-commerce, and the taxing of internet access via the Tax Freedom Act. more

Fiber to the Home: ‘Awesome’ - But What Is Its Purpose?

Two approaches can be taken towards the development of Fiber to the Home (FttH). One is all about its commercial potential - the sale of the most awesome commercial applications in relation to video entertainment, gaming and TV. The other is a perhaps more sophisticated approach - from the perspective of social and economic development. Of course the two are not mutually exclusive. more

Technology Fights Against Extreme Poverty

One of the good things about participating in the meetings of the UN Broadband Commission for Digital Development is seeing the amazing impact our industry has on the daily lives of literally billions of people. While everybody - including us - is talking about healthcare, education and the great applications that are becoming available in these sectors, the real revolution is taking place at a much lower level. more