Might Satellite Constellations Learn to Avoid Debris?

The European Space Agency (ESA) reported that as of January 2019 there were about 5,000 satellites in space and 1,950 of them are still functioning. Hopefully, those functioning satellites have fuel and thrusters that will enable them to de-orbit and (mostly) burn up in the atmosphere when their useful life is finished. The remaining 3,050 are slowly drifting, along with a lot of debris. The ESA estimates that there have been over 500 break-ups, explosions, collisions, or anomalous events... more

Back to the Future Part IV: The Price-Fixing Paradox of the DNS

GenX-ers may remember spending a summer afternoon at the movie theater and seeing the somewhat corny but beloved antics of Marty McFly and Doc as they used a souped-up Delorean to travel the space-time continuum. In Back to the Future Part II, Doc and Marty travel into the future, where the bullying, boorish Biff causes a time-travel paradox when he steals the Delorean and takes a joyride into the past to give his younger self a sports almanac containing the final scores of decades worth of sporting events. more

Trump Orders Cyberattacks by US Companies

It is supremely ironic. A rogue national leader with the stroke of a pen, dictates that its companies will expose a foreign company's end users to cyberattacks. This is the net effect of denying security patches or operating system updates pursuant to Trump's order. In the US Great Rogue Leader's bizarro world, this is the very behavior that he claims makes his actions necessary. In fact, this Trump malware attack is worse because of the mass exposure to exploits. more

Threat Intelligence Platform in Action: Investigating Important Use Cases

As technology gets more and more sophisticated, tech-savvy cybercriminals are having a field day devising increasingly ingenious ways to steal confidential data from ill-prepared targets. What this means is that an equally sophisticated cybersecurity response is needed to keep attackers at bay. This would involve re-examining reactive cybersecurity practices and adopting a proactive approach towards an active search for risks and vulnerabilities with the help of threat intelligence (TI). more

Broadband and Food Safety

I recently saw a presentation that showed how food safety is starting to rely on good rural broadband. I've already witnessed many other ways that farmers use broadband like precision farming, herd monitoring, and drone surveillance, but food safety was a new concept for me. The presentation centered around the romaine lettuce scare of a few months ago. The food industry was unable to quickly identify the source of the contaminated produce and the result was a recall of all romaine nationwide. more

A Closer Look at the “Sovereign Runet” Law

In December 2018, a bill on the "stable operation" of the Russian segment of the Internet was introduced and got the title "Sovereign Runet" in mass media and among the public. It was adopted after 5 months later, despite doubts about the technical feasibility of its implementation. The law is very ambitious in its intent to simultaneously control Internet traffic and protect Runet from some external threats, but legislators still have no idea how it would actually work. more

SpaceX Reports Significant Broadband Satellite Progress

SpaceX delayed last Wednesdays Starlink launch due to high winds and on Thursday they decided to do a software update and postpone the launch until next week, but they revealed significant progress in their Starlink mission press release and in tweets by and a media call with Elon Musk. The mission press release said SpaceX has significantly reduced the size and weight of their satellites. more

A Report on the ICANN DNS Symposium

By any metric, the queries and responses that take place in the DNS are highly informative of the Internet and its use. But perhaps the level of interdependencies in this space is richer than we might think. When the IETF considered a proposal to explicitly withhold certain top-level domains from delegation in the DNS the ensuing discussion highlighted the distinction between the domain name system as a structured space of names and the domain name system as a resolution space... more

Know Someone Who Has Made the Internet Better? Postel Service Award Nominations Deadline May 15

Do you know of someone who has made the Internet better in some way who deserves more recognition? Maybe someone who has helped extend Internet access to a large region? Or wrote widely-used programs that make the Internet more secure? Or maybe someone who has been actively working for open standards and open processes for the Internet? more

Gall’s Law and the Network

In Systemantics: How Systems Really Work and How They Fail, John Gall says: "A complex system that works is invariably found to have evolved from a simple system that worked. A complex system designed from scratch never works and cannot be patched up to make it work. You have to start over with a working simple system." In the software development world, this is called Gall's Law... more