RIAA Loses Again: No Legal Wins Against P2P File Sharers So Far

The Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) has been taking a lot of people to court -- basically, harassing folks in an attempt to curb file-sharing. The $220,000 verdict against Jammy Thomas got a lot of news (and probably worried a lot of folks). However, on appeal (i.e., after a new court not cherry-picked by the RIAA to try the case looked things over), the RIAA lost... again. ...At its heart, the verdict reaffirms that simply making a copyrighted work available is not the same as actually distributing the work. more

Internet Vigilantism

Atrivo (aka Intercage), a Concord, California-based Internet hosting service, disappeared from the Internet for around two days recently. They didn't go bankrupt or suffer a physical catastrophe. Their providers simply shut them down by refusing their traffic. This might very well be the first time in history that the Internet community, a cooperative association of networks with no governing body, has collectively put someone out of business, if only briefly. more

Do the IM Protocol Wars Even Matter?

Do you care any more about zillion different IM services? Do you care about the IM protocol wars that have plagued the usage of IM for the last years? Odds are that if you are an IM user like me, you probably don't. Why not? Simple... we've unified the IM services on the client side and basically stopped caring about the various services and protocols. I was reminded of this fact this morning when I received a message saying that an update was available for Adium on my Mac that solved a really annoying disconnection problem with Yahoo!Messenger. more

DNSSEC Rally

In late August the White House mandated that all of the agencies in the US government have functioning DNSSEC capabilities deployed and operational by December 2009. I am suggesting here that we, as a community, commit to the same timetable. I call upon VeriSign and other registries to bring up DNSSEC support by January 2009. more

Estonian Cyber Security Strategy Document: Translated and Public

The Estonians have a public version of their cyber security strategy translated into English (currently available offline only). The concept of a national strategy for cyber security is one which I am particularly fond of... The following is the Summary section from the document which might be of interest... more

Comcast’s Network Management Practices: A Brief Analysis

Late last week, Comcast officially disclosed to the FCC details of its network management practices which have been a subject of considerable discussion here on CircleID. (My thanks to Threat Level from Wired.com for providing a convenient copy of Comcast's "Attachment A" in which this disclosure is made.) There's not a lot of startling disclosure in this document, but it does provide some useful concrete facts and figures. I'll quote the more interesting parts of the document here, and offer comment on it. more

Japan Domain Market Demystified

Ever sat at one of the VeriSign "State of the domain" meetings at any of the ICANN meetings? Or read their reports about countries with the greatest opportunity in domains? Almost without question you will learn that Japan is earmarked as the country with the greatest opportunity for growth in the domain market. They take into consideration important factors such as GDP of a country, internet population, and current domain registration levels... more

The Wall Street Lesson for Net Neutrality

As the institutions of Wall Street continue to crumble one after another, there's a lesson to be learned for those of us who want to make sure the Internet remains as free and open in the future as it has been in the past. The collapse of Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac, Bear Stearns, Merrill Lynch, Lehman Brothers, AIG and the rest didn't happen overnight. The situation has been brewing for years. The subprime mortgage crisis may have precipitated the immediate tragedy, but underpinning the whole mess is a philosophy about business and government. more

IGF Meeting Blacklisted

I got an e-mail from someone currently attending the Internet Governance Forum (IGF) meeting in Geneva. The e-mail ended up in my spam folder because the IP address used for the wireless LAN at the meeting is on a spambot/virusbot blacklist, namely cbl.abuseat.org. Apparently some guy there has his computer infected by a spambot or a virusbot... more

Cloud Computing and Privacy

There has been a good deal of talk of late on the important topic of security and privacy in relation to cloud computing. Indeed there are some legitimate concerns and some work that needs to be done in this area in general, but I'm going to focus today on the latter term (indeed they are distinct -- as a CISSP security is my forte but I will talk more on this separately). more