Last month, the Sustainable Digital Infrastructure Alliance (SDIA) announced our Open Data Hub, a resource that's meant to boost transparency, trust, and data availability to help researchers, industry, and society realize a sustainable digital economy. It is essentially our answer to the challenge recognized across the sector: that the lack of reliable data is one of the most foundational issues we face in creating a sustainable ICT ecosystem. more
Dear Chief Financial Officers of tech giants, the internet is in crisis, and you can lead your organization to help solve the problem. You'll be well compensated, and you'll enjoy massive public relations benefits. I fear that if you don't, global governments will force your hand. There is a shortage of available IPv4 addresses but we are years away (possibly a decade or more) from IPv6 viability and adoption in North America. more
Leading Moscow-based anti-virus software provider Kaspersky Lab is planning to open a data center in Switzerland to address Western government concerns that Russia exploits its anti-virus software to spy on customers, according to a report from Reuters on Wednesday. more
Reflection amplification is a technique that allows cyber attackers to both magnify the amount of malicious traffic they can generate, and obfuscate the sources of that attack traffic. For the past five years, this combination has been irresistible to attackers, and for good reason. This simple capability, of turning small requests into larger, 'amplified' responses, changed the Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attack landscape dramatically. more
According to Akamai, the incident was the largest attack seen to date, "more than twice the size of the September 2016 attacks that announced the Mirai botnet and possibly the largest DDoS attack publicly disclosed." more
The Equifax hack is understood to have compromised the personal data of over 140 million individuals. Although recent hacks of other businesses have affected more individuals, the personal data held by Equifax is significantly more sensitive than the data compromised in other hacks and includes Social Security numbers, birth dates, current and previous addresses and driver licence details... (Co-authored by Peter Davis and Brendan Nixon.) more
Back in the early 2000s, several notable Internet researchers were predicting the death of the Internet. Based on the narrative, the Internet infrastructure had not been designed for the scale that was being projected at the time, supposedly leading to fatal security and scalability issues. Yet somehow the Internet industry has always found a way to dodge the bullet at the very last minute. more
Harvard Business Review just ran an interesting article on the information security aspects of Internet of Things (IoT). Based on the storyline, the smart city initiatives are doomed to fail unless the security of the IoT devices and the systems will be improved. While security of the digital society is obviously a key concern, I am not entirely convinced that relying on the security of individual devices and systems is the best course of action. more
The Trump administration has criticized China on a number of trade issues in its Foreign Trade Barriers report including cloud computing restrictions, Voice-over-Internet Protocol (VoIP) and Domain Name Rules. more
It all started earlier this year in June. I was coding transcripts of the past global Internet Governance Forum (IGF) meetings as part of a data mining exercise for DiploFoundation's Geneva Internet Platform (GIP). Pouring over transcript after transcript, the work was tedious, but I was learning a great deal about the Internet governance community as well. My interest was piqued by the conversations, the familiar names I came across, and the multi-stakeholder manifestation of politics, perspectives, and positions. more
One of the oft-made claims about Bitcoin and its blockchain transaction ledger is that they make transactions really cheap, so you can pay someone anywhere in the world for free, or close to it. But when you look closer, is that really true? Not by a long shot. Bitcoin transactions are stored in a large shared database called the blockchain. more
The promise of "big data" -- real-time insights, predictive analytics and a better understanding of customer behaviors -- has many companies jumping into this near-bottomless information pool with both feet. But the sheer volume of data can cause serious stress for IT professionals trying to balance C-suite expectations, legacy tech limitations and corporate workloads. What's more, the data market is rapidly evolving. more
Doug Madory from Renesys reports: "In response to recent NSA spying allegations, Brazil is pressing ahead with a new law to require Internet companies like Google to store data about Brazilian users inside Brazil, where it will be subject to local privacy laws. The proposed legislation could be signed into law as early as the end of this week. However, Google's DNS service started leaving the country on September 12th, the day President Rousseff announced her intention to require local storage of user data." more
The success or failure of public cloud services can be measured by whether they deliver high levels of performance, security and reliability that are on par with, or better than, those available within enterprise-owned data centers... IDC forecasts that public cloud IT spending will increase from $40 billion in 2012 to $100 billion in 2016. To provide the performance, security and reliability needed, cloud providers are moving quickly to build a virtualized multi-data center service architecture, or a "data center without walls." more
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
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