Your Cybersecurity is Only as Strong as Your Weakest Vendor

Managing the risk of third parties has become a compliance focus for many large organizations. Companies even work with third-party service providers and external vendors just to manage this risk. The recent SolarWinds attack escalates the critical need for chief compliance officers to collaborate with their business counterparts to identify and mitigate potentially unknown threats that lie within third-party supply chains. Yet how can companies manage this risk when it's not if but when you're attacked? more

iREIT Drops TM-Typo Domains?

As faithful CircleID readers will know, iREIT (Internet REIT, Inc.), a Texas domain name portfolio investment corporation, has been sued by Verizon and by Vulcan Golf for cybersquatting. It appears iREIT is taking steps to clean up its portfolio by deleting obvious typos of famous trademarks... more

Plutocrats and the Internet

The new month visits on us a new attempt to control the Internet; the UN's specialized agency, the International Telecommunication Union (ITU), is holding its quadrennial plenipotentiary meeting in Guadalajara, Jalisco this week. The governments assembled there are considering a few proposals that can best be described as piquant. more

The Modern Encryption Debate: What’s at Stake?

The debate around encryption has become a hot topic in a world where communications are increasingly becoming digital. The modern encryption debate is a complex and nuanced issue, with many players from different backgrounds trying to influence the conversation. The question of balancing the need for national security with the right to privacy has been a matter of public debate for years. Only recently has the issue been framed in terms of encryption, but the discussion is certainly not new. more

Verisign Extends COVID-19 Wholesale Restore Fee Waiver

Verisign today announced that the waiver of the wholesale restore fee for .com and .net domain names is extended until August 1, 2020 at 03:59:59 UTC. more

Is 2017 Crunch Time for the Domain Industry?

Verisign's spent the best part of 2016 putting out warnings. The .COM operator and domain industry heavyweight highlighted its Q3 earnings report with a stern "Ending Q4 '16 Domain Name Base expected to decrease by between 1.5M to 2.8M registrations from the end of Q3 '16". A forecast which the company said was based on "on historical seasonality and current market trends." As 2016 drew to a close, the downturn seemed to materialize... more

Thinking Outside the Internet

This is a talk I gave at Google in Cambridge January 6, 2014. Some may know this as Ambient or Borderless Connectivity, but I'm titling this post as "Thinking Outside the Internet." It builds on my Three Stages of Digital theme, outlining how we are shifting from a telecom-centric framing with meaning and value inside the wire to today's Internet in which meaning and value are no longer contained within channels. more

2025 IPv4 Price Trends and 2026 Predictions

Through 2024, IPv4 leasing stayed steady at about $0.50 per IP per month, even as purchase prices diverged by block size. Large blocks (like /16) corrected notably while smaller blocks (/20 - /24) remained comparatively firm. That spread reflected shifting enterprise behavior (more surgical allocations, less speculative buying) and the resilience of subscription-like leasing in unstable conditions. more

RIPE NCC to Hold Sixth IPv6 Focused Hackathon

The Regional Internet Registry for Europe, the Middle East and parts of Central Asia (RIPE NCC) together with Comcast and Danish Network Operator's Group (DKNOG), are organizing the sixth IPv6 focused hackathon. more

Wow. That’s a Lot of Reserved Names

ICANN recently updated the list of reserved second level domain names. Those are names that you won't be able to register in any of the 1500 or so new domains they're planning to add. There's rather a lot of them, currently 629. The names are in three groups, the ICRC (the Red Cross), the IOC (the Olympic games) and everyone else. Several years ago the Red Cross and later the Olympics came to ICANN and insisted that they make a special list of forbidden names, separate from the various trademark registries. more

Anti-Phishing and Hong Kong

Planning for a short trip to Hong Kong tomorrow reminded me of Jonathan Shea, something I wanted to blog about but was waiting for the hype around the new generic Top-Level Domains (TLDs) to cool down. Jonathan Shea is an old friend who is in-charge of ".hk". I had the pleasure to catch up with him in Paris ICANN meeting. Before Jonathan, let me talk about something related that happened in Paris. At the Cross Constituency Meeting, there was a presentation by the Anti-Phishing Working Group (APWG). In summary, they were proposing working with registries to take down domain names that are suspected to be involved in phishing. more

ICANN Pressured to Reserve Names: “We don’t accept any more reservations!”

It is not a secret that I have been (and I continue to be) against the requests made to ICANN by the International Olympic Committee (IOC) and the Red Cross for special protection of their names and their variations. I am mainly against it because of the problems associated with these types of protection, the potential implications they may have and the fact that any attempt to reserve any names in the Domain Name Space will set a very bad precedent that will be detrimental to the whole new gTLDs experience. Well, the effect of this precedent is right upon us... more

Tracking Internet Piracy: Harder Than You Think

Wired Magazine recently published an article called "The Shadow Internet", where it says: "Anathema is a so-called topsite, one of 30 or so underground, highly secretive servers where nearly all of the unlicensed music, movies, and videogames available on the Internet originate. Outside of a pirate elite and the Feds who track them, few know that topsites exist. Even fewer can log in." But what are the difficulties in tracking and identifying these so-called topsites? Joel Snyder, a senior network consultant responds. more

Deep Sea Diving: The State of Submarine Cable Technology

There is something quite compelling about engineering a piece of state-of-the-art technology that is intended to be dropped off a boat and then operate flawlessly for the next twenty-five years or more in the silent depths of the world's oceans! It brings together advanced physics, marine technology, and engineering to create some truly amazing pieces of networking infrastructure. more

IPv6, LTE and IPSO: Not So Long Term Evolution to 50 Billion Devices

Who would dare to predict the year the Internet will reach 50 billion addressable devices? Thomas Noren, head of LTE product development at Ericsson sees one day 50 billion devices shouldered by LTE. He sees LTE as the truly global standard putting to rest the long and acrimonious rivalry between CDMA and GSM protagonists and even sees the Chinese third way with their TD-SCDMA aligned on LTE. Mobile WiMax is, in his mind, already relegated to the dustbin of history... more