.nxt Conference Inspires and Informs New gTLD Debate

The first-ever .nxt conference recently concluded in San Francisco. The conference featured two days of productive, educational, and passionate discussion about the business of new generic top-level domains (gTLDs). While ICANN's public meetings have recently focused on debating the policies that will go into its gTLD Applicant Guidebook, the .nxt meeting moved the discussion into the future to tackle the issue of what to do when the program has actually launched... more

Next Round of New TLDs May Not Happen Until 2020, Says ICANN

Speaking at this week's World Summit on the Information Society (WSIS), taking place in Geneva, head of ICANN's global domains division, Akram Atallah, has pointed to 2020 as the earliest realistic timeframe for the next round of new gTLD applications. more

Google Launcheds Advanced Protection Program for “High-Risk” Users

Coninsiding with October Cybersecurity Awareness Month, Google today announced the launch of Advanced Protection Program specifically "designed for those who are at an elevated risk of attack." more

Four New Generic Top Level Domains

At its meeting in Durban, ICANN signed contracts with the applicants for four new top level domains. The new domains are ????, which means "web" in Arabic, ?????? and ????, which mean "online" and "site" in Russian, and ??, which means "game" in Chinese. They should give us an interesting hint about the future of the new TLDs, because all four are utterly, totally, generic. more

The Insecurity of the IoT is Only Getting More Profound, Says Principal Researcher at F-Secure

"Three years after Mirai first appeared, and two years after WannaCry, it shows that we still haven't solved the problems leveraged in those outbreaks," said F-Secure Principal Researcher Jarno Niemela. more

Web Server Botnets and Server Farms as Attack Platforms

Are file inclusion vulnerabilitiess equivalent to remote code execution? Are servers (both Linux and Windows) now the lower hanging fruit rather than desktop systems? In the February edition of the Virus Bulletin magazine, we (Kfir Damari, Noam Rathaus and Gadi Evron (me) of Beyond Security) wrote an article on cross platform web server malware and their massive use as botnets, spam bots and generally as attack platforms. Web security papers deal mostly with secure coding and application security. In this paper we describe how these are taken to the next level with live attacks and operational problems service providers deal with daily. more

Guadeloupe Moves to Set Up Internet Exchange Point

Developments in the Caribbean digital space are fuelling initiatives to strengthen the Internet infrastructure in the region. In Guadeloupe, a recent agreement among three Internet service providers has cleared the way for the island to establish its first Internet exchange point. Commonly called an IX or an IXP, an Internet exchange point is a critical element of Internet infrastructure used to interconnect networks and deliver data traffic between them. more

Cyber Terrorism Is a Real Threat, and for the First Time Both Russia and the US Acknowledge It

Eugene Kaspersky, CEO and co-founder of Internet security giant Kaspersky Lab said last week that "terrorists could build a botnet that could bring down the entire Internet structure". Mr. Kaspersky ended his speech with the statement that "a global cyber police force, and global cooperation between law enforcement agencies and governments is needed". This goes very much in accordance with some of the conclusions in the Cyberspace Policy Review more

Fine Grained Mail Filtering With IPv6

One of the hottest topics in the email biz these days (insofar as any topic is hot) is how we will deal with mail on IPv6 networks. On existing IPv4 networks, one of the most effective anti-spam techniques is DNSBLs, blackists (or blocklists) that list IP addresses that send only or mostly spam, or whose owners have stated that they shouldn't be sending mail at all. DNSBLs are among the cheapest of anti-spam techniques since they can be applied to incoming mail connections without having to receive or filter spam. more

The Internet as Weapon

One of the most striking and enduring dichotomies in the conceptualization of electronic communication networks is summed up in the phrase "the Internet as weapon." With each passing day, it seems that the strident divergence plays in the press -- the latest being Tim's lament about his "web" vision being somehow perverted. The irony is that the three challenges he identified would have been better met if he had instead pursued a career at the Little Theatre of Geneva and let SGML proceed to be implemented on OSI internets rather than refactoring it as HTML to run on DARPA internets. more

WIPO’s UDRP ‘Overview’ Gets Bigger (and Better)

Just as the number of domain names and domain name disputes have expanded significantly in recent years, so, too, has WIPO's "Overview," which has been updated to address the growing complexity of cases under the Uniform Domain Name Dispute Resolution Policy (UDRP). WIPO has just published the third edition of its "WIPO Overview of WIPO Panel Views on Selected UDRP Questions" -- commonly referred to as "WIPO Jurisprudential Overview 3.0." more

A Look Back at the World of IP Addressing in 2020: What Changed and What It Means

Time for another annual roundup from the world of IP addresses. Let's see what has changed in the past 12 months in addressing the Internet and look at how IP address allocation information can inform us of the changing nature of the network itself. Back around 1992, the IETF gazed into their crystal ball and tried to understand how the Internet was going to evolve and what demands would be placed on the addressing system as part of the "IP Next Generation" study.  more

Why Telcos Don’t Get Networks

I've posted to SSRN my paper on why most telecom companies, even though they operate networks, don't appreciate the fundamental business dynamics of network structures. This will be a chapter in a book Wharton is publishing on network-based strategies and competencies. In the paper, I describe two views on telecom and Internet infrastructure... more

Metrics for New gTLDs Performance

The essay describes six groups of gTLD performance indicators: (1) the presence of a secondary market; (2) uses of second-level domain names; (3) the identity of the owners of parked and not-in-use domain names; (4) domain name renewals; (5) the market size of the supporting complementary assets; and (6) the character of the person in charge of a given registry. A time-trend of these indicators would convey any price inefficiencies and bubbles, and the health of the industry. more

Wireless Innovations for a Networked Society

Last week, I had the honor of moderating an engaging panel discussion at Mozilla on the need for community networks and the important role they can play in bridging the digital divide. The panel highlighted the success stories of some of the existing California-based initiatives that are actively working toward building solutions to get under-served communities online. more