Beavers Kill Fiber Route

An article from CBC earlier this year reported that beavers had chewed through an underground fiber and had knocked 900 customers in Tumbler Ridge, British Columbia off broadband for 36 hours. The beavers had chewed through a 4.5-inch conduit that was buried three feet underground. This was an unusual fiber cut because it was due to beavers, but animals damaging fiber is a common occurrence. more

The Multinational Nature of Spam

I received a spam message the other day that went to my Junk Mail Folder. I decided to take a look at it and dissect it piece by piece. It really is amazing to see how spam crosses so many international borders and exploits so many different machines. Spammers have their own globally redundant infrastructure and it highlights the difficulties people have in combating the problem of it. more

Google Unleashes Domain Name Registration Service

Kieren McCarthy reporting in the Register: "Google has launched its new domain-name management system, providing a clean and simple interface that will put it in direct competition with market leader GoDaddy." more

This COVID-19 Crisis Proves the Internet Is Indeed a Caribbean Right

The coronavirus pandemic has, in the most emphatic way, shown us all just how interconnected everything and everyone is. A worldwide race is underway to minimize human interactions in order to avoid a global catastrophe. The inescapable consequence of these initiatives is an unprecedented shut down of the local, regional and global economy. The latest cost estimate to save the global economy is now at $7 trillion and climbing. more

NYC Fiber Network Distributes Entangled Photons, Paving the Way for the Quantum Internet

In a groundbreaking development for quantum communication, researchers at Qunnect Inc. have successfully achieved the automated distribution of polarization-entangled photons over New York City's existing fiber network. more

A Look at Why Businesses Buy Cloud Services?

If you are a cloud provider, whether you are pure play or an internal IT department, it is very interesting to know who is buying cloud services, and why. In a recent survey by PB7 sponsored by EuroCloud Netherlands and others, a group of Dutch companies was interviewed about their motivations and hesitations around cloud computing. The survey's results were quite a bit more interesting than the usual lot. In this article I have cherry picked a few observations from the larger survey. more

Top Ten List of Needed FCC Regulatory Reforms

Honesty is the best policy. At the risk of anthromorphizing a regulatory agency, at the very least the FCC has not told the complete truth, or put itself in a position not to know the truth. The FCC has contributed to debates about what constitutes credible facts and statistics, and what this data means. For example, soon-to-be former FCC Chairman Kevin Martin asserted as the gospel truth his factual conclusion that cable television operators collectively have a 70% market share... The FCC should acknowledge that it may not know all the facts. more

Meltdown and Spectre: Security is a Systems Property

I don't (and probably won't) have anything substantive to say about the technical details of the just-announced Meltdown and Spectre attacks. What I do want to stress is that these show, yet again, that security is a systems property: being secure requires that every component, including ones you've never heard of, be secure. These attacks depend on hardware features... and no, many computer programmers don't know what those are, either. more

Sharing: The First Step to Structural Change in Mobile

The arrival of the iPhone, Android and iPad will raise the stakes higher in the mobile broadband market. The fact that iPhone alone has over 140,000 Apps over sort of open networks, not portals, shows the demand for mobile applications. This will put an enormous strain on the infrastructure of the mobile operators and will require them to build fibre networks to all mobile stations, as well as invest in more spectrum and new technologies such as LTE. At the same time the mobile subscriber markets are becoming saturated and competition is driving margins down. more

How Digital Asset Management May Change Due to COVID-19

One of the "fathers of the internet," Vint Cerf, in a September 2019 article he published, said: "Today, hackers routinely break into online accounts and divert users to fake or compromised websites. We constantly need to create new security measures to address them. To date, much of the internet security innovation we've seen revolves around verifying and securing the identities of people and organizations online. more

DoT and DoH Guidance: Provisioning Resolvers

As part of a larger effort to make the internet more private, the IETF defined two protocols to encrypt DNS queries between clients (stub resolvers) and resolvers: DNS over TLS in RFC 7858 (DoT) and DNS over HTTPS in RFC 8484 (DoH). As with all new internet protocols, DoT and DoH will continue to evolve as deployment experience is gained, and they're applied to more use cases. more

Privacy Getting a Reboot

Anyone old enough to remember when cross-border data flows were limited to what could be put in a DHL box in New York and sent directly to Milan for the next day? Or when MIPS were so costly and centralized that batch processing was the norm? The world has changed, but the rules governing data protection and privacy haven't (much). Today technology allows and users demand that data flow without the drag of political boundaries or national borders, yet we still want assurances that our information will be protected and respected.  more

Can Trademarks and Brands Help Save the Internet From Itself?

Trademarks and brands are often among a company's most valued assets. Customers associate trademarks and brands with producer integrity. They engender consumer trust. Without TMs and Brands, companies struggle for attention and find it more difficult to link the company's integrity and trustworthiness in the marketing of its goods and services. Representing company promise and customer expectations, they are uniquely positioned to symbolize common values and aspirations. more

Why SDN is Not Enough

A hot topic in telecoms at the moment is 'software-defined networking' (SDN). This term covers a range of technologies that put networks under the control of centralised management software. But what if SDN misses the point of why broadband networks exist in the first place? Network equipment vendors are busy pushing operator CTOs to adopt a 'software telco' approach. A small army of analysts and consultants cheer this process on. more

M3AAWG & i2Coalition Collaborate on Best Practices on Anti-Abuse in Hosting & Cloud Environments

I am excited to announce the recent release of the industry first Best Common Practices document for Cloud and Hosting providers for addressing abuse issues that was created by M3AAWG and the i2Coalition. M3AAWG has been collaborating with the Best Practices Working Group of the i2Coalition over the past 2 years to discuss ways to solve malicious activity within hosting and cloud ecosystems.  more