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OECD, Organization for Economic Co-Operation and Development, has released a report for policy makers assessing the level of IPv6 deployment around the world. "[T]he timely deployment of IPv6 by network operators and content/application providers is an increasing priority for all Internet stakeholders. In terms of public policy, IPv6 plays an important role in enabling growth of the Internet to support further innovation. In addition, security, interoperability and competition issues are involved with the depletion of IPv4." more
Until a few weeks ago, almost everyone in the Internet governance circus seemed to ignore the very existence of WSIS. After it popped up on international newspapers, however, things have been changing; and suddenly, I have started noticing plenty of negative reactions, on the lines of "we don't need WSIS, we don't need the UN, we don't need governments, we don't need internationalization - just go away from our network". However, I often find that these reactions are based on fundamental misunderstandings of the issues at stake; so please let me offer a different perspective. more
1. Many jurisdictions already have laws which cover abuse of computer systems and networks -- and spam is of course abuse. These laws are only sporadically enforced, however, usually when a sufficiently visible/powerful entity is the aggrieved party. Adding more laws (a) is redundant and (b) does not increase enforcement. 2. Laws are only enforced as law enforcement has resources available. Spam/abuse is not a high priority unless a sufficiently visible/powerful entity makes it so, and those cases are rare. more
Large-scale IPv6 deployments suggest that IPv6 is at least a technical success, the technology works. Time to visit the other important question: does it work commercially. Does IPv6 really come with a positive business case? We are about to find out, if you help us... The Internet technical community has spent about two decades making IPv6 work on a technical level. We have developed the protocol, modified and expanded a few others; we set up the registry system and distributed the addresses. more
On 29 March 2024, an announcement was posted notifying the world that the Open-Source Software (OSS) package "xz-utils," which includes the xz data compression program and a library of software routines called "liblzma" and which is present in most Linux distributions, had been compromised. The insertion of the compromised code was done by "Jia Tan", the official maintainer of the xz-utils package. more
The .xxx controversy is a legacy of the Bush era. In the dark period of WSIS and the Iraq invasion, ICANN's independence was fatally undermined when a political appointee of the Bush administration, in response to an email campaign from rightwing groups in the Bush "base", issued a direct threat to Paul Twomey that if ICANN approved the .xxx Top-Level Domain (TLD) it would not put it in the root. more
There's a great fight going on right now in Philadelphia...The case is about a Pennsylvania statute [PDF] that mandates that Pennsylvania ISPs remove access to sites that the AG believes contain child pornography. Now, child pornography is abhorrent and any ISP will cooperate in taking down such sites that it is hosting. But the problem is that in complying with the statute with respect to sites the ISPs don't themselves host, ISPs are (rationally) using either IP blocking ("null routing") or "domain poisoning" techniques, both of which (particularly the IP number blocking) result in rendering inaccessible millions of perfectly legal sites. more
A recent study by researchers at the Cooperative Association for Internet Data Analysis (CAIDA) at the San Diego Super Computer Center (SDSC) revealed that a staggering 98% of the global Internet queries to one of the main root servers, at the heart of the Internet, were unnecessary. This analysis was conducted on data collected October 4, 2002 from the 'F' root server located in Palo Alto, California.
The findings of the study were originally presented to the North American Network Operators' Group (NANOG) on October 2002 and later discussed with Richard A. Clarke, chairman of the President's Critical Infrastructure Protection Board and Special Advisor to the U.S. President for Cyber Space Security. more
Good taste has never been a criterion in ICANN's new domains program, and domains including .fail and the remarkably vulgar .wtf have become part of the DNS with little comment. Now we have .sucks, which is intended to empower consumers, but does so in a way so clumsy that ICANN is asking regulators in the U.S. and Canada for an excuse to shut it down. more
On April 16 ICANN issued a breach notice to Turkish Registrar Alantron for not consistently providing access to its WHOIS database via Port 43, a command-line query location that all Registrars are required to supply under conditions of their contract with ICANN under section 3.3.1. Four days later they issued a breach to Internet Group do Brazil for the same problem. ... The WHOIS record, as we all know, is a massive fraud with illicit parties filling records with bogus information and hiding behind anonymity. more
Ever since Neustar announced they signed a deal with GSMA to oversea global database for the mobile operators last week (see also Washington Post), there are many debates about the deal online. "Neustar, a company that should certainly know better, has announced that they're going to create a .gprs TLD to serve the mobile phone industry This, of course, requires creation of a private root zone, against the very strong warnings in RFC 2826" said Steven Bellovin. To the more supportive John Levine: "This isn't quite as stupid as it seems. The GSM industry needs some way to maintain its roaming user database, the database is getting considerably more complicated with 3G features, and it looks to me like they made a reasonable decision to use DNS over IP to implement it rather than inventing yet another proprietary distributed database." more
The crème de la crème, the good, the bad, even the ugly of the Domain Name Industry are attending NamesCon in Vegas this week. 2016 will be a very challenging, absolutely critical year for those attendees and their corporate employers as the Domain Name System (DNS) faces a massive shakeup. In 2015, 287 global brands, worth $trillions headed by Google, Amazon, had their new TLD Registries delegated into the root zone of the Internet. more
A decade has passed since Jon Postel left our midst. It seems timely to look back beyond that decade and to look forward beyond a decade hence. It seems ironic that a man who took special joy in natural surroundings, who hiked the Muir Trail and spent precious time in the high Sierras was also deeply involved in that most artificial of enterprises, the Internet. more
As the world becomes more and more reliant on electronics, it's worth a periodic reminder that a large solar flare could knock out much of the electronics on earth. Such an event would be devastating to the Internet, satellite broadband, and the many electronics we use in daily life. A solar flare is the result of periodic ejections of matter from the sun into space. Scientists still aren't entirely sure what causes solar flares, but they know that it's somehow related to shifts in the sun's magnetic field. more
On April 24th the NETmundial "Global Multistakeholder Meeting on the Future of Internet Governance" concluded with the issuance of an eight-page statement. This non-binding document falls short of the "Magna Carta for the Internet" called for in an opening statement delivered by Tim Berners Lee, but it does set the stage for the other two major 2014 events that will affect the course of Internet Governance (IG) - the IGF meeting in Istanbul, Turkey and the ITU meeting in Busan, Korea. more
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