Is Call Forwarding an “Information Service” and Why It Matters for FTC Jurisdiction

Time to brush the dust off your Computer II notebooks. Are voicemail, electronic fax, and call forwarding enhanced services or telecom services? Today's case: FTC v. American eVoice, Ltd... The FTC brought an action against Defendants claiming that they were engaged in cramming, adding unwanted voicemail, electronic fax, and call forwarding services to consumers bills to the tune of $70 million. more

Ron Paul Caught in Domain Dispute with Supporters

Former U.S. presidential candidate and congressman Rob Paul has filed a complaint with the World Intellectual Property Organization against the registrants of RonPaul.com and RonPaul.org in order to gain control of the domains. more

ICANN Holding Its First North American Meeting Since 2014 in Puerto Rico

As ICANN wraps up its Annual General Meeting in Abu Dhabi, the organization is inviting participation in its 61st ICANN meeting in San Juan, Puerto Rico, from 10–15 March 2018. more

Our Digital Illiteracy

Pew Research Center recently surveyed 4,272 adults and tested their knowledge of basic computer topics. The results showed that there was a lack of general knowledge about a few of the terms that are important for how people use the Internet. For example, the survey showed that only 30% of survey takers knew that website starting with https:// means that the information provided over that site is encrypted. Only 28% of respondents understood the concept of two-factor authentication... more

Berners-Lee Announces Creation of World Wide Web Foundation

Sir Tim Berners-Lee, inventor of the World Wide Web, on Sunday announced the launch of World Wide Web Foundation to fulfill a vision of the Web as humanity connected by technology. "The Web is a tremendous platform for innovation, but we face a number of challenges to making it more useful, in particular to people in underserved communities," said Sir Tim Berners-Lee, Director of the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), and co-Director of the Web Science Research Initiative (WSRI). "Through this new initiative, we hope to develop an international ecosystem that will help shape the future Web. A more inclusive Web will benefit us all." more

Have LLMs Broken Fair Use?

Two sets of authors sued Anthropic and Meta in San Francisco for copyright infringement, arguing that the companies had pirated their works to train their LLMs. Everyone agreed that a key question was whether fair use allowed it, and in both cases, the courts looked at the fair use issue before dealing with other aspects of the cases. Even though the facts in both cases were very similar, last week, two judges in the same court wrote opinions, coming to very different conclusions. How can that happen? Is fair use broken? more

Network Outages Costing Mobile Operators $15B Annually

Sarah Reedy reporting in LightRading: Mobile operators suffer from an average of five network outages or degradations that impact subscribers each year, costing them around $15 billion annually, according to new Heavy Reading research. Put another way, that's about one outage every other month. More than 80 percent of those outages affect just one or a subset of networks or services. more

ccTLD Market Share Catching Up to gTLDs, CENTR Reports

Council of European National Top level Domain Registries (CENTR) has released its latest quarterly Domain Name Stat Report stating that ccTLDs have continued increasing their market share against gTLDs -- this quarter rising from 44% to 45%. ccTLD IDNs continue to grow although at a slightly lower rate. more

Study Indicates Nearly Half A Million Jobs Created from “App Economy” in US

A new study reveals close to 466,000 jobs have been created in the "App Economy" in United States -- up from zero in 2007. The total number of Apps Economy jobs includes jobs at 'pure' app firms such as Zynga as well as app-related jobs at large companies such as Electronic Arts, Amazon, and AT&T, as well as app 'infrastructure' jobs at core firms such as Google, Apple, and Facebook. In addition, the App Economy total includes employment spillovers to the rest of the economy. more

Botnets: Most Prevalent Threat on the Internet for the Enterprises

Based on the total number of transactions, Zscaler reports botnets as the biggest security risk on the Internet for the enterprises. "Once a host gets infected, the botnet usually spreads quickly within an enterprise. It also generates a significant amount of traffic to the command and control server, to download additional malware or perform other actions." more

SpaceX Launches 1st Batch of New “V2 Mini” Starlink Satellites to Orbit With Four Times More Capacity

SpaceX is continuing to launch more Starlink satellites in an effort to increase the speed of its internet service. The tech company recently announced the launch of the V2 Mini satellites, which are designed to provide four times more per-satellite capacity than earlier versions more

ICANN Targeted in Spear Phishing Attack

In an announcement on Tuesday, ICANN reports that it is investigating a recent intrusion into its systems. The agency believes a "spear phishing" attack was initiated in late November 2014. It involved email messages that were crafted to appear to come from its own domain being sent to members of its staff. more

Watching the Watchers Watching Your Network

It seems that this last holiday season didn't bring much cheer or goodwill to corporate security teams. With the public disclosure of remotely exploitable vulnerabilities and backdoors in the products of several well-known security vendors, many corporate security teams spent a great deal of time yanking cables, adding new firewall rules, and monitoring their networks with extra vigilance. more

The 2015 IGF Brazil Will Focus on Empowering Sustainable Development

The preparations of the Brazil Internet Governance Forum (IGF) meeting are well under way. After consulting the wider Internet community and discussing the overarching theme of the 2015 IGF meeting, the Multistakeholder Advisory Group (MAG) decided to retain the title "Evolution of Internet Governance: Empowering Sustainable Development". This theme will be supported by eight sub-themes that will frame the discussions at the Joao Pessoa meeting... more

The Internet of the Future – What Happens Behind the Scenes?

Today's Internet is a critical infrastructural element whose continued development influences industries, cultures, and the private space of most individuals. However, the world-encompassing network sometimes needs to be adapted to new requirements to keep pace with current innovations. We have recently seen accelerating development of Internet usage on the user side. Whether it is online shopping's expansion or the greater distribution of mobile devices or streaming services... more