I recently saw a presentation that showed how food safety is starting to rely on good rural broadband. I've already witnessed many other ways that farmers use broadband like precision farming, herd monitoring, and drone surveillance, but food safety was a new concept for me. The presentation centered around the romaine lettuce scare of a few months ago. The food industry was unable to quickly identify the source of the contaminated produce and the result was a recall of all romaine nationwide. more
"These vulnerabilities are as bad as it gets," says Google's Information Security Engineer, Tavis Ormandy, in reference to multiple critical vulnerabilities discovered affecting Symantec, a popular vendor in the enterprise security market. more
The Internet Society (ISOC) Board of Trustees today passed a resolution to strongly support the plan developed by the global Internet community presented to the U.S. National Telecommunications and Information Administration to transition oversight of key Internet resources. more
Mary Iqbal writes to report that ICANN has released the third round of initial evaluation results, bringing the total number of applicants to pass Initial Evaluation to 93. ICANN has now completed the initial evaluation of all but 13 IDN Top Level Domains. more
Access to multiple social media services including Facebook, Twitter and YouTube have been reported throughout Turkey beginning Friday Nov 04 2016 1:20AM local time – ongoing as of Friday noon. more
Kieren McCarthy reporting in the Register: "The process to bring greater accountability to domain-name overseer ICANN descended into farce last week when the organization's board tried to skewer plans to force it to answer to the internet community while simultaneously claiming it supported the idea. more
In his last meeting today, Federal Communication Commission (FCC) chairman Kevin J. Martin, announced that he will be leaving the commission and will not be staying in the Obama administration. While the chairman had previously declined commenting on his future plans, the departure did not come unexpected. In the statement after announcing his departure at the FCC meeting, Martin also mentioned that he would depart Jan. 20 to become a Senior Fellow at the Aspen Institute in Washington, D.C. This announcement follows reports that President-elect Barack Obama will nominate Julius Genachowski to be the next FCC chairman. more
As was the case in the US during World War II, civilian volunteers are making important contributions to the Ukrainian war effort. On February 8, 2022, the first truckload of Starlink terminals arrived in Kyiv. A week later they were being used. By April 2022, there were 5,000 terminals in Ukraine, and 42,000 as of April 2023. (At this point, SpaceX and Ukraine have gone silent. Neither ChatGPT4, Gemini, Copilot, Perplexity, nor I could not find a current terminal count). more
The Internet Society has announced the names of the 32 individuals who have been selected for induction into the Internet Hall of Fame. Last week, the Internet Society announced plans to change the location of its 2013 Internet Hall of Fame awards ceremony, originally scheduled for Istanbul, due to the recent protests and unpredictable environment. The ceremony is now scheduled for 3 August in Berlin, Germany. more
China plans to send almost 13,000 satellites into low-Earth orbit to compete with and monitor SpaceX's Starlink constellations. The project, codenamed "GW," is being run by a newly established group called China Satellite Network Group Co, whose goal is to launch a total of 12,992 small satellites into orbit quickly. more
Only 39 percent of computers scanned in February were infected with malware, compared to 50 percent last month, according to recent data gathered by Panda Security. Trojans were found to be the most prolific malware threat, responsible for 61 percent of all cases, followed by traditional viruses and worms which caused 11.59 percent and 9 percent of cases worldwide, respectively. more
Whatever your personal perspective of the rights and wrongs of the current Arab-Israeli war in Gaza, there is a second front being fought on the Internet, says Jart Armin of HostExploit.com in a blog post today. "This form of warfare is a battle of words and often vivid imagery engaged by hackers from either side of the divide." more
The number of Chinese Internet users has surpassed 500 million, with nearly half of them using microblogs, or Weibo, according to latest official figures. About 55.8 million Chinese people became new Internet users last year, bringing the country’s Web population to 513 million, representing an Internet penetration rate of 38.3 percent, according to a report released by China Internet Network Information Center (CNNIC). more
Every public tweet since Twitter's inception in March 2006 will be acquired and archived digitally by the U.S Library of Congress, according to announcements made today. The Library has been harvesting data from the web since 2000 and currently holds "more than 167 terabytes of web-based information, including legal blogs, websites of candidates for national office, and websites of Members of Congress". While an official press release has not been issued yet, the Library says "[e]xpect to see an emphasis on the scholarly and research implications of the acquisition". The Library chose to make its first mention of the Acquisition via its official Twitter account @librarycongress. more
The Internet Society Board of Trustees has retained the executive search firm Odgers Berndtson to help identify qualified candidates for the position of President & CEO. Lynn St.Amour, the Internet Society's current President & CEO, announced her plans earlier this year to step down in February 2014 at the conclusion of her contract. more