Recursive DNS and You

In the world of DNS, there are two types of DNS servers, 'recursion disabled' and 'recursion enabled'. Recursion disabled servers, when asked to resolve a name, will only answer for names that they are authoritative for. It will absolutely refuse to look up a name it does not have authority over and is ideal for when you don't want it to serve just any query. It isn't, however, very useful for domains you don't know about or have authority over... more

2016 US Presidential Election Likely to Have Major Impact on Broadband Expansion and Regulation

"The 2016 presidential election is likely to have a major impact on how the US government tries to expand broadband deployment and how it regulates Internet service providers," writes Jon Brodkin in Ars Technica. more

WiFi QoE Assurance with TR-069 - Part 2: Optimizing a Single Access Point

As we have seen in the first installment of this series, TR-069 offers unprecedented visibility into the customer premises network to highlight devices beyond the gateway, and in the case of WiFi, the issues affecting service quality. Insights into the surrounding WIFI landscape alone provide ample data to provision the access point (AP) to operate in a part of the spectrum with the least amount of interference. more

Policy Review: Botnets are eWMD, electronic Weapons of Mass Destruction

The latest issue of Policy Review from the Hoover Institution, a public policy research center -- focused on advanced study of politics, economics, and political economy -- has an essay titled eWMDs – electronic weapons of mass destruction. The Policiy Review readers are warned that botnets should be considered a serious security problem and that "cyber attacks present a grave new security vulnerability for all nations and must be urgently addressed." more

Internet Association Releases Policy Roadmap for Trump

The Internet Association today released a policy roadmap detailing a roadmap for the incoming administration and Congress. more

China Forbids News Reporting from Social Media Unless Approved

The instruction, issued by the Cyberspace Administration of China, came only a few days after Xu Lin, formerly the deputy head of the organization, replaced his boss, Lu Wei, as the top gatekeeper of Chinese internet affairs. more

Trust and Insecurity

When I was first advocating home networking at Microsoft, we encountered a problem. The existing systems and applications had implicitly assumed they were inside a safe environment and didn't consider threats from bad actors. Early Windows systems hadn't yet provided file system with access control and other protections though there were some attempts to have separate logins to keep some settings separate. more

Euro 2020 Part Three: Domains (Revisited) and Other Channels

In this final article in the series of studies looking at Euro 2020-related infringements, we revisit domain name infringements and consider activity across other online channels, with a focus on social media and mobile apps. Following the original study, which looked at domains registered before May 2020 with names containing "euro2020" or "euro2021," we analyzed daily activity levels in the period immediately preceding and during the competition. more

U.S. Slammed as Major Host for Cybercrime

While Russia and Ukraine are generally regarded as today's main cybercrime hubs, "a lot of their infrastructure is housed in the west, in the United States to be precise," writes Vincent Hanna of Spamhaus Project. "Without exception, all of the major security organizations on the Internet we know of agree that the 'Home' of cybercrime in the western world is a place known as Atrivo/Intercage. We ourselves have not come to this conclusion lightly but from many years of dealing with criminal operations hosted by Atrivo/Intercage, gangs of cybercriminals -- mostly Russian and East European but with several US online crime gangs as well -- whose activities always lead back to servers run by Atrivo/Intercage..." more

Massive African Internet Outage and the Fragility of Undersea Cables

Eight countries in West Africa reported Internet outages after damage was reported to four different undersea fiber cables. The most affected countries are Ivory Coast, Liberia, and Benin, with additional problems caused in Ghana, Nigeria, and Cameroon. Lesser impact was felt in South Africa, Senegal, and Portugal. There has been no official word on what caused the problem, but it's likely due to the shifting of the seabed due to seismic activity. more

EPDP Team Marches Toward Major Milestone

If it feels like the work of the latest group addressing registration data within ICANN has been going on forever, try participating in it! Since the summer of 2018, the team has regularly been meeting for several hours each week, participating in numerous face-to-face meetings and exchanging thousands of emails. Last week in Los Angeles, the team got together once again to continue our Phase 2 work creating policy that will (among other issues) govern the disclosure of non-public registration data to third parties. more

Honda Halts Domestic Car Production Plant Due to WannaCry Virus in Computer Network

Production at a Honda domestic vehicle plant was halted for a day this week as a result of the discovery of WannaCry ransomware in the computer network, the company reports.  more

Security Against Election Hacking - Part 2: Cyberoffense Is Not the Best Cyberdefense!

State and county election officials across the country employ thousands of computers in election administration, most of them are connected (from time to time) to the internet (or exchange data cartridges with machines that are connected). In my previous post I explained how we must audit elections independently of the computers, so we can trust the results even if the computers are hacked. more

Chromebooks, Google’s Long-Waited Laptop, to Ship Next Month

Google yesterday dove deep into its Chrome notebook project at its annual Google I/O conference. The company has had the notebook operating system in beta for almost two years now. Google announced the first market-ready Chromebooks from partners Samsung and Acer. The Chrome OS is dependent on the cloud for storage and various web-based applications. The result is a machine that boots in a matter of seconds and carries very little in the line of native hardware. more

The Big Questions Facing the Telecom Industry

I took a pause the other day to think about the big issues facing the telecom industry. When I've done that in past years, I always came up with a few major issues and more smaller ones. But we are in such turmoil right now that I rattled off the following list quickly. I can't remember a time when our industry was wrangling with so many major issues at the same time. The industry's performance over the next decade is going to depend upon how we handle these issues. more