Welcome:
Login
|
Sign Up
|
About CircleID
Follow:
|
|
|
In response to a letter from ICANN's Noncommercial Users Constituency (NCUC) to data protection authorities concerning overreaching requests of law enforcement agencies in ICANN's ongoing Registrar Accreditation Agreement negotiations, the Article 29 Data Protection Working Party has written the ICANN Board. more
Look past the panic over December's World Conference on International Telecommunications (WCIT); it's unlikely to be a catastrophe for several practical reasons: (1) the negotiation lasts ten days, so there is not enough time for 193 countries to agree on how to phrase catastrophe (2) large multilateral events tend to converge, like so many voters, on the centre, and (3) the putative chairman of the event is a seasoned grown-up, and will not allow the treaty to break the global information grid. more
The Microsoft action against 3322.org, a Chinese company, started with the news that computers were infected during the production phase. Stepping away from the controversy surrounding the approach, there are important lessons that cyber security officials and upper management, deciding on the level of and budget for cyber security in organisations should learn and take into account. I'm writing this contribution from a premise: China uses the fact that most IT devices are built in China to its advantage. Allow me to start with an account from personal memory to set the stage. more
Today I released a report on 'National cyber crime and online threats reporting centres. A study into national and international cooperation'. Mitigating online threats and the subsequent enforcing of violations of laws often involves many different organisations and countries. Many countries are presently engaged in erecting national centres aimed at reporting cyber crime, spam or botnet mitigation. more
The announcement last month of a new approach by the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) to Africa is welcome, and significant for a number of reasons. Africa must participate in ICANN's activities to help shape its policies, and benefit from the domain name industry (estimated at $2 billion in 2008), where it lags behind other regions, given the few African registrars, and that there are no generic top-level domain names (gTLDs) registries that are African. more
This year in July gen. Keith Alexander, director of the National Security Agency and head of the US Cyber Command participated at DefCon, the hackers conference in Las Vegas. In his address, gen. Alexander said, among other things, "This is the world's best cybersecurity community. In this room right here is the talent our nation needs to secure cyberspace."... As someone, who is regularly meeting the top Russian cyber folks, I already know (unofficially, of course) how the words of gen. Alexander were met in Moscow. more
ICANN's 2012 Nominating Committee (NomCom) selections are out. After a yearlong process, the NomCom has selected new members for the ICANN Board (3 seats), the GNSO and ccNSO Councils (1 seat each) and ALAC (2 positions). For those unfamiliar with it, the NomCom is in theory independent of other ICANN bodies such as the Board and exists to help fill leadership positions on them. more
The term "jurisdiction" has various definitions in law, but for our purposes here we can say it is the power of some legal body to exercise its authority over a person or subject matter or territory. In the Internet today, it is territory that gives rise to many major issues. As in real estate, what matters in jurisdiction is "location, location, location". When the Internet and trademark rights began to intersect, it quickly became apparent that traditional concepts of the jurisdiction of courts and legislatures would be seriously strained by situations where a registrant in one country could use a registrar in a second country to register a domain name in yet a third country. more
In a recent CircleID posting related to the ITU-T, the demise of that body over the years and the underlying causes were described. Among other questions, it raises the question of where has the industry technical collaborative activity gone. The short answer is just about everywhere else. This was exemplified by a recently compiled spreadsheet of some 200 different cloud forums prepared by the ITU-T's own cloud coordination group. more
The ITU, through its Council acting as the executive body of the Member States, made a "landmark decision" to make available to the public "the main [WCIT] conference preparatory document" and to establish a publicly accessible page "where all stakeholders can express their opinions" on the preparatory document or other WCIT-related matters. more
IANA's IPv4 pool was officially exhausted in early 2011; Regional Internet Registries (RIRs) are gradually eating through their remaining IPv4 reserves and, although there will always be a trickle of recycled IPv4 addresses coming through as businesses go bust or ISPs move entirely to IPv6, the bulk of RIR IPv4 activity in future will be maintenance of existing allocation records... While IPv6 is definitely the way of the future for the Internet, the sheer size of the IPv6 address pool, combined with simplified allocation policies that have deliberately reduced barriers to entry, means there are very few organizations that can't get IPv6 directly from the RIRs these days. more
The U.S. Commerce Department's National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA) announced today that it has awarded the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority (IANA) functions contract to the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN). The IANA functions are key technical services critical to the continued operations of the Internet's underlying address book, the Domain Name System (DNS). more
The ICANN latest reveal of the applications pending batching has shown a number of very crucial details of what the new domains system is like. The new system before batching presents new applications with the North Americas having the highest applications amounting to 911, Europe follows with 675, Asia pacific which already has one continental domain .asia has three hundred and three domains, Latin America which shares the same ecological niche with Africa has 24 new applications 7 domains higher than Africa which has presented 17 new domains. more
As I prepare to jet off to Prague this weekend for the coming ICANN conference, I had to reflect back on the tumultuous year this has been in ICANN and the Internet world generally, especially as relates to Africa and Emerging Markets. And after all the smoke and fury, I had to ask: Is ICANN leaving Africa behind? Or could it be that it's exactly the opposite? That Africa is moving forward and ICANN is missing the party? more
Declan McCullagh recently opined that the "FBI [and the] DEA warn [that] IPv6 could shield criminals from police." His post was picked-up relatively widely in the past few days, with the headlines adding more hyperbole along the way. So just how real is this threat? Let's take a look. more
A World-Renowned Source for Internet Developments. Serving Since 2002.