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The European Union's cloud computing strategy couldn't come at a better time as the region lags behind the rest of the world when it comes to cloud computing usage. The EU announced its cloud computing strategy last month and is optimistic it will create new jobs and help boost a struggling economy. An information campaign is necessary if the EU is to overturn the misunderstanding and general lack of knowledge about the cloud. more
It may not be widely-known but the big 3 search engines -- Google, Yahoo! and Bing -- have established procedures for removing natural search results on the basis of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA). That's good news for brand owners: if consumers can't find infringing websites via the search engines, they're less likely to come across them at all... more
A story... ZZZ Telemarketing (not a real name) is locked in a heated fight with their bitter rival, YYY Telemarketing (also not a real name), to win a very large lead generation contract with Customer X. Customer X has decided to run a test pitting the two companies against each other for a week to see who can generate the most leads. The ZZZ CEO has said to his staff that it is "do or die" for the company. If they fail to win the contract, they will have to shut down -- they need to do "whatever it takes" to win over YYY. A ZZZ staffer discovers that part of why YYY has consistently underbid them is because they are using SIP trunks to reduce their PSTN connection costs. But the staffer also discovers that YYY is using very cheap voice service providers who run over the public Internet with no security... more
The growth of broadband customers has looked spectacular over the past year during the pandemic. It's easy to chalk up higher broadband customers nationwide to the need for households to be connected during the pandemic. But as I look back on what's happened during the last year, I can't help but wonder if the broadband stats we are seeing are somehow overinflated. more
How prevalent is cybersquatting and typosquatting? Take a look at www.wipo.com, and then compare it with the World Intellectual Property Organization's web site www.wipo.org. Ironically, the WIPO Arbitration and Mediation Center handles a majority of the UDRP domain dispute arbitrations internationally. The very organization which is invested with the authority by ICANN to resolve cybersquatting and typosquatting disputes internationally under the UDRP is, by all appearances, being squatted. Here are two apparent typosquatters... more
Many of you will have seen news stories that explained what was going on: a huge DDoS attack on the infrastructure of Dyn had taken down access to many large websites like Twitter. A great deal of digital ink has since been spilled in the mainstream press on the insecurity of the Internet of Things, as a botnet of webcams was being used. Here are some additional issues that might get missed in the resulting discussion. more
Because domain names represent the online identity of individuals, businesses and other organizations, companies and organizations large and small have expressed increasing concern over reports of "domain name hijacking," in which perpetrators fraudulently transfer domain names by password theft or social engineering. The impact of these attacks can be significant, as hijackers are typically able to gain complete control of a victim's domain name - often for a significant period of time. more
ICANN hosted a Resolver Operator Forum in mid-December, and the session had several interesting presentations that I would like to comment on here... The first presentation in this forum was from Paul Mockapetris. He pointed to the original academic published paper, Development of the Domain Name System, by Paul Mockapetris and Kevin Dunlap, published in the proceedings of ACM SIGCOMM’88. The paper noted that by 1983 it was obvious that the shared HOSTS.TXT file was not a scalable solution... more
On November 4, 2003, VeriSign announced a new "trust enhancing" seal which they built using Macromedia's Flash technology...While there are problems inherent to VeriSign's approach that call into question their understanding of "The Value of Trust," there are ways they could have made this particular implementation less trivially spoofable. The flaws I demonstrate on this page are flaws in the concept and the execution rather than anything inherently flawed in Flash. Overall this kind of graphical "trustmark" is extremely easy to forge just by recreating the artwork. But in this case, you don't even have to do that. The seal can still be called directly off the VeriSign servers, yet it is easily modified, without recreating artwork, and without doing anything untoward with VeriSign's servers! more
Much has been said in recent weeks about various forms of cyber spying. The United States has accused the Chinese of cyber espionage and stealing industrial secrets. A former contractor to the United States' NSA, Edward Snowden, has accused various US intelligence agencies of systematic examination of activity on various popular social network services... These days cloud services may be all the vogue, but there is also an emerging understanding that once your data heads into one of these clouds, then it's no longer necessarily entirely your data; it may have become somebody else's data too... more
DMARC is what one might call an emerging e-mail security scheme. It's emerging pretty fast, since many of the largest mail systems in the world have already implemented it, including Gmail, Hotmail/MSN/Outlook, Comcast, and Yahoo. DMARC lets a domain owner make assertions about mail that has their domain in the address on the 'From:' line. It lets the owner assert that mail will have a DKIM signature with the same domain, or an envelope return (bounce) address in the same domain that will pass SPF validation. more
In this two-part series article, Andrew McLaughlin takes a critical look at the recently reported study, Public Participation in ICANN, by John Palfrey, Clifford Chen, Sam Hwang, and Noah Eisenkraft at the Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard Law School..."The study's presentation and analysis of data contain much of interest, and much that could assist ICANN (and other policy-making bodies) in improving its use and management of online public forums. But the study's value is diminished by two rather fundamental shortcomings: (1) its misapprehension of both the theory and the practice of ICANN's policy-development process, and (2) the sizeable gap between the broad scope of the study's conclusions and the very narrow -- indeed, myopic -- focus of the analysis from which they are derived. Simply put, the study scrutinizes a small and misleading corner of ICANN (namely, its online public comment forums) and leaps to a sweeping (and, in my view, unwarranted) conclusion." more
Decentralization is exciting. Headline-grabbing, even. After all, in a world where frustration levels are sky-high and rising, it should not come as a shock that many individuals are willing to embrace what we might call "anti-system solutions." Decentralized solutions, in our case, which come with the ambitious promise of providing everything their centralized counterpart can provide but without centralized points of failure and regulations. In our previous article, we enumerated several advantages associated with decentralized domain names. more
The great promise of the new gTLD programme is not that it will spawn dozens of .COM clones, but rather that it will lead to the creation of a global constellation of unique names embraced by specific interest groups. As an ICANN community, our challenge now is to ensure that the policy framework we've created to manage new gTLDs advances that vision by not penalising the very sorts of domains that the programme was designed to encourage. more
Electronic money is not a new idea. The Electronic Fund Transfer Act was passed by the U.S. Congress and signed by President Jimmy Carter 35 years ago (1978). Other forms of electronic money include payment processors, direct deposit, and digital currencies such as Bitcoin. What distinguishes Bitcoin from other electronic money is that it is a cryptocurrency... Will Bitcoin replace the dollar, euro, yen, franc, kroner, et al? Possible, but most authorities seem to be saying it is doubtful. more
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