IPv6 and DNSSEC Are Respectively 20 and 19 Years Old. Same Fight and Challenges?

A few weeks ago I came across an old interview of me by ITespresso.fr from 10 years back entitled "IPv6 frees human imagination". At the time, I was talking about the contributions IPv6 was expected to make and the challenges it had to face. After reading the article again, I realized that it has become a little dusty (plus a blurred photo of the interviewee :-)). But what caught my attention the most in the interview was my assertion: "If IPv6 does not prevail in 2006, it's a safe bet that it will happen in 2007". Wow! more

Why Senator Stevens is Right on Net Neutrality

Several people emailed me about the actual things the senator said and why he is off-base. I decided to listen to his speech again, and write down the points I believe are critical. Senator Stevens who everyone is dissing on for his speech on Net Neutrality in my book spoke nothing less than brilliant. I will also tell you, in my opinion, exactly why... He nailed down the subject into the point that matters: Business. It's about profit. more

False Positives and Ignorance

Content inspection is a poor way to recognise spam, and the proliferation of image spam recently drums this home. However if one must use these unreliable techniques, one should bring mathematical rigour to the procedure. Tools like SpamAssassin combine content inspection results, with other tests, in order to tune rule-sets to give acceptable rates of false positives (mistaking genuine emails for spam), and thus end up assigning suitable weights to different content rules. If one is going to use these approaches to filtering spam, and some see it as inevitable, one better know one's statistics... more

China Temporarily Cuts Itself Off from the Global Internet

China briefly disconnected from much of the global internet for over an hour on Wednesday, following a disruption traced to the country's "Great Firewall." According to activist group Great Firewall Report, the outage began at 12:34 a.m. Beijing time and lasted until 1:48 a.m. on August 20. more

When Did We Give Away the Internet?

I've been following the recent news on the World Summit on the Information Society, and it's getting really bizarre. The Wired article is one example of out of the out-of-this-world coverage on the World Summit; I heard a similar spin yesterday on a radio show that often shares material with the BBC. What king or dictator or bureaucrat has signed the document giving power over the Internet to one organization or another? Did I miss the ceremony? One laughable aspect of news reportage is that the founders and leaders of ICANN always avowed, with the utmost unction, that they were not trying to make policy decisions and were simply tinkering with technical functions on the Internet.  more

New gTLD Discussion Draft - Top 10

Okay, so spending my Monday morning printing out and reviewing 348 pages of the "New gTLD Discussion Draft" is not exactly what I had mind when I woke up today, but kudos to ICANN for keeping to the timeline that they had released last month. Since, most of you do not have the time or the patience (and probably have real work to do), I've taken it upon myself to highlight the most important changes in this version. more

ICANN Sets June Target for New gTLD Program Launch

npt its recent meeting in San Francisco, ICANN approved a new draft timeline for the launch of its new generic top-level domains (gTLDs) program that will let its Board of Directors approve the final Applicant Guidebook in June 2011, enabling companies to apply for gTLDs before the end of the year. more

IAB Urges Developers to Encrypt by Default

The Internet Architecture Board (IAB) has issued a statement recommending that encryption be the default traffic option for protocols: "The IAB urges protocol designers to design for confidential operation by default. We strongly encourage developers to include encryption in their implementations, and to make them encrypted by default. We similarly encourage network and service operators to deploy encryption where it is not yet deployed, and we urge firewall policy administrators to permit encrypted traffic." more

Enterprise Domain Stargazing: Understanding Your Company’s Galaxy of Domains

In CSC's recent insight paper, we address the trend that many business leaders today don't realize the extent to which their modern enterprise -- and its millions of digital assets -- rely on. It's a vast domain ecosystem that needs to be protected from online threats. Often, to better understand this need for domain security, we need to understand how critical and interconnected domains are within a business. more

Another Year of the Transition to IPv6

I bet that nobody believed in 1992 that thirty years later, we'd still be discussing the state of the transition to IPv6! In 1992 we were discussing what to do about the forthcoming address crunch in IPv4, and having come to terms with the inevitable prospect that the silicon industry was going to outpace the capacity of the IPv4 address pool in a couple of years, we needed to do something quickly more

ICANN’s Proposed Changes to IDN Registration

A month ago, ICANN announced that it had a large set of proposed changes to its "Guidelines for the Implementation of Internationalized Domain Names". The original guidelines are fairly confusing and not widely deployed by the ccTLDs, so one would think that the proposed revisions would be clearer and more useful. No such luck. Instead of describing what the problems with the old guidelines were, the committee that put together the new proposal simply added a whole bunch more rules. more

The UDRP “Celebrates” Its 500th Reverse Domain Name Hijacking Case

Today, for the 500th time, an expert panel under the Uniform Domain Name Dispute Resolution Policy or "UDRP", issued a decision finding a Complainant guilty of Reverse Domain Name Hijacking or "RDNH". RDNH is an attempt to egregiously misuse the UDRP to unjustly seize a domain name from its lawful owner... To-date, the UDRP has adjudicated over 80,000 domain name disputes. The vast majority of them result in the transfer of a cybersquatted domain name to the rightful trademark owner. more

What’s the Impact of Cloud Computing on the Environment?

Post-Thanksgiving is a time of reflection where we are thankful for technological improvements that allow us to succeed. Every-so-often, technology comes along that not only improves our business but can also help the world. Cloud computing is such a technology. Transitioning to the cloud is a good choice for just about any business, for several reasons. Cloud applications offer scalability, performance, cost-effectiveness and easy mobile access. more

Google Chose to Win .APP in an ICANN Auction for $25m - Why?

For those who don't know, there are typically 3 methods of resolving contention sets in the new gTLD world... Given that Google is a portfolio applicant of over 100 gTLDs why did it elect to go for an ICANN Auction and make all details of the auction public? Disclosure of the winning bid by Google certainly makes a statement, it's very newsworthy, but does it serve Google's purposes, since it is in other contention sets for some popular strings and a bar has been set? more

A Snapshot of the Domain Industry in 2023

The year 2022 was a turning point. We started emerging from the covid emergency and could return to traveling and meeting our peers at industry events worldwide. But it was also a year of taking stock, with numbers returning to pre-covid levels. After two years of sky-high domain registrations, figures returned to pre-pandemic levels in 2022. The domain sector shows a good mix of strength and adaptability to change compared to other industries.  more