NTIA’s New Broadband Map

The National Telecommunications and Information Administration surprised the broadband industry by issuing a new broadband map for the whole U.S. The map differs in dramatic ways from the FCC's broadband map, which is derived from broadband speeds that are reported by the ISPs in the country. It's commonly understood that the FCC broadband map overstates broadband coverage significantly. The NTIA map draws upon varied sources in an attempt to create a more accurate picture of the availability of broadband. more

Documentary Looks at 60 Hudson Street, World’s Most Concentrated Hub of Internet Connectivity

In a new documentary, filmmaker Ben Mendelsohn, takes a look at New York City's 60 Hudson Street as one of the world's most concentrated hubs of Internet connectivity. "Set in the dense, mixed-use neighborhood of Tribeca, the building's nondescript brick exterior conceals several network interconnection facilities where huge amounts of data are exchanged," writes Mendelsohn. The short documentary titled, "Bundled, Buried & Behind Closed Doors," takes a look at the history behind the building and a peak at the hidden infrastructure within. more

Black Helicopters for the DNS: What Happens In 2025?

When Steve delBianco from NetChoice testified (April 2, 2014) in the Subcommittee on Communications and Technology of the US House of Representatives on "Ensuring the Security, Stability, Resilience, and Freedom of the Global Internet", he proposed a stresstest for new mechanisms which could substitute the role of the NTIA in overseeing the IANA contract with ICANN. Stresstests are good. It is good for cars, it is good for banks and it is good for new mechanisms... more

Internet Infrastructure Coalition (i2Coalition) Joins M3AAWG to Reduce Hosting Industry Abuse

The Internet Infrastructure Coalition (i2Coalition) has joined the Messaging, Malware and Mobile Anti-Abuse Working Group (M³AAWG) to continue efforts on developing best practices for hosting and cloud service companies as well as sharing other information that will protect end-users. more

Information Protection for the Domain Name System: Encryption and Minimization

In previous posts in this series, I've discussed a number of applications of cryptography to the DNS, many of them related to the Domain Name System Security Extensions (DNSSEC). In this final blog post, I'll turn attention to another application that may appear at first to be the most natural, though as it turns out, may not always be the most necessary: DNS encryption. (I've also written about DNS encryption as well as minimization in a separate post on DNS information protection.) more

Finland First Country to Make Broadband a Legal Right

Finland's Ministry of Transport and Communications announced today that from July 2010, every person in the country will have a legal right to at least 1Mb of broadband connection. Finland is the first country to guarantee broadband access and has already initiated plans to increase the 1MB minimum to 100Mb by 2015. Communications Minister Suvi Linden says the universal service and Internet connection at the specified minimum speed will help improve the quality and availability of connections in sparsely populated areas. This will in turn contribute to maintenance of rural vitality, increase business opportunities and e-commerce. more

W3C/IAB “Strengthening the Internet” Workshop: Deadline Monday to Submit Position Papers

How can the open standards organizations of the IETF and W3C "strengthen the Internet" against large-scale pervasive monitoring? That is the topic up for discussion at the "Strengthening the Internet Against Pervasive Monitoring (STRINT)" workshop planned for February 28 and March 1, 2014, and jointly sponsored by the Internet Architecture Board (IAB) and the W3C. The workshop is by invitation-only and has a deadline of Monday, January 20, 2014 (by 11:59 UTC) for submission of either position papers or Internet drafts. more

Commentary on the FTC Spam Summit

The following speech was prepared with the intention of using portions of it during the FTC Spam Summit, but CAUCE was not given the opportunity to participate due to time constraints... "I am here today to question. Yesterday we heard how the tenor of the discussion about spam became more mature. How, in the period of time that has elapsed since the last summit, things have developed as an industry. That may be true, but I question if the discussion at hand here this week is truly a big tent effort. I see few anti-spammers here..." more

Demand for Cybersecurity Workers in the United States Has Nearly Doubled Since 2013

Cybersecurity job postings in the United States has nearly doubled since 2013 and is growing three times as fast as other IT roles, according to a new report from the labor market analytics firm Burning Glass Technologies. more

You Just Signed a Registry Contract With ICANN. What Are Your Plans?

Back on February 4, 2013, I wrote a CircleID post entitled 'How the registrar Cash Flow Model Could Collapse with New ICANN gTLDs.' My key point back then was this: new gTLD applicants need to be mindful of how the cash flow policies of their registry (and of their back-end service provider) could impact whether their TLD is actively promoted by ICANN registrars... registries have historically assumed near-zero risk. This is going to change. more

ICANN’s At-Large Process: Exit, Without Voice

ICANN seems to be out to re-prove Hirschman's theories of exit, voice, and loyalty by driving all of its good people to exit rather than giving them meaningful voices. Thomas Roessler, a long-time advocate of individual users' interests on the interim ALAC now suggests it's Time to Reconsider the structure of ICANN's At-Large, as he feels compelled to promise himself not to get involved with ICANN again... more

Emerging Communications Technologies

A "New IP" framework was proposed to the ITU last year. This framework envisages a resurgence of a network-centric view of communications architectures where network-managed control mechanisms moderate application behaviors. It's not the first time that we've seen proposals to rethink the underlying architecture of the Internet's technology (for example, there were the "Clean Slate" efforts in the US research community a decade or so ago) and it certainly won't be the last. more

The Top 25 Global Websites from the 2015 Web Globalization Report Card

I'm pleased to announce the publication of The 2015 Web Globalization Report Card. Here are the top-scoring websites from the report... You'll notice that Google is once again ranked number one. The fact is, no other company on this list invests in web and software globalization like Google. While many software companies are happy to support 40 or even 50 languages on their websites, Google is looking at 60 or more languages across its many products. more

Spam Arrest’s Sender Agreement Fails Because Email Marketer’s Employees Lacked Authority

People hate receiving spam, but most people stopped obsessing about spam a decade ago or more. In the interim, anti-spam filters have improved dramatically. Still, some anti-spammers hate spam so passionately -- or, perhaps, hope to put a little coin in their pockets -- that we still see a steady stream of lawsuits against email marketers. For the most part, those lawsuits don't win; in the past half-decade, repeat anti-spam plaintiffs have rarely won in court. more

Interview: Antony Van Couvering on the New TLD Opportunity

I recently caught up with a former colleague Antony Van Couvering. Many here on CircleID probably know him, he's been active in the domain name business since the late 1990's. With the new Top-Level Domain (TLD) issue so white hot and with Antony's firm right in the mix, I thought it was time to get his take via an interview. If anyone has questions (or challenges perhaps?) to anything below, I'm happy to forward to Antony for a response. more