La Casa Gelato in Vancouver, Canada, is doing just fine by selling a grand total of more than 500 ice cream flavors (wild asparagus, balsamic vinegar, dandelion -- you get the idea). On the other hand, Apple Inc. has built its enviable business on the principle of the fewer options the better. So, what does the confused ICANN need to do with its proposed new top-level domains (TLDs)? My advice: Go the Apple route. more
Two friends of mine wrote pieces today about reputation, one about email, the other about real-life stuff. I think they are strangely, tangentially yet inextricably linked. Laura Atkins, email specialist and part-time meteorologist at Word to the Wise aggregated a series of posts about a storm gathering on the email front. Receivers and filter-makers are up in arms about the crappy mail streams they see coming to them from ESPs, email service companies providing sending services for clients of various pedigrees. more
With companies shifting away from on-premises and "traditional" telecom networks to Internet-based protocols - such as Voice Over IP (oIP) - the market for critical communications infrastructure - most notably SIP trunking - is on the rise; not only multiple failover sites but cloud-based SIP-as-a-service solutions are now popular options. However, there's a caveat: problems unique to SIP systems that can cause IT headaches if you're not prepared. Here are three of the most common. more
One IP address is much the same as another - right? There's hardly a difference between 192.0.2.45 and 192.0.2.46 is there? They are just encoded integer values, and aside from numerological considerations, one address value is as good or bad as any other - right? So IP addresses are much the same as each other and an after-market in IP addresses should be like many other markets in undistinguished commodity goods. Right? more
One of the most striking and enduring dichotomies in the conceptualization of electronic communication networks is summed up in the phrase "the Internet as weapon." With each passing day, it seems that the strident divergence plays in the press -- the latest being Tim's lament about his "web" vision being somehow perverted. The irony is that the three challenges he identified would have been better met if he had instead pursued a career at the Little Theatre of Geneva and let SGML proceed to be implemented on OSI internets rather than refactoring it as HTML to run on DARPA internets. more
A water utility in Europe was compromised by cryptocurrency malware mining attack; the attack is the first public discovery of an unauthorized cryptocurrency miner impacting industrial controls systems. more
Nearly one year ago, I asked Will .CN become the next .COM? And perhaps I was right in more ways than one. Because now it appears that .CN is experiencing its very own .COM bust. Just a year ago Chinese domain registrations were booming, so quickly in fact that .CN had surpassed .DE to become the most-registered ccTLD. more
Verisign today announced that the waiver of the wholesale restore fee for .com and .net domain names is extended until August 1, 2020 at 03:59:59 UTC. more
Several months ago McKinsey did a very interesting study on the economic value of the Internet. They pointed out that Internet in the G8 countries as well as Brazil, China, India, South Korea, and Sweden is now bigger than agriculture or energy. The Internet represents 3.4% of GDP and accounted for 21 percent of GDP growth over the last five years among these developed countries and as Vint Cerf pointed out in his blog created 2.6 jobs for every one lost. more
For many people the comments made by Michael Hayden, Former Director of the Central Intelligence Agency, at this week's Black Hat Technical Security Conference in Abu Dhabi may have been unsettling as he commented upon the state of Chinese cyber espionage. I appreciate the candor of his observations and the distinction he made between state-level motivations. In particular, his comment... more
The 2004 new sTLD round brought about a new type of TLD in the form of .asia and .cat. As we always struggle for words to capture their nature, I call them "geoTLDs". Culture, language and ethnicity are also part of geography. Contrary to ccTLDs, geoTLDs do not have a territorial meaning. They are a wonderful addition to the Internet as they provide a way to demonstrate one's commitment to a community that is not defined by borders, yet linked to where the individual chooses to be. ...Will they be? They will, unless we do the wrong thing now. more
The frequency of DDoS attacks has risen by 40% year on year while the duration of attacks decreased with 77% lasting ten minutes or less, according to a new report released by Corero Network Security. more
There are many big questions in telecom these days, and this is one that's on my mind right now. Over the past few months, I've participated in events or briefed with leading vendors in our space, namely Avaya, ShoreTel, BroadSoft, Aastra, Metaswitch, Mitel, Interactive Intelligence, and this week Cisco. Every analyst has their own core circle of vendors they stay close to, but I'd say that's a pretty fair representation of who's driving telecom. To varying degrees, all of these vendors have a cloud story, and the more I hear it, the more I start to wonder what it really means. more
The Internet Commerce Association sent this letter to ICANN yesterday in regard to the RegisterFly situation: "I am writing to you in my capacity as Counsel to the Internet Commerce Association (ICA), a non-profit trade association dedicated to promoting and protecting the rights of domain name (DN) owners... It has come to our attention that an ICANN-accredited registrar is in the midst of what appears to be a near-complete operational breakdown, and that its ongoing failure to carry out its responsibilities is causing substantial economic loss to tens of thousands of DN registrants in both the United States and multiple foreign jurisdictions." more
One of the most debated questions at the time of the opening of the .eu Top-Level Domain (TLD) was whether or not it was possible to register names on the basis of prior rights on signs which include special characters, such as an ampersand. The Advocate General of the Court of Justice of European Union has just published his opinion (4 years later...) more
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