Nominations Now Open for Public Interest Registry (PIR, Operator of .ORG) Board of Directors

Would you be interested in helping guide the future of the Public Interest Registry (PIR), the non-profit operator of the .ORG, .NGO and .ONG domains? If so, the Internet Society is seeking nominations for three positions on the PIR Board of Directors. The nominations deadline is Monday, November 30, 2015. Find out more information about the positions and the required qualifications. more

The Other Vote on November 4th

The vote that Federal Communications Commissioners are planning for November 4 is not as important as the voting we'll do on that day, but it does matter a lot to the future of the United States. Unless the forces opposed to progress manage to postpone FCC action (which they are trying very hard to do), the FCC could decide to set the stage for another generation of innovative products with which the US will strengthen its competitive position in global markets... more

EU “Fair Share” Contagion: Caribbean Telecoms Operators Seek to Deepen Their Monopoly Strangleholds

On Friday, 23rd June, Caribbean telecommunications operators (telcos) held a meeting in Miami to fine tune their strategy to force Big Tech companies to contribute financially to regional telecoms network infrastructure. Hosted by the Caribbean Telecommunications Union (CTU), and taking a similar perspective to the "fair share" proposal currently being debated in the European Union, regional network operators are arguing that over-the-top (OTT) service providers are responsible for 67 percent of the total Internet traffic in the Caribbean, but make no contributions or investments toward local delivery networks. more

US Department of Justice Sues California Over Its New Net Neutrality Law

The U.S. Department of Justice on Sunday night filed a lawsuit against California over the new net neutrality law after just an hour the bill was signed. more

The Test of Time at Internet Scale: Verisign’s Danny McPherson Recognized with ACM SIGCOMM Award

The global internet, from the perspective of its billions of users, has often been envisioned as a cloud -- a shapeless structure that connects users to applications and to one another, with the internal details left up to the infrastructure operators inside. From the perspective of the infrastructure operators, however, the global internet is a network of networks. It's a complex set of connections among network operators, application platforms, content providers and other parties. more

Protests in Iraq Lead to a Two-Day Internet Shutdown by the Government

Widespread protests in Iraq against the government have lead to a state of emergency where the government has ordered disconnection of the fiber backbone of Iraq that carries traffic for most of the country. more

Is the Web a “Communications Medium”?

I've been having a short Twitter exchange with Paul Downey (@psd), someone who I hold in high intellectual and personal regard. I've made an assertion that has Paul snorting his coffee back up through his nose and into his keyboard: that the Web is not a communications medium. Justifying this claim can't be done in 140 characters. Now, there is a sleight of hand I'm pulling off here. You can build communications media on the Web, but my claim is that the Web itself is not one, and that has subtle but significant consequences. more

Next Round of New TLDs May Not Happen Until 2020, Says ICANN

Speaking at this week's World Summit on the Information Society (WSIS), taking place in Geneva, head of ICANN's global domains division, Akram Atallah, has pointed to 2020 as the earliest realistic timeframe for the next round of new gTLD applications. more

Officially Compromised Privacy

The essence of information privacy is control over disclosure. Whoever is responsible for the information is supposed to be able to decide who sees it. If a society values privacy, it needs to ensure that there are reasonable protections possible against disclosure to those not authorized by the information's owner. In the online world, an essential technical component for this assurance is encryption. If the encryption that is deployed permits disclosure to those who were not authorized by the information's owner, there should be serious concern about the degree of privacy that is meaningfully possible. more

Microsoft, Fortra, and Health-ISAC Take Legal Action Against the Abuse of Cobalt Strike to Combat Ransomware Attacks

A group of companies, including Microsoft, have collaborated to launch a major action to disrupt the use of cracked, legacy copies of the security tool Cobalt Strike which cybercriminals have abused to deploy ransomware. more

Mobilizing Russian Population Attacking Georgia: Similar to the Estonian Incident?

It seems like the online Russian population is getting mobilized. Like a meme spreading on the blogosphere, the mob is forming and starting to "riot", attacking Georgia. This seems very similar to the Estonian incident, only my current guess is natural evolution rather than grass-roots implanted -- but I am getting more and more convinced of the similarities as more information becomes available. Determining exactly when the use of scripts by regular users started, is key to this determination. more

Considerations on the High-Level Panel’s “Internet Governance Forum Plus” Model

The Fourteenth Annual Meeting of the Internet Governance Forum (IGF) will convene in Berlin three weeks from tomorrow. One of the highlights of the meeting could be the main session on Internet Governance and Digital Cooperation that is to be held on Day 1, 26 November 2019. The session is to consider some of the recommendations contained in the June report from the UN Secretary-General's High-level Panel on Digital Cooperation, most notably the panel's proposal to revamp the IGF... more

Court Finds Pirate Bay Defendants Guilty, With Jail Sentence

A Swedish court on Friday found all four defendants guilty in a copyright test case involving one of the world's biggest free file-sharing websites. "The Stockholm disctrict court has today found guilty the four individuals that were charged with accessory to breaching copyright laws," the court said in a statement. "The court has sentenced each of them to one year in prison." more

Schneier: Lasting IoT Security Will Only Happen if Governments Start Introducing Stiff Penalties

Without regulation, there is little hope companies will implement proper security protection measures for IoT devices, said author and security expert Bruce Schneier, during a panel discussion at the Aspen Cyber Summit. more

The Name Collision Conference

Earlier this week Verisign sponsored a two day conference on name collisions in the DNS. Despite the very short time frame in which it was organized, only a month from announcement to meeting, there were some very good presentations. I'll just hit some highlights here; all of the papers and slides are on their web site at namecollisions.net. Sunday morning started with a keynote by Bruce Schneier, who is not a DNS expert (and doesn't claim to be) but had some interesting observations on names in general. more