Almost a year ago I wrote about Google Chrome: Cloud Operating Environment and [re]wrote the Google Chrome Wikipedia article, discussing the ways in which Google was changing the game through new and innovative features... Similar features were quickly adopted by competitors including Opera (which Chrome quickly overtook at ~2%) and Firefox (which still has an order of magnitude more users at ~20-25%). more
Like many in the UK communications industry my colleagues and I at Entanet have been eagerly awaiting the Digital Britain report. Darren Farnden, Entanet's Head of Marketing, has posted an interesting assessment of key parts of the report at opinion.enta.net. Given the content of Darren's article I thought it would be useful to post it in full here for CircleID readers... more
Irrespective of which solution to the current domain name brand-sharing impasse ends up being adopted by brand owners (option 1, option 2, or a combination), the owners must first understand and embrace current trends in online communications, information gathering, and entertainment. Thus, for a solution to succeed the corporate mindset toward new technologies needs to change; after that brand owners can work cooperatively with the domain name industry (owners and institutions) to increase the aggregate pie. more
U.S. Sen. Roger Wicker, chairman of the Committee on Commerce, Science, and Transportation, announced today that it will convene a hearing titled, "Policy Principles for a Federal Data Privacy Framework in the United States." more
New research indicates that the .US top-level domain contains numerous domains linked to a malicious link-shortening service dubbed 'Prolific Puma' promoting malware and phishing. Infoblox has been monitoring this three-year-old service, which uses short domains hosted on uncooperative providers to disguise harmful landing pages. more
Mozilla was nominated as one of the three ISPAUK's 2019 Internet Villains for their proposed approach "to introduce DNS-over-HTTPS in such a way as to bypass UK filtering obligations and parental controls, undermining internet safety standards in the UK." more
As we move further into the summer months and the demands made upon domain professionals typically ease, now is the ideal time to review domain name portfolios. And technology solutions can greatly automate this process. Ensuring that portfolios are pared, appropriate levels of security are implemented, and domains point to relevant content are all key areas upon which to focus. more
Consumers who have a choice are quickly deciding they don't need the old copper-based phone network, often known as POTS for Plain Old Telephone Service. We use our cellphones for talking even when we're not mobile. The cell phones have built in phone directories, easy ways to return calls, the ability to call a number on a web page; and we don't share them with our parents or children... It's a good year for traditional phone companies when they don't lose more than 10% of their POTS lines. more
Everyone knows there are many frauds linked to the growth of domain names. According to AFNIC (the French NIC), there has been a significant increase in the number of cases of slamming since the beginning of this year. ...To fight against these practices, AFNIC issued a guide where it describes different categories of slamming... more
A new broadband trend has quietly entered the market. Both Starlink and T-Mobile are advertising broadband that can be used practically anywhere and are aiming new products at campers, hikers, and others that go to remote locations. According to T-Mobile, this is a huge market, with 15 million households taking RV trips yearly and 59 million people camping. more
The idea that the US would maintain a strategic position in the Internet was always a pipe dream. Allowing the US to pick the DNS contractors is one thing, allowing the US the power to arbitrarily shut countries off the net is quite another. And that is what deployment of DNSSEC and the rPKI under the current models would do. The idea that some US congressman would promote a bill to force ICANN to drop Cuba, Palestine or the enemy of the moment off the Internet is really not far fetched. The US government was just shut down for over two weeks in a bizarre act of political theater. more
Eugene Kaspersky has warned global leaders that the world needs international agreements about cyber-weapons in the same way as it needs agreements about nuclear or biological weaponry. The chairman and chief executive officer of Kaspersky Lab, warned delegates at CeBIT Australia that cyber-warfare and terrorism was the number one internet threat facing the world today. He said the Stuxnet industrial virus had demonstrated that cyber-weapons were capable of damaging physical infrastructure, and were "a thousand times cheaper" to develop than conventional weaponry. more
The announcement last month of a new approach by the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) to Africa is welcome, and significant for a number of reasons. Africa must participate in ICANN's activities to help shape its policies, and benefit from the domain name industry (estimated at $2 billion in 2008), where it lags behind other regions, given the few African registrars, and that there are no generic top-level domain names (gTLDs) registries that are African. more
The online digital rights group, Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) on Tuesday published a post warning ICANN's latest move requiring the use of Uniform Rapid Suspension (URS) for .org domain names is a "bad fit." more
Sender Address Validation and Authentication (SAVA) is the silver bullet. It will send to Cyberia all dark forces that make us shiver when we make a purchase on the internet, pose a threat to our very identities and have made DDoS a feared acronym. Some of you will remember the heated debates when Calling Line Identification (CLID) was first introduced in telephony. Libertarians of all stripes called passionately to ban such an evil tool... more