Smart Highways or Smart Cars?

It wasn't too many years ago when you couldn't read an article about broadband infrastructure without hearing about the need for smart highway infrastructure that was going to enable self-driving cars. There were various versions of how this would happen, but the predominant concept was that 5G networks along roads would communicate with cars and would enable efficient and safe travel by eliminating driver error by taking the driver out of the equation. more

Zoom Cryptography and Authentication Problems

In my last blog post about Zoom, I noted that the company says "that critics have misunderstood how they do encryption." New research from Citizen Lab show that not only were the critics correct, Zoom's design shows that they're completely ignorant about encryption. When companies roll their own crypto, I expect it to have flaws. I don't expect those flaws to be errors I'd find unacceptable in an introductory undergraduate class, but that's what happened here. more

.xom, BrandJacking and Error-Search

BusinessWeek is running a column called 'Brandjacking' on the Web. In summary, nobody likes deliberate cybersquatting or typosquatting. But if Typo domain-names did not exist, the traffic would continue to flow to Microsoft or Google via the browser's error search where those very large companies would make money in the same manner as the 'evil cybersquatters'... more

Important Changes in the Proposed Final New gTLD Applicant Guidebook

The new guidebook represents an enormous step forward for the new Top-Level Domain program for a number of key reasons. As we have commented previously, the naming convention as the 'Final' guidebook is of significant importance and reinforces the ICANN Board's intention to get to the finish line with the program. Of equal importance however, is that the number of changes from the previous version of the guidebook is relatively small and focus on a few key issues which shows that the end is indeed near. more

Registrars That Complied With “Shakedown” Requests May Now Be in Violation of ICANN Transfers Policy

At the time we posted 'Whatever Happened To Due Process,' we were unaware that we were just one of many registrars receiving these notices from the London (UK) Police. We have since been made aware that this was part of a larger initiative against the BitTorrent space as a whole, and that most if not all of the other registrars in receipt of the same email as us folded rather quickly and acquiesced to the shakedown orders. more

The IANA Stewardship Transition - Now Is the Time to Share Your Views

The IANA Stewardship Transition process may have started more than a year ago, but last week it reached its pinnacle with the publication of the compiled Proposal to Transition the Stewardship of the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority (IANA) Functions from the US Commerce Department's National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA) to the Global Multistakeholder Community" by the IANA Coordination Group (ICG). more

SpaceX Starlink’s Variable Pricing Pilot in France Is Good Business and Good Karma

Starlink is available in 37 nations, and the price for best effort service was the same everywhere until August 3, when variable pricing with throttling became available in France. I predicted they would eventually shift from uniform to affordable pricing some time ago, but why did they do it now? Starlink first became available in the U.S. and Canada, and sales are beginning to outrun the available capacity. more

Routing Redundancy: How Much Is Enough?

Internet connectivity is a good thing. Many of us depend on it for everything from our livelihoods to our entertainment. However, the Internet is very fragile and even the The New York Times is worried about it. But they're primarily concerned with overloads that can occur when everyone on the planet does the same thing at roughly the same time, such as surfing for news about Michael Jackson. Unfortunately, we will never avoid all such scenarios. Physical systems are designed around average and typical peak loads, not around extremely high loads associated with very unlikely events. Who would pay for that? more

Domain Name Registrar Isn’t Liable for Counterfeit Goods – InvenTel v. GoDaddy

InvenTel makes security cams for cars. It is trying to crack down on Chinese counterfeiters. It brought a prior lawsuit against a wide range of defendants, including GoDaddy. InvenTel voluntarily dismissed GoDaddy from that suit. It brought a second round of litigation involving a new counterfeit site allegedly by the same bad guys, www.hdminorcarnbuy.com, a domain name registered via GoDaddy. more

Is FttH Future-Proof Infrastructure?

Telecoms engineers from all of the major telecoms services and equipment companies around the world agree that FttH is the only future-proof telecommunications technology. So who should we trust - the technology experts or politicians with different agendas? If there had been a division of opinion among these experts it would have been necessary to investigate it; but if they are all in agreement it is safe to follow their advice. more

Luddites of the 21St Century Unite?

In the past few weeks doom and gloom stories about the future were printed, discussed and opined in the press. The down and out of the message of futurists is that the middle class is going to be swept away in the coming years because of software and robotic solutions (from here on: automated processes), making humans redundant... Do Luddites of the 21st century need to rise? I want to look at the topic from a few angles. more

Call for Participation – ICANN 69 DNSSEC and Security Workshop, October 2020

If you are interested in presenting at the ICANN 69 DNSSEC and Security Workshop during the week of 17-22 October 2020, please send a brief (1-2 sentence) description of your proposed presentation to [email protected] by 27 August 2020. We are open to a wide range of topics related to DNS, DNSSEC, DANE, routing security, and more. There are some ideas in the Call for Participation below, but other ideas are definitely welcome, too! more

Telcos Cannot Wind Back the Clock

The proposals by the European and Arab telcos that are being considered at the World Conference on International Telecommunications (WCIT) conference in Dubai later this year are most certainly facing defeat. This is not because the USA believes that the international telecommunications regulations (ITR) cannot be discussed by the ITU. America has a rather strange set of national regulations in which they have combined internet infrastructure and content -- and as such they claim that this no longer has anything to do with telecommunications. more

Help CrypTech (and Me) Make the Internet More Secure

Are you ready to help me make the Internet more secure? Here's your chance to join me in a project to create an open-source hardware device to protect email, files and other data from hackers and government spies. The CrypTech Project was founded in late 2013 after NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden revealed that the US and other governments were exploiting weak cryptography and loose standards to gain access to citizens' email, documents, and other files. more

IPv4 Market and IPv6 Deployment

IPv4.Global's Lee Howard will be a panelist at the Internet Governance Forum's session, "IGF 2020 WS #327 Believe it or not, the Internet Protocol is on Sale!" Preparing for this session has provided an opportunity to research how the IPv4 address market has affected the deployment of IPv6. There are a few spikes where a large number of addresses was transferred in a single transaction, most recently from APIDT.org. more