AdDomains: A New Weapon for Traditional Advertising

ICANN's new gTLD program was designed in part to boost innovation. The thinking was: give people the canvas and let them paint in new and fascinating ways, with no set direction... and paint they will. Now that the new gTLD dream has become reality, new uses and business models are already emerging to prove this theory correct. One of the industries in which new gTLD innovation is making itself felt is traditional advertising. This is a sector that has been turned upside down by the Internet revolution of the last decade. 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

Major Flaw Found in WannaCry Raises Questions on Whether it was Really a Ransomware

An extensive analysis of WannaCry seems to indicate attackers would be unable to determine which users have paid the ransom and they cannot decrypt on a per-user basis. more

Meta Spells Out Absurdity of EU’s Plan to Tax Big Tech for Broadband Expansion

The EU is proposing a telecom-industry-backed plan to effectively tax Big Tech companies, with the intention of throwing that money toward Big Telecom companies for broadband expansion. The proposal is part of the EU's efforts to craft digital policies for the next few decades, with an eye on shoring up lagging broadband access. more

HTTPS Interceptions Are Much More Frequent Than Previously Thought

I have written about the problems with the "little green lock" shown by browsers to indicate a web page (or site) is secure. In that article, I consider the problem of freely available certificates, and a hole in the way browsers load pages. In March of 2017, another paper was published documenting another problem with the "green lock" paradigm - the impact of HTTPS interception. more

Large Companies (Un?)knowingly Hire Spammers

This morning, CSO and MacKeeper published joint articles on a massive data leak from a marketing company. This company, River City Media (RCM), failed to put a password on their online backups sometime. This leaked all of the company's data out to the Internet at large. MacKeeper Security Researcher, Chris Vickery discovered the breach back in December and shared the information with Spamhaus and CSO online. The group has spent months going through the data from this spammer. more

Google’s China Troubles Continue; Congress Examines U.S. Investment in Chinese Censorship

In his latest blog post, Google's Chief Legal Officer David Drummond reports that Chinese authorities aren't happy with the automatic redirection of Google.cn to Hong Kong. They are threatening not to renew Google's Internet Content Provider license, which is required to legally operate any kind of Internet business in China. more

State-Sponsored Attack Is Manipulating DNS Systems of National Security Organizations

A team of security researchers on Wednesday issued a stern warning about a DNS Hijacking campaign being carried out by an advanced, state-sponsored actor believed to be targetting sensitive networks and systems. more

An Early Look at the State of Spam in 2009, Social Networking Spam on the Rise

As recently reported, spam volumes indicate spam has nearly jumped back up to its pre-McColo shutdown levels. However, Symantec's The State of Spam report has also observed that in recent days spammers are increasingly piggybacking on legitimate newsletters and using the reputation of major social networking sites to try and deliver spam messages into recipients' inboxes... In its special URL investigation the report also indicates that on average approximately 90 percent of all spam messages today contain some kind of a URL. Additionally, analysis of data from past recent days, according to Symantec, have shown that 68% of all URLs in spam messages had a '.com' Top-Level Domain (TLD), 18% had a China's '.cn' ccTLD and 5% had a '.net'. more

More on Portable Email Addresses

Last month a bill in the Israeli Knesset would have required ISPs to provide portable e-mail addresses, analogous to portable phone numbers that one can take from one phone company to the other. As I noted at the time, e-mail works differently from telephone calls, and portability would be difficult, expensive, and unreliable. So I was wondering, idly, if we really wanted to provide portable e-mail addresses, how hard would it be? more

Could Bulk-Registered Typosquatting Domains Be Connected to .ORG DNS Abuse?

Public Interest Registry (PIR) announced the creation of the DNS Abuse Institute about two months ago as it believes that "every .ORG makes the world a better place" and "anything that gets in the way of that is a threat," notably in the form of Domain Name System (DNS) abuse. To show support for the initiative, WhoisXML API analyzed monthly typosquatting data feeds for December 2020, January 2021, and February 2021 to identify .ORG domain trends... more

Connectivity Starts at Home

Today's Internet is just one application of the powerful idea of best-efforts connectivity. The home router (NAT) decouples the connectivity within the home from the larger internet, enabling innovation that leverages the Internet without being limited by it. Connectivity starts at home. Your computers and devices all interconnect locally. In a sense, the larger Internet is just one more connected device. You are free to innovate and experiment without asking a provider's permission. more

Trademarks and Domain Names Composed of Common Terms

The lexical material from which trademarks are formed is drawn from the same social and cultural resources available to everyone else, which includes domain name registrants. Since trademarks are essentially a form of communication, it is unsurprising that a good number of them are composed of common terms (dictionary words, descriptive phrases, and shared expressions) that others may lawfully use for their own purposes. more

Google’s Gigabit Gambit

Want a gig (1000 megabits per second) of Internet access bandwidth? Google says you could have it by the end of next year "from Manhattan to rural North Dakota (sic, I think they meant Vermont)" if their proposal to the FCC is accepted forthwith according to CNET's newsblog. Not only a gig but a mobile gig, accessible by cellphone or roaming computer -- no fiber required. Sound too good to be true? -- it isn't, IMHO! Engineering is not the problem... more

New Geographical Top-Level Domains and Auctions

I was surprised by ICANN's "Economic Case for Auctions in New gTLDs" paper especially with view to the latest presentation on the new generic Top-Level Domain (gTLD) implementation process in Paris. That Paris presentation highlighted the protection of community interests such as religious organisations, geographically based communities or indigenous groups and suggested a preference of bona fide community-based applicants against pure generic applications for the same string. Contrary to this the only text passage in the current paper where ICANN considered the community-based applicants is "a 25% bidding credit could be offered to community-based bidders whose community is located primarily in least-developed countries". This reminds me of the discussion on discounts for HIV medicine... more