Bobbie Johnson, technology correspondent for The Guardian, was kind enough to quote me along with Vint Cerf (nice to be in good company) on the importance of building an online economy and an online government. Vint said: "You know how they say opportunity lies on the edge of chaos? Maybe that's going to be true here too." So far our telecommunications infrastructure has largely been privately built and financed. Why should that change now? It's unusual for government to do anything as well as the private sector. more
Want to easily show people where a specific submarine cable goes? Or what cables terminate in a particular location? Last year I wrote about Telegeography's cool interactive submarine cable map and how useful it is to understand the submarine cable side of Internet infrastructure. In that article I mentioned how great it would be if you could get a link for a particular cable or location that you could pass along to other people. more
At the Virus Bulletin conference this past September in Dallas, Righard Zwienenberg from ESET gave a presentation entitled BYOD. BYOD stands for Bring Your Own Device, but he reframed the acronym to "Bring Your Own Destruction", that is, he alluded to the security implications of bringing your own device. BYOD is the latest trend sweeping business and schools. more
This morning, Global Payments held a conference call with investors and analysts covering their earlier breach announcement and projected earnings. Global Payments had also released an update advisory yesterday stating that "the company believes that the affected portion of its processing system is confined to North America and less than 1,500,000 card numbers have been exported" and that only Track 2 card data may have been stolen. more
As ICANN introduces new generic top level domains (gTLDs) and separates itself from US oversight, it has the opportunity to distance itself from the taint of cybersquatting, brand abuse, and criminal activity involving domains... To underscore the scope of the issue, consider this research on just 30 top Interbrand-ranked global brands. The most recent MarkMonitor Brandjacking Index found cybersquatting incidents increased over 40% in the last year for the brands that were studied; these leading brands suffered as many as 15,000 incidents per brand... more
The current .NET Registry Agreement between ICANN and VeriSign is due to expire on 30 June 2011. On April 11 2011 ICANN posted a proposed draft renewal agreement for public comment. Under the terms of the existing agreement, which contracted a 6 year term starting July 1 2005, renewal is automatic unless VeriSign commits some egregious breach of terms. more
"We need to break down silos", is a phrase often heard in national and international meetings around cyber security and enforcing cyber crime. So it is no coincidence that at the upcoming NLIGF (Netherlands Internet Governance Forum), the IGF, but also an EU driven event like ICT 2013 have "Breaking down silos" and "Building bridges" on the agenda. But what does it mean? And how to do so? more
In spite of having a slow, expensive, government-controlled Internet infrastructure, Cuba is undergoing what Ted Henken and Sara Garcia Santamaria refer to as a digital revolution. The digital revolution might be said to have begun in 2007 when Yoani Sánchez launched her blog "Generation Y." Internet access was difficult -- she would get illegal connectivity at tourist hotels, and the blog was initially hosted in Germany. Soon, the Huffington Post began publishing her posts, and she has subsequently received many international awards, including the Ortega y Gasset Award for Digital Journalism in 2008. more
On 31 May 2016, The Commission together with Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and Microsoft unveiled a code of conduct that includes a series of commitments to combat the spread of illegal hate speech online in Europe. These IT Companies support the European Commission and EU Member States in the effort to respond to the challenge of ensuring that online platforms do not offer opportunities for illegal online hate speech to spread virally. more
2014 will be remembered as the year of the "multistakeholder model" on the Internet. NTIA demonstrated its commitment to bottom-up, multistakeholder Internet governance by committing to complete the transfer of responsibility for various technical functions -- known as the IANA Functions -- to the multistakeholder community. NTIA called on ICANN to convene the community to develop a transition plan to accomplish this goal. more
The U.S. Supreme Court on Tuesday declined to hear the Wikimedia Foundation's appeal of a lower court's decision to dismiss their lawsuit against the National Security Agency (NSA). more
In my previous post, I talked about the significance of DNS in connection with the Software Defined Data Center (SDDC) and Software Defined Networking. Although the second generation DNS provisioning model I outlined should have seemed straight-forward enough, in real life it is anything but. In my view, the real-world complications of a seemingly trivial issue are largely related to how the network industry approaches IP addressing. more
In a recent post to CircleID entitled New Domains and ICANN Accountability, Steve DelBianco paints himself as "frustrated" that ICANN didn't take a different path toward new Top-Level Domains (TLDs). Mr. DelBianco was one of four witnesses at a hearing before the House Judiciary Committee's Subcommittee on Courts and Competition on September 23, 2009. He is a creative advocate for his clients, an engaging speaker, and a skillful writer, and he produced a synopsis of the hearing which sounded convincing -- until I tried to make sense of it. more
Verisign announced a few days ago a decrease of 0.4 million domain name registrations for .COM and .NET Top Level Domains, a first time in the history of these TLDs. Could this decrease be related to the successive price increases of September 2021 and September 2022? On 28 July 2022, Verisign, the registry for the .COM and .NET TLDs, announced that it would be applying a 10% increase in the price of .NET domains as of 1 February 2023. more
"Credibility" in English comes through Middle French from a Latin word signifying trustworthiness and reliability in business and personal transactions (allegations, contentions, statements, promises, etc.). Where the goal is persuasion, exaggerating, embellishing, withholding, and falsifying evidence or accusing the adverse party of some heinous crime is not a winning strategy for proving claims or defenses. more
A World-Renowned Source for Internet Developments. Serving Since 2002.