The Domain Name System has always been intended to be extensible. The original spec in the 1980s had about a dozen resource record types (RRTYPEs), and since then people have invented many more so now there are about 65 different RRTYPEs. But if you look at most DNS zones, you'll only see a handful of types, NS, A, AAAA, MX, TXT, and maybe SRV. Why? A lot of the other types are arcane or obsolete, but there are plenty that are useful. more
In two recent debate events I participated in, on iFreedom and privacy in the online world, mistrust of government and government's intentions and motivations on and towards the Internet were abundantly present with more than just a few people in the audiences. The emotions were not new to me, no, it was the rationality that surprised and sometimes almost shocked me. Why? Well, should these sentiments get the support of the majority of people, it would undermine all legitimacy of a government to govern. Let's try and take a closer look. more
As reported last July, there is a proposal from some Flemish politicians to create a .vla top level domain under the new gTLD process launched by ICANN. The proposal further elaborated that the Flemish government would have to cover the costs. Not so fast, says the Flemish government... more
This is a follow-up to my previous post on Cybersecurity and the White House. It illustrates an actual cyberwarfare attack against Estonia in 2007 and how it can be a legitimate national security issue. Estonia is one of the most wired countries in eastern Europe. In spite of its status of being a former Soviet republic, it relies on the internet for a substantial portion of everyday life -- communications, financial transactions, news, shopping and restaurant reservations all use the Internet. Indeed, in 2000, the Estonian government declared Internet access a basic human right... more
Mail software consists of a large number of cooperating pieces, described in RFC 5598. A user composes a message with a Mail User Agent (MUA), which passes it to a Mail Submission Agent (MSA), which in turn usually passes it to a sequence of Mail Transfer Agents (MTAs), which eventually hand it to a Mail Delivery Agent (MDA) to place it in the user's mail store. If the recipient user doesn't read mail on the same computer with the mail store (as is usually the case these days) POP or IMAP transfers the mail to the recipient's MUA. more
ICANN is the only institution with responsibility for the functioning of DNS. And so it is natural that when there is a DNS problem for people to expect ICANN to come up with the solution. But having the responsibility to act is not the same as having the ability. Like the IETF, ICANN appears to have been designed with the objective of achieving institutional paralysis. And this is not surprising since the first law of the Internet is 'You are so not in charge (for all values of you). more
Mozilla and the National Science Foundation have announced a $2 million prize for ideas that decentralize the web; prizes will be available for both early-stage design concepts and fully-working prototypes. more
My blog 'What PRISM, credit card hacking and Chromecast have to do with FttH' led to some very interesting discussions all around the world. One of issues that was discussed was that the sheer capacity of FttH will also allow hackers, criminals and others to use that massive capacity for the wrong reasons. Its volume will make it increasingly difficult to police. more
Here at the Anti-Phishing Working Group meeting in Hong Kong, we've just released the latest APWG Global Phishing Survey. Produced by myself and my research partner Rod Rasmussen of Internet Identity, it's an in-depth look at the global phishing problem in the second half of 2013. Overall, the picture isn't pretty. There were at least 115,565 unique phishing attacks worldwide during the period. This is one of the highest semi-annual totals we've observed since we began our studies in 2007. more
ICANN and the European Dialogue on Internet Governance (EuroDIG) signed a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) to further encourage collaboration and cooperation between both organizations in their efforts to further promote and strengthen the multistakeholder model of Internet governance in Europe. more
In an earlier article, IPv4 - Business As Usual, we pointed out that the RIPE NCC will reach the last /8 of IPv4 address space (16,777,216 addresses) sometime later this year. On Friday, 14 September 2012 we reached this important milestone; we allocated the last IPv4 addresses from the unallocated pool. From now on, the RIPE NCC can only distribute IPv6 addresses and a one-time /22 IPv4 allocation from the last /8 to those Local Internet Registries (LIRs) that meet the requirements. more
The Internet Society today announced the launch of a survey to gain greater insights into multistakeholder governance perceptions and processes at all levels - national, regional, and international. The questionnaire is open to all interested participants and is available until 30 September 2013. The survey is one component of the Internet Society's broader initiative focused on the open and sustainable Internet. more
A group of 24 CEO's and Internet company founders submitted a letter today to the Federal Communications Commission in support of the Net Neutrality initiative. Also last week, in a similar letter, Vinton Cerf, Stephen Crocker and other Internet pioneers spoke out on Net Neutrality supporting FCC's recent open Internet initiative. more
I read this to the ICANN Board Thursday morning, in Sydney, after more prep work than I care to recall. If you don't know that the DAGv3 is delayed, or what the IRT is, this is a good time to bush up on current ICANN state. "Good morning. My name is Eric Brunner-Williams, and I am speaking to you on behalf of the initial signatories of the Step-by-Step proposal. I represent one of the signatories as the principal of the native, aboriginal, and indigenous cultural and linguistic Top-Level Domain (TLD) project, one of many similar efforts to preserve living languages and cultures..." more
I recently had a chance to read a report titled, "Show Me the Money: Characterizing Spam-advertised Revenue" produced as a joint effort from the University of California, San Diego (UCSD), International Computer Science Institute, and UC Berkeley by Chris Kanich, Nicholas Weaver, Damon McCoy, Tristan Halvorson, Christian Kreibich, Kirill Levchenko, Vern Paxson, Geoffrey M. Voelker and Stefan Savage. I also had a chance to hear Chris Kanich speak about the topic - Show Me The Money! This post contains my notes with some photos taken from that report. more