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
The IPv6 Act Now website, aimed at encouraging the adoption of IPv6, has featured a video today on Google's implementation of IPv6, which resulted in the launch of ipv6.google.com. In this video, Lorenzo Colitti, network engineer at Google, explains the planning, deployment, and future plans for making Google services available over IPv6. The best way to proceed with an IPv6 deployment, Colitti says is "to run everything on the same infrastructure." more
UCLA and Washington University in St. Louis recently announced the launch of the Named Data Networking (NDN) Consortium, a new forum for collaboration among university and industry researchers, including Verisign, on one candidate next-generation information-centric architecture for the Internet. Verisign Labs has been collaborating with UCLA Professor Lixia Zhang, one of the consortium's co-leaders, on this future-directed design as part our university research program for some time. more
ICANN President Fadi Chehade gave Internet stakeholders a welcome surprise last week when he announced ICANN would launch a community-driven process to strengthen its accountability, and that this process would be "interdependent" with the transition of IANA functions away from U.S. Government oversight. It was fitting that Fadi announced the accountability process at NETmundial in Sao Paolo, where Internet stakeholders from around the world gathered to discuss the evolution of the global Internet governance. more
Knowing how long to store your company email can be confusing. For some industries and public companies there are laws dictating how long emails should be kept, but for other companies it is more discretionary. A document retention policy can help with this. Deciding which emails to keep and for how long - and then most importantly, sticking to your policy - will be looked on more favourably should you find yourself justifying missing email evidence to a judge. more
The ICANN Implementation Recommendation Team (IRT) working group has published its final report, which I decided to analyze a bit further. I already made a few comments last month, both in the At-Large Advisory Council framework and on my own. There are several issues raised by the recommendations of this report. The Uniform Rapid Suspension system (URS) is one. more
Some worrying signs are emerging in the USA. During the last decade I have questioned the economic viability of two parallel telecoms infrastructures. When these two network rollouts commenced no issue existed in relation to conflicting interests -- one delivered telephone services, the other broadcasting services. But this all began to change when it became possible to use the HFC network more
There is an excellent business case for Google bidding megabucks in the upcoming 700MHz auction and investing even more to get a network up and running. I think Google is well aware of the value to them if they win and the harm they'd suffer if the duopoly wins instead. Google can make big bucks with a nationwide third network AND make things better for all Internet users AND improve the United States' pathetic competitive position in the contest for broadband access. Hope this post doesn't end up post-tagged "wishful thinking"... more
As the Internet grows, those countries and societies with mature systems of content development, innovation and entrepreneurism will continue to be better positioned to meet these needs. At the same time, such countries are also better positioned to take advantage of the efficiency, and capacity of the Internet to amplify and extend their cultural reach and economic capacity. The implication of this amplification and extension of cultural reach and economic capacity from developed markets, is that it can drown out indigenous content and restrict local economic opportunities in developing and under-developed markets. more
Most everyone who visits CircleID is familiar with Moore's Law, which stated simply holds that computing power doubles every 18 months. This has been going on since the 1960s and shows no sign of slowing. Moore's Law drives faster and faster computing, which produces more and more data and network complexity. This inexorable trend is putting immense pressure on corporate networks, and the strain is too much for many of them to handle on their own. more
ICANN is currently seeking public comment on the subject of "closed generic" Top Level Domain (TLD) applications. A "Closed Generic" is a TLD that is a generic term, but domains within that TLD will not be sold to the public. There are those who object to generic terms such as .book being operated as closed registries, which means that domain names within the .book Top Level Domain as proposed by Amazon would not be sold to the public, but instead, Amazon.com would own and operate all domain names within the .Book Top Level Domain. more
BGP. Border Gateway Protocol. The de-facto standard routing protocol of the Internet. The nervous system of the Internet. I don't think I can overstate the importance, the criticality of BGP to the operation of the modern Internet. BGP is the glue that holds the Internet together at its core. And like so many integral pieces of the Internet, it, too, is designed and built on the principle of trust... The folks who operate the individual networks that make up the Internet are generally interested in keeping the Internet operating, in keeping the packets flowing. And they do a great job, for the most part. more
When the World Intellectual Property Organization began deliberating in 1998 and 1999 about creating an arbitral regime that the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers transformed into the Uniform Domain Name Dispute Resolution Policy the curse words of choice were "predators" and "parasites" to describe cybersquatters. (In an early UDRP decision a Respondent who had also featured as a defendant in a trademark case asserted he had "just as much right to own the Domain Names [with typographic variations of the mark] as the person who owns the correct spelling of [the mark]" more
An underwater data cable linking Sweden and Latvia was damaged early Sunday, marking the fourth such incident in the Baltic Sea, fueling concerns within NATO regarding the security of critical infrastructure. more
It has been a while, nearly eight years since we have been in touch. I thought I would post an update to the DCA vs ICANN case, to the interested party of the global internet, towards the eight-year legal battle DCA had with ICANN. I believe there would be useful lessons learned that would shed some light on ICANN's activities in the Internet community. For those not aware, the DCA vs. ICANN case involved many twists and turns, spanning nearly a decade of DCA's efforts to hold ICANN accountable for the harm it caused to DCA over the delegation rights of the .Africa new gTLD Registry. more