One of the worldwide challenges in relation to the development of national broadband networks is equality. Broadband is critical for the digital infrastructure and it is essential that everybody enjoys the same level of quality and affordability. This is a major challenge and as a rough measuring stick approximately one-third of the people in developed economies would miss out if there were not a requirement for equality. We see some of the problems related to this issue arising in other countries. more
In case you missed it a few days, a story broke that said that Facebook was caught hiring a PR firm to spread stories about Google about how they invade people's privacy... Even though I work for Microsoft and therefore can hardly be considered unbiased, I think Microsoft would be in a position to call out others for lack of privacy protection. I say this based on the fact that in my division, every new feature that we implement has to go through Privacy reviews... more
Today a senior McCain advisor, Doug Holtz-Eakin, proudly held up a Blackberry and declared: "You're looking at the miracle that John McCain helped create." Bloggers on all sides of the partisan divide are having a field day with this -- suggest that the McCain campaign is out of touch, desperate, or trying to top the trouble VP Al Gore got into, when he was falsely accused of claiming to have invented the Internet... more
European Union Member States published a report on the 'EU coordinated risk assessment on cybersecurity in Fifth Generation (5G) networks'. The report is based on the results of the national cybersecurity risk assessments by all EU Member States. It identifies the main threats and threats actors, the most sensitive assets, the main vulnerabilities, and several strategic risks. more
I pulled together some statistics on my collection of botnet statistics for the period of time between Rustock being shut down and Wednesday, April 6. I wanted to see the distribution of botnets per country - now that Rustock is down, which country has the most botnet infections (as measured by unique IP addresses that send us spam)? more
Verizon and AT&T re-introduced their unlimited data plans earlier this year, and as a result, studies show that the providers' 4G speeds and overall speeds have fallen due to increased data demand on their networks. more
The ongoing ITU Plenipotentiary Conference in Busan South Korea is the quadrennial gathering where its Nation State Members gather to elect new leadership of its four permanent secretariats and populate a few other of its assorted bodies. The next two weeks are spent in endless sessions where several regional blocs of Members still enamored with pre-liberalization telecom models complain about the new world of telecommunications that they did not invent -- while engaging in copious use of their new smart phones and online services. more
Procedure matters. It matters whether a defendant can dispose of a litigation right out of the gate, or whether the defendant must suffer the slings and arrows of discovery, motions, and trial before presenting a successful defense. Procedurally, once a litigation has been initiated, defendant has a chance to say, "hey, wait a minute, there isn't actually a cause of action here." It's like someone suing me for being tall. Well, yeah, but there is no recognized cause of action against being tall. more
ICANN meetings sometimes congeal around a single theme. In San Francisco the theme was captured on clever t-shirts bearing the iconic symbol of the London Underground with the words, "Mind the GAC." Here was a succinct and timely plea for the ICANN Board to pay serious attention to the Governmental Advisory Committee (GAC)'s concerns about new generic Top-Level Domains (gTLDs), rather than to risk undermining the long-term viability of the multi-stakeholder model. more
The first Registration Operations Association Workshop took place on Thursday, 16 October 2014, at the Los Angeles Hyatt Regency Century Plaza Hotel. I'd like to thank the 64 people that took the time to attend and participate in the discussion, both in-person and remote. I started the workshop with an introduction to some of the technical challenges being faced by the domain registration industry. more
The really important part of the World Conference on IT (WCIT) is not the internet battles that have caught the interest of the press - it is what will happen after the conference has ended. Membership of WCIT is on a per-country basis... Each country is free to make up its own delegation and these delegations can therefore represent a large variety of social, economic, business, legal, technical and other interests - as large and as wide as each country decides its delegation will be. more
After some five years of public debate on the national broadband network it is heartening to see that more and more people are getting the message that the network means more than just fast internet access. Increasingly key decision-makers in business and government are reaching an understanding of the transformation that is underway in the economy. more
Every once in a while I look in on the white spaces, to see how things are going. You'll recall that the white spaces are unused, non-contiguous ("swiss cheese" ) frequencies between broadcast stations around the county. Commr. McDowell of the FCC has said that initial rules for the white spaces will be released sometime this fall. If the white spaces are made available on an unlicensed basis for use by opportunistic, "smart," low-power mobile devices, entrepreneurial engineers will think of ways to use this wealth of spectrum (300 MHz wide, if fractured) to provide mobile connections to whatever fiber installations are nearest. more
With measurement networks rapidly evolving up to hundreds of nodes, it becomes more and more challenging to extract useful visualisations from tons of collected data. At the same time, geographical information related to Internet measurements (either known or inferred with state-of-the-art techniques) can be exploited to build tools based on geography as a common knowledge base. We wanted to develop a tool to visualise different classes of geographically annotated Internet data, e.g., topology, address allocation, DNS and economical data. more
Last year Europe imposed GDPR, arguably the world's toughest standard for data privacy and now, a year later, there has yet to be any enforcement action against a big tech firm. more
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