A Look at the Growth of the Internet Routing System

Geoff Huston, APNIC's Chief Scientist, is visiting the RIPE NCC this week to spend time with his fellow Regional Internet Registries (RIR) colleagues and to strengthen collaboration on shared projects. We've used this opportunity to invite him to produce the 'Interesting Graph of the Week'. Geoff has been monitoring the global routing system for many years. Here are his most recent observations. more

Internet Service Quality Measured from Thousands of Locations

RIPE Atlas, the new active measurements network maintained by the RIPE NCC, gives you a way to easily measure the quality of your Internet services. RIPE Atlas is designed in such a way that it can collect data for analysis from a great number of locations on the Internet. The actual measurement devices, or "probes", are so small that they can be easily deployed in a home environment. more

Caring About Cybersecurity or Preparing the Ground for an I-Patriot Act?

Few months ago in a talk given at the Institution of Engineering and Technology organised here in London by the Society for Computers and Law, Professor Lessig recounted a conversation he had with former US Counter Terrorism Czar Richard Clarke, where Larry asked the question that many had in mind... how the US Government managed to conceptualize, design and draft a piece of legislation as vast and complex as the USA PATRIOT Act in such a short period of time (a month and 15 days after 9/11), and the answer was what many people had imagined... more

Microsoft is Abandoning SHA-1 Hashes for Updates - But Why?

Microsoft is shipping a patch to eliminate SHA-1 hashes from its update process. There's nothing wrong with eliminating SHA-1 - but their reasoning may be very interesting. SHA-1 is a "cryptographic hash function". That is, it takes an input file of any size and outputs 20 bytes. An essential property of cryptographic hash functions is that in practice (though obviously not in theory), no two files should have the same hash value unless the files are identical. more

Seattle Restores ISP Privacy Rules. Could be First of Many Cities to Defeat FCC’s Privacy Roll Back

The city of Seattle this week will move forward with its own plan to restore broadband user privacy rules despite the recent law passed by U.S. Congress, signed by President Trump in April, which gave ISPs the green light to collect customer data. more

An Investigation Shows How Bomb Threat Scammers Hijacked Thousands of Big-Name Domains

Ars Technica's Dan Goodin reports that an "investigation shows the spam run worked by abusing a weakness at GoDaddy that allowed the scammers to hijack at least 78 domains belonging to Expedia, Mozilla, Yelp, and other legitimate people or organizations." more

Russia Targeted British Telecom, Media, Energy Sectors, Reveals UK National Cyber Security Centre

Speaking at The Times Tech Summit in London, Ciaran Martin, chief of the National Cyber Security Centre (NCSC), warned Russia is seeking to undermine the international system. more

The Growing Importance of Language in UDRP Proceedings

An increasing number of domain name disputes are being conducted in languages other than English, a trend that presents a new challenge for some trademark owners. In 2015, 85.77% of all domain names disputes at the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) were conducted in English - down from an all-time average of 88.01% and a record high (in 2000) of 99.84% (disregarding 1999, the first year of the UDRP, because only one case was filed - in English -- that year). more

DDoS Awareness Day - Oct 23, Register Today for Live Virtual Event

In support of National Cyber Security Awareness Month, DDoS Awareness Day is a virtual, global event focused on raising awareness and education around the threat of DDoS attacks. Hosted by Neustar with and exclusive media partner CSO, DDoS Awareness Day brings together top experts in global security to share their views, technical tips and from-the-trenches experience. Attendees will also be given access to a wealth of DDoS materials: white papers, surveys, presentations, best practices and more. more

Predicting Future Broadband Prices

I've been giving a lot of thought lately to the long-term trajectory of broadband prices. This is something that should be considered by anybody who is thinking about competing in a market against a big cable company. It's not an easy question to get your hands around since many factors might affect future rates. The following are some of the major trends that I think must be considered. First is pressure on the big ISPs from Wall Street. more

.Org: ICANN’s Betrayals and its Opportunity to Act Now in the Public Interest

ICANN's repeated betrayals of the public interest have created the conditions for Ethos Capital's proposed purchase of .Org. The growing outrage directed at ICANN is raising questions about ICANN's legitimacy and the wisdom of having entrusted ICANN with oversight over the domain name system ("DNS"). ICANN has shown itself to be out of touch with and unresponsive to the public interest. ICANN now has an opportunity to remember its mission... more

Domaining Europe Becomes NamesCon Europe

After 10 years as one of the top-level European Domaining Conferences, it is our pleasure to announce the transition of Domaining Europe into NamesCon Europe! This is an exciting new chapter for the NamesCon brand that expands into the European domaining market. The agreement between Domaining Europe and NamesCon was confirmed at the beginning of 2018. The rebranding of Domaining Europe to NamesCon Europe is in effect for the upcoming June 2018 event in Valencia. more

Developed Economies Not Ready for an ICT-Driven Recovery

Some interesting but disturbing messages are emanating from Europe and America. With countries slowly coming out of the economic crisis and employment picking up again, it has become clear that the new jobs becoming available are driven by companies operating in the digital economy; very few of the 'old jobs' will become available. Many people in western countries are unprepared for this change and many new skills that are required are simply not available in sufficient numbers to counter the downfall in employment that has occurred over the last five years. more

Why ‘Open’ May Become the Keyword of the Digital World in 2022?

From open standards and software to data, 'open' has been a defining word of the internet since its early days. However, most of the digital growth around major platforms has been driven by proprietary software and 'closed' systems. Recently, companies such as Microsoft and Google have been shifting towards open-source software more and more. Over the last few years, additional momentum was created with the USA adopting the open-source approach to cope with lagging behind, mainly, Huawei in the development of 5G networks. more

Chinese Scientists Have Built First Quantum Network With No Danger of Being Decrypted

A paper published by researchers from the Chinese Academy of Sciences, reports a successful demonstration of satellite-based entanglement distribution to receiver stations separated by more than 1200 km -- the results illustrate the possibility of a future global quantum communication network. more