The Internet Society Board of Trustees has issued an announcement stating that it cannot agree to participate in or endorse the Coordination Council for the NETmundial Initiative. "We are concerned that the way in which the NETmundial Initiative is being formed does not appear to be consistent with the Internet Society’s longstanding principles," says the statement released today. more
After two and a half years of technical analysis and discussions, six months of deliberations among all stakeholders, and intense negotiations at the United Nations, at three o'clock in the morning on December 12, 2015, the talented co-facilitators from the United Arab Emirates and Latvia dropped the gavel on the outcome document for the ten-year review of the World Summit on the Information Society (WSIS). That consensus document presents international principles that will guide the UN's work on Information and Communications Technology (ICT)-related issues. more
The remarkable take rate in Korea and China is invalidating almost all projections of 5G subscriptions. The 5G promotion has consumers wanting to buy, buy, buy. Huawei Mate 20 5G is selling for only US$30 more than the 4G model. At that price, who would want to buy a 4G phone that could be obsolete in a year or two? In the first two weeks of sale, over a million Chinese bought Huawei's 5G phone. more
The Biden administration has issued a stark warning to the nation's governors about the increasing threat of cyberattacks on the United States' water and wastewater systems. more
Comcast today announced plans to conduct production-network trials of IPv6 technology this year. The trials are aimed at helping identify and solve any areas of difficulty involved in the transition to IPv6, and to determine what approach will be the easiest and most seamless for its customers, says Jason Livingood, Comcast's Internet System Engineer. more
AT&T and satellite company AST SpaceMobile announced a partnership to provide satellite cellular service directly from satellites to cellphones. This will provide a service that is much needed for the billions of remote users who are not in the range of a cell tower. This is an emerging industry that is still being referred to by different acronyms. more
Seventy-five years ago today, on May 29th, 1934, Egyptian private radio stations fell silent, as the government shut them down in favor of a state monopoly on broadcast communication. Egyptian radio "hackers" (as we would style them today) had, over the course of about fifteen years, developed a burgeoning network of unofficial radio stations... It couldn't last. After two days of official radio silence, on May 31st, official state-sponsored radio stations (run by the Marconi company under special contract) began transmitting a clean slate of government-sanctioned programming, and the brief era of grass-roots Egyptian radio was over... more
Several models of Android mobile devices discovered containing firmware that collect sensitive personal data about their users and transmitted this sensitive data to third-party servers without disclosure or the users' consent. more
Major financial firms operating in New York will face stiff cybersecurity obligations starting Wednesday under a new regulation introduced in the city. more
A significant ransomware attack by a group known as AlphV or BlackCat has severely disrupted pharmacies across the U.S., affecting the delivery of prescription medications for over ten days. This attack on Change Healthcare has resulted in considerable difficulties for hospital pharmacies and nationwide drug distribution. more
The web performance and security company, Cloudflare has shared one of the methods it uses to ensure randomness when generating encryption keys. more
Majority of U.S. Federal agencies using .gov domains have not signed their DNS with DNSSEC (Domain Name Security Extensions) despite a December 2009 Federal deadline for adoption, according to the latest report by IID (Internet Identity). IID analyzed the DNS of more than 2,900 .gov domains and has released the results in its "Q3 State of DNS Report". more
On February 11th, Professor Ben Leff of American University Washington College of Law (WCL) spoke on the panel: The Controversial Sale of the .ORG Registry: The Conversation We Should be Having as a scholar of charitable and nonprofit law. On February 21st, he posted a blog piece on WCL's PIJIP blog outlining and expanding his presentation. With Professor Leff's permission, I repost his piece on CircleID to join the timely discussion taking place here on the .ORG sale. more
I am uploading short video interviews of Internet Governance Forum (IGF) participants during the 3 - 6 December 2008 conference in Hyderabad, India. The participants are asked a standard set of questions... Some 10 interviews are now online. My aim, if possible, is to interview at least 100 participants. more
U.S. regulators on Wednesday blocked some Obama administration rules on the eve of implementation, regulations that would have subjected broadband providers to stricter scrutiny than web sites face to protect customers' private data. more