IBM Predicts the Future for 2016 and It Includes No Spam

IBM published a video where it predicts what the world will look like in 2016 (see bottom of this post for the link). It includes the following five predictions. I want to start with the last one -- that junk mail (i.e., spam) will disappear. You'll need to watch the video to get the nuances of the prediction, but IBM says that in five years, Junk Mail will become a thing of the past. more

Telling the Truth About 5G

I still run across articles that extol the supposed wonders of 5G. The most recent, published in Gizmodo asks "How 5G Could Replace Your Home Broadband Connection". I was surprised to see an article like this in a tech-oriented site because the article gets most of the facts wrong about 5G - facts that are not hard to verify. This article talks about 5G having "faster download speeds, faster upload speeds, more bandwidth, and lower latency" than landline broadband. more

Russia Demands Facebook to Store Citizens’ Data on Russian Servers or Be Blocked

Russia threatens to block access to Facebook next year unless the company complies with a law that requires websites which store the personal data of Russian citizens to do so on Russian servers. more

Guadeloupe Moves to Set Up Internet Exchange Point

Developments in the Caribbean digital space are fuelling initiatives to strengthen the Internet infrastructure in the region. In Guadeloupe, a recent agreement among three Internet service providers has cleared the way for the island to establish its first Internet exchange point. Commonly called an IX or an IXP, an Internet exchange point is a critical element of Internet infrastructure used to interconnect networks and deliver data traffic between them. more

Google Building 600 Million Euro Data Center in Denmark Powered by Renewable Energy

Google will invest 600 million euro (roughly $700 million USD) to construct its first Danish datacenter. The company says the site will be matching its energy use with 100 percent carbon-free energy. more

Privacy and Trust Go Hand-In-Hand

A few days ago, Eric Goldman wrote an interesting thinkpiece in CircleID regarding users' feeling about privacy. He seems to conclude that the existent regulations and policies on the matter are unnecessary, since Privacy doesn't "really" matters to the consumer. Eric based his argumentation on a number of surveys, stating that, even when the user expresses concerns about their privacy, on line behavior shows a different reality. We don't want to discuss here the soundness of surveys as a reliable source of information, but the author could be assuming too much in his analysis. more

Summit to Focus on Knowledge Sharing for IPv6 Deployment

The IPv6 Forum, the North American IPv6 Task Force, and Charmed Technology, Inc. today announced that the U.S. IPv6 Summit 2003 will be held December 8 - 11, 2003 in Arlington, VA, at the Doubletree Crystal City. The U.S. IPv6 Summit 2003 will focus on deployment, technical depth of key IPv6 features, and applications or services of Internet Protocol version 6 (IPv6).  more

Fiber Infrastructure in China Has Grown Nine Times Faster Than in the U.S. Since 2013

While developed and developing countries are fully aware of the importance of robust Internet infrastructure in the digital age, none have the same level of ambition that has fueled China's aggressive rollout strategy over the past seven years. more

How a Security Specialist Fell Victim to Attack

Our systems are protected by state of the art security systems. Our SPAM filter is a hardware device that is nearly 100% effective. It also helps in protecting against Spyware and other malicious code. Our Firewall is similar to those you would find in large corporations. Our Anti-Virus system has served us well and we've not had problems with virus for years. ...Two weeks ago, I received approximately twenty e-mails requesting the review and approval of Defending The Net articles published on other sites. I thoroughly review the e-mails to make sure they seem legitimate... more

Google’s .App TLD Application Under Fire

I've written about "closed generic" new TLD applications several times over the last year. I'm opposed to them, as I've said in the past and continue to say today. However I've generally been supportive of "restricted" TLDs. The Association for Competitive Technology (ACT) has serious concerns about Google's application for .app and want ICANN's board of directors to treat as a "closed generic". more

Wireless Net Neutrality

To date, most of the discussion on net neutrality has dealt with the behaviour of conventional wireline ISPs. RCR Wireless News is carrying an opinion piece called "Paying for the bandwidth we consume" by Mark Desautels, VP -- Wireless Internet Development for CTIA -- the trade association for the US wireless industry. His article follows up on reports of Comcast cable moving to discontinue internet access service to so-called "bandwidth hogs"... more

The UN Panel on Digital Cooperation: Reinventing the Wheel or Innovating Internet Policy Making?

The new High-Level Panel on Digital Cooperation (HLP.DC), appointed by UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres, will have its first face-to-face meeting in New York, September 25-26, 2018, just before the beginning of the 73rd UN General Assembly. The Panel, co-chaired by an American woman, Melinda Gates from the Microsoft Foundation and a Chinese man, Jack Ma from Ali Baba, "is expected to raise awareness about the transformative impact of digital technologies... more

Unforeseen Legal Consequences of Implementing Internationalized Top-Level Domains

ICANN is currently analyzing technical and policy implications regarding the introduction of Internationalized Top-Level Domains into the root. This is an important step in the continued evolution of the Internet by enabling language communities of the world that write non-Latin and extended Latin scripts to utilize their languages on the Internet... While the IDNC Working Group (IDNC) has made constructive progress on proposing a framework for the introduction of an initial set of IDN TLDs, the approach taken by the IDNC from a legal perspective is fundamentally flawed. more

DDoS Attacks: Don’t Be In Denial of the Risks

Unlike traditional attacks by hackers which breach a business's security systems, resulting in defaced websites, intellectual property theft and/or customer data theft, a DDoS attack focuses on making a business's Internet connected infrastructure (e.g. web servers, email servers, database servers, FTP servers, APIs, etc.) unavailable to legitimate users. A business's brand reputation, which can take years to establish, can be swept away in just a few hours from a single DDoS attack in the same way a natural disaster like a flood or earthquake can impact a traditional brick and mortar business. more

The Rising Technical Challenges of Networking at Home

For me, one of the more interesting sessions at the recent IETF 81 meeting in July was the first meeting of the recently established Homenet Working Group. What's so interesting about networking the home? Well, if you regard challenges as "interesting", then just about everything is interesting when you look at networking in the home! more