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SpaceX is now serving customers (aka beta testers) in the northern United States. They will soon be doing so in Southern Canada and recently announced that Germany, where they have applied for permission and have begun construction on two ground stations, will probably be next. Early customers in the US are paying $499 for their user terminals and $99 per month for Internet service. more
It has been observed that the most profound technologies are those that disappear (Mark Weiser, 1991). They weave themselves into the fabric of everyday life until they are indistinguishable from it, and are notable only by their absence. The feat of reticulating clean potable water into every house, so that it is constantly accessible at the turn of a tap, is a great example of the outcome of large scale civil engineering projects, combining with metallurgy, hydrology, chemistry and physics. But we never notice it until it is no longer there. more
I read with interest the recent blog written by Theresa Swinehart a Sr. Advisor to the President on Strategy. She wrote: "The most critical element of this [ICANN Transition] process is trust and alignment. To ensure success on this accountability track, we must as a community work closely together to make sure that the final process is meaningful. There is plenty of work to be done in an ambitious period of time." more
Last week the Federal Trade Commission settled a lawsuit against Yesmail, a large ESP (Email Service Provider). The facts of the case are not in dispute, but their meaning is. Yesmail, like most large ESPs, has absorbed a number of its smaller competitors over the years including a company called @Once. Back in 2004, they screwed up their incoming mail so that a whole lot of bounces and opt-out requests were erroneously filtered out as spam. As a result, thousands of people who'd told @Once to stop sending them mail kept getting mail anyway... more
Most of us, when we go to a website and see the little lock at the top of the browser, don't think twice and trust that we are communicating with the right company or organization. However, this is no longer the case because of a rather radical development that has largely occurred without notice or intervention by almost everyone. The web now has its own rapidly spreading version of CallerID spoofing that is about to get worse. more
The first RFC describing Border Gateway Protocol (BGP), RFC 1105, was published in June 1989, thirty years ago. By any metric that makes BGP a venerable protocol in the Internet context and considering that it holds the Internet together, it's still a central piece of the Internet's infrastructure. How has this critically important routing protocol fared over these thirty years, and what are its prospects? Is BGP approaching its dotage or will it be a feature of the Internet for decades to come? more
The legal issues surrounding the sudden success of "Pokemon Go" -- one of the world's fastest-growing apps or games -- are popping up as quickly as unhatched Eggs at a PokéStop. Within days of the game's release, the National Safety Council issued a call that "urges pedestrians to exercise caution while playing the Pokémon Go augmented reality game" and "implores drivers to refrain from playing the game behind the wheel." more
Cybersecurity regulation is coming. Whether regulations intended to enhance critical infrastructure protection will be based on existing statutory authority, new legislation, an Executive Order or a combination of legal authorities, however, is still unknown. Other aspects of the coming federal oversight of critical infrastructure cybersecurity that remain undetermined include the extent to which governance system will include voluntary characteristics and the time frame for initiation of new cybersecurity regulation. more
Ok, ok - it's pretty hard to ignore the bombshell news that's on front pages everywhere today in Canada. It looks like Nortel is going to seek bankruptcy protection, perhaps as early as today. This may be a minor story in the U.S. business press, but it's a big story in tech/telecom, and a HUGE story here in Canada. You don't need me to tell you what Nortel means to Canada in terms of pride and joy, although that's more of a distant memory these days... more
It's been a busy month for the folks in the Skype For SIP project. First, back on September 9, Skype announced ShoreTel interoperability. Then last week on September 17, Skype announced interop with the open source SIPFoundry sipXecs product. Today, though, is Skype's biggest announcement yet... more
The US government is looking at telling ISPs how to deal with compromised customers and botnets. They're a bit late to the party, though. Most of the major commercial ISPs have been implementing significant botnet controls for many years now. more
A network traffic analyzer can tell you what's happening in your network, while a Domain Name System (DNS) analyzer can provide context on the "why" and "how." This was the theme of the recent Verisign Labs Distinguished Speaker Series discussion led by Paul Vixie and Robert Edmonds, titled Passive DNS Collection and Analysis -- The "dnstap" Approach. more
If you had an e-mail address any time in the past six years, you've probably gotten spam for something called VigRX for Men, with fairly specific promises that it will make you, ah, manlier. I always wondered how many nitwits could fall for this kind of nonsense. Thanks to a recent class action settlement, we now know that there have been quite a lot of them. A class action suit filed in 2001 in Colorado settled recently, with some quite amazing info in the documents available at http://lemsettlement.com. LEM stands for Leading Edge Marketing, the name used by the defendants for several companies in the US, Canada, and the Bahamas. more
Earlier this year, at the CES show in January, the big cable companies discussed their vision for the future. They introduced the concept that cable networks would be able to deliver 10-gigabit broadband in the future. They labeled the promotion at the show as 10G. I didn't write about it at the time because I assumed this was a gimmick to give some buzz to this show in the middle of the pandemic. But lately, I've seen that they are still talking about the 10G initiative. more
The latest ICANN domain auction brought the auction proceeds piggy bank to about $240 million. The application fees for the new gTLD round were $361 million of which, at the end of March, they'd spent $227 million, and their very conservative estimate is that at the end of the process they'll have spent $289 million. If you add the numbers from the private auctions to the ones for the ICANN auctions, it's as much or more than the application costs. more
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