Observations in and Around the UN Broadband Commission

The 7th meeting of the UN Broadband Commission in Mexico City was again a good combination of announcements about new plans, results of previously undertaken activities, and views on the future of broadband. Very noticeable was the enthusiasm and acknowledgement of the impact of ICT, and of broadband in particular. In September 2012 the Commission launched its working group on gender equality. Research undertaken by the various members of the workgroup provided somewhat similar results. more

Live Webcast Thursday March 28 of ION Singapore IPv6 and DNSSEC Sessions

For those of you interested in IPv6 and/or DNSSEC, we'll have a live webcast out of the Internet Society's ION Singapore conference happening tomorrow, March 28, 2013, starting at 2:00pm Singapore time. more

GoDaddy Laying Off 8% of Its Workforce Amid Uncertain Macroeconomic Environment

GoDaddy has announced a plan to reduce its global team size by 8%. The move will affect multiple levels in the company, as well as its three brands -- Media Temple, Main Street Hub, and 123 Reg. more

Spam Now Over 90% of All Email, Increasing Volumes Involve Social Networking Sites

Spam levels have increased by 5.1% since last month, reaching heights of 90.4%, according to latest report from Symantec's MessageLabs Intelligence... The majority of this increase in spam in May was comprised of messages with very little content other than a subject line and valid hyperlink, says the report. "Each hyperlink pointed to a different active profile on one of a number of major social networking environments. The profiles were likely created using random names and automated CAPTCHA-breaking tools. Moreover, the emails were sent from valid webmail hosting providers, which means they were not spoofed, as has been the case in the past for these types of domains." more

Nov 25th Deadline To Nominate Technical Community Reps for IGF Multistakeholder Advisory Group (MAG)

Would you (or someone you know) be interested in representing the "technical community" on the Multistakeholder Advisory Group (MAG) of the Internet Governance Forum (IGF)? If so, the deadline to nominate someone (including yourself) is Monday, November 25, 2013. Under-Secretary-General Wu Hongbo of UNDESA has issued a statement on the Internet Governance Forum (IGF) Multistakeholder Advisory Group (MAG) renewal process for 2014 with the stated aim of rotating one third of the MAG members. more

WHOIS Policy at ICANN Continues to Fail

ICANN has once again acceded to the wants of contracted parties and is at risk of abdicating its duty to act in the global public interest when it comes to WHOIS policy. Its inability or unwillingness to date to reign in bad WHOIS policy, driven by contracted party interests, flies in the face of its previously-expressed policy goal “to ensure the continued availability of WHOIS to the greatest extent possible while maintaining the security and stability of the Internet’s system of unique identifiers.” more

Phishing 2020: A Concentrated Dose of Badness

How much phishing is there? Where is it occurring, and why? How can it be reduced? I and my colleagues at Interisle Consulting have just published a new study called Phishing Landscape 2020, designed to answer those questions. We assembled a deep set of data from four different, respected threat intelligence providers and enriched it with additional DNS data and investigation. The result is a look at phishing attacks that occurred in May through July 2020. more

IPv6 a Case of Confirmation Bias

Is the glass half full or half empty? The human reflex of selective deafness to information or arguments countering one’s established believes lives on. The ISOC organized lunchtime IPv6 panel at IETF 74 in San Francisco illustrates the point... more

DNSSEC Signed ROOT by 1 July 2010

Mehmet Akcin writes: As announced today as part of RIPE meeting in Lisbon, Portugal by Joe Abley, DNS Group Director at ICANN, and Matt Larson, Vice President of DNS Research at VeriSign, in their presentation (Page 25), DNSSEC for the root zone is proposed to be fully deployed by July 1, 2010. The Draft Timeline suggests Root zone being signed by December 1, 2009 while initially staying internal to ICANN and VeriSign. The incremental roll out of the signed root would then take place from January until July 2010. more

No Time Bar for Cybersquatting Claims Under UDRP

Headline in TheDomains.com, June 18, 2016: "Wow: 20 Year Old Domain Name WorldTradeCenter.com Lost in UDRP." For those who don't follow UDRP decisions carefully this may elicit, how can this be? Well, surprised or not, and assuming complainant has priority in the string of characters that is both a domain name and a trademark... delay is not a factor in prevailing on cybersquatting claims when there is an alignment of other factors... more

Digital Rights Defender Steps Aside: Cindy Cohn to Leave EFF After 25 Years

Cindy Cohn, a leading advocate for digital civil liberties, will step down as executive director of the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) by mid-2026. Her departure marks the end of a tenure spanning over two decades, including ten years at the helm of the San Francisco-based nonprofit. more

Have You Reviewed Your Domain Lock Portfolio?

Domain names give your intellectual property visibility, as well as provide function for your company's infrastructure. Vital domain names are simply too important to be left exposed. To protect them, you can add extra layers of security to your digital brand with easy, secure, server-level protection in addition to multi-level locks that combat domain name system (DNS) hijacking and protect against unauthorized changes and deletions to your critical domain names. more

What’s With the 32-Bit Numbers That the Internet Keeps Defying?

By now you might have read the news "How 'Gangnam Style' Broke YouTube?" What happened is that a YouTube video named 'Gangnam Style' by a South Korean singer Park Jae-sang, known by his stage name PSY, has been viewed so many times that it broke YouTube's view counter. YouTube's view counter is built on a 32-bit integer, which provides a view-tracking capability of nearly 2.15 billion views. more

Network Dis-Aggregation and SDN: Different, But Related

Two of the hottest trends in networking today are network dis-aggregation and SDN. This is great for many reasons. It's also confusing. The marketing hype makes it hard to understand either topic. SDN has become so vague that if you ask 10 experts what it means, you are likely to get 12 different answers. Network dis-aggregation seems straightforward enough until it gets confused with SDN. We need to take a step back. In a recent Packet Pushers blog post; I start with a simple explanation of each of these trends and then map how they interact. more

According to the Department of Homeland Security, Cybercrime Is a Bigger Threat Than Terrorism

An article in Forbes the other day reports on US Secretary of Homeland Security Janet Napolitano's comments that 'cybercrime represents the "greatest threat and actual activity that we have seen aimed at the west and at the United States" in addition to "or other than Al Qaeda and Al Qaeda-related groups."' ..."Napolitano cited a study commissioned by Symantec that put the total worldwide cost of cybercrime at $388 billion -- higher than the global market for heroin, cocaine and marijuana combined." more