Electricity Utilities and IoT

More and more connected devices will require more and better electricity solutions. In many developing economies more people have ready access to a smartphone and the internet than they have access to electricity. For that reason we have seen mobile telecoms operators starting to include power solutions (mainly through distributed energy systems, using solar panels) in order to sell more phones and telecom services. This shows how important access to electricity is. more

Symantec Acquires VeriSign’s Security Business for $1.28 Billion

Symantec today announced that it has signed a definitive agreement to acquire VeriSign's identity and authentication business, which includes the Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) Certificate Services, the Public Key Infrastructure (PKI) Services, the VeriSign Trust Services and the VeriSign Identity Protection (VIP) Authentication Service. more

Representatives From EU, NATO, USA, Japan, Australia Hold Meeting on 5G Security and Policy Measures

Representatives from over 30 countries including nations from European Union, NATO, United States, Germany, Japan, Israel and Australia participated in the Prague 5G Security Conference this week. more

Preparing for GDPR’s Impact on WHOIS - 5 Steps to Consider

With GDPR coming into effect this May, it is almost a forgone conclusion that WHOIS as we know it today, will change. Without knowing the full details, how can companies begin to prepare? First and foremost, ensuring that brand protection, security and compliance departments are aware that a change to WHOIS access is on the horizon is an important first step. Just knowing that the ability to uncover domain ownership information is likely to change in the future will help to relieve some of the angst that is likely to occur. more

ITU Becomes Trans-Sectoral

Very little was said about telecommunications during the official speeches and forums at ITU Telecom World 2009. The industry is even talking about changing its focus from telecommunications to ICT [United Nations Information and Communication Technologies Task Force], Discussions are now focusing on how ICT can be used to underpin the various socio-economic developments that are taking place. more

How Safe is Your Fiber Network?

There was a major attack launched against long-haul fiber networks outside of Paris, France, on April 27 of this year. It appears that there was a coordinated attack by vandals to cut three long-haul fiber routes simultaneously. Fibers were cut with what seemed like a circular saw, and sections of fiber were removed to make it hard to make repairs. These were backbone fibers that were shared by multiple ISPs. more

EU Rulings on Geo-Blocking in Digital Storefronts Will Increase Piracy Rates in the Developing World

For the longest time, it was an insurmountable challenge for those in the developing world to be able to afford to legally consume multimedia products. Prices originally set in Dollars, Euros or Yen often received insufficient adjustments to compensate for lower incomes, something that was compounded by local import or manufacture taxes that did little to alleviate matters. more

Celebrating the 25Th Anniversary of the World Wide Web

Today the full original name of the World Wide Web is being seen everywhere as people all around the world join together to celebrate the 25th anniversary of the proposal that Tim Berners-Lee submitted at CERN that led to the creation of the "Web" we have today. While many of our articles here on CircleID focus more on the underlying Internet infrastructure that makes the Web possible, it's good to take a moment to reflect on - and celebrate - the amazing evolution of the Web from those very early days!  more

Is It Time for Social Networks to Adopt Some Trademark Protection?

The headlines this week say that over 200 million domain names now exist on the internet. Pretty impressive... But consider the explosive growth of Social Networks. The top twenty social networks alone have over 2 billion user names. With User Names on social networks rapidly becoming the Internet's new brand identifiers, I wonder: is it time that we apply the same trademark rules we have for domain names to user names as well? more

Unregistered Gems Part 6: Phonemizing Strings to Find Brandable Domains

The UnregisteredGems.com series of articles explores a range of techniques to filter and search through the universe of unregistered domain names, in order to find examples which may be compelling candidates for entities looking to select a new brand name (and its associated domain). The previous instalment of the series looked at the categorisation of candidate names according to the phonetic characteristics of its constituent consonants, using a simple one-to-one mapping between each consonant and a corresponding phonetic group. more

Is Cable Broadband Equal to Fiber?

As I have blogged over the years, I have to give kudos to the folks at the big ISPs who have steadily provided controversial quotes that are worth writing about. The latest comes in an article by Linda Hardest at FierceTelecom. She quotes Charter's CEO Tom Rutledge talking about comparing cable broadband to fiber. She quotes Rutledge as saying... more

CENTR Reports Decreased Growth in European ccTLDs

According to the latest quarterly report from the Council of European National Top-Level Domain Registries (CENTR), the median growth in European ccTLDs during 2019 was recorded at 2.4% YOY, down from the 3.1% recorded at the same time in 2018. more

Mobile Broadband Penetration in Asia

The advent of mobile broadband triggered a huge change in broadband access across Asia. Following more than a decade of strong growth in almost all mobile markets in the region, an amazing transition to new generation mobile networks and services took place. By end 2014 there were a total of 1.2 billion mobile subscribers and with annual growth running at over 40% coming into 2015 the numbers were expected to hit 1.7 billion by end-2015. more

Not World War III - This Time the ICT Revolution

In the past it has been wars and revolutions that created major changes in society. It was only after these events that old ideas, structures and doctrines gave way. And in many countries wars and revolutions are still functioning as a tool for change -- the Arab Revolution and the collapse of the Soviet Empire are good examples of this. But wars and revolutions are disruptive in an economic sense, cost the lives of many people, and necessitate costly rebuilds after the even more

Pre-Registrations of .NYC Domain Names and the Shattered Dream

In response to United Domains pre-registration of .nyc domain names, we posted the below on our blog and the NARLO sites yesterday. While United Domains pre-registration service is free and non-binding, the North American Regional At Large Organization, part of the ICANN governance ecology, is concerned that "the offer of such a service could create artificial demand..." more