Is Australia a Hot-Bed of Zombie Activity?

About a week ago, I posted that Australia was getting ISPs to boot infected computers off of their network. I commented on whether or not this was a good policy. However, there was one thing in that article that I wanted to comment on but didn't... more

Donuts, Rightside Group Merge in a $213M Acquisition Deal

Donuts Inc., a leading domain name registry for new top-level domains and Rightside Group today announced a merger agreement; Donuts has agreed to acquire Rightside for $10.60 per share in an all-cash tender offer, for an aggregate purchase price of approximately $213MM. more

DNS Complexity Lessons

Recently, Bert Hubert wrote of a growing problem in the networking world: the complexity of DNS. We have two systems we all use in the Internet, DNS and BGP. Both of these systems appear to be able to handle anything we can throw at them and "keep on ticking." But how far can we drive the complexity of these systems before they ultimately fail? Bert posted a chart on the APNIC blog to illustrate the problem. more

Don’t Blame Open Recursives For DDoS Attacks and Why You Should Implement BCP38

There has been plenty of buzz and chatter on the Internet recently concerning a very large DDoS attack against CloudFlare, with coverage on their blog, the New York Times, and the BBC, among many others. While attacks of this nature are certainly nothing new, the scale of this attack was surprising, reported to hit 120Gbps. For a sense of scale, your average cable modem is only about 20Mbps, or about 0.016% of that bandwidth. more

Why 5G Won’t Be Here Tomorrow

I just saw another article yesterday written by a major-city newspaper telling the public that 5G is coming in 2020. I hate to see reporters who have accepted the nonsense being peddled by the carriers without digging a little deeper to find the truth. At some point in the near future, the public will finally realize that the 5G talk has mostly been hype. more

Loon Balloons Restore Internet After a Massive Earthquake Strikes Remote Parts of Peru

On Sunday, when a magnitude 8.0 earthquake struck remote parts of Peru’s Amazon region, at the request of the government of Peru and Telefónica, Alphabet re-directs a group of its Loon balloons to the impacted area to restore Internet access. Within 48 hours, people on the ground had wireless broadband communication, reports Alphabet. more

Human Rights and Regular Internet Users

Human rights are a topic that came up several times at the IETF meeting that just ended. There's a Human Rights Research Group that had a session with a bunch of short presentations, and the featured two talks at the plenary asking, 'Can Internet Protocols Affect Human Rights?' The second one, by David Clark of MIT, was particularly good, talking about "tussle" and how one has to design for it or else people will work around you. more

ICANN to Release Hundreds of Domain Names Matching Country Names

Hundreds of country and territory domain names are likely to be finally released this year based on the new resolution that calls for ICANN to take "all steps necessary" to do so. more

Germany’s Leading ISP Deutsche Telekom Under Cyberattack, Close to 900K Customers Affected

Close to a million Deutsche Telekom customers have had trouble getting online since Sunday afternoon which the company on Monday confirmed to be the result of an "outside" attack. more

Three Reasons Why Apple Didn’t Have to Unlock a Phone

The US government is demanding Apple unlock iPhones in about a dozen cases beside the San Bernardino one. In a strikingly similar case, Judge James Orenstein in Brooklyn rejected the government's request for three separate reasons. In the decision the judge refers several times to the San Bernardino case, and it is clear he expects this decision to be an important precedent for that one. more

ICANN Chair Elections Test Its Institutional Integrity

The ICANN Board will soon be considering candidates for election to the position of ICANN Chairperson and Vice Chair, which compels me to remind both the Board and the ICANN community of the fact that one of the members pursuing the Chairmanship is the subject of an on-going Australian Freedom of Information Act, which was initiated by the irregularities that brought about this individuals dismissal from the .au Domain Administration. more

Rewiring Internet Governance: Summing up ICANN Policy Walking Backward Into the Future (Part 4)

So-called "globalization" and its corollaries which are trade policy and, thus, foreign policy intersect with telecommunications. This ought to be obvious and it is not new. For example, in December 2011, OECD adopted its "Recommendation of the Council on Principles for Internet Policy Making", the latter which apparently connects with an earlier U.S. cyberspace strategy based on something called the "Internet Freedom Agenda" dated 21 January 2010... more

Faceobook on Connecting the World from the Sky

Facebook has announced more details on how its Connectivity Lab is working to connect the world from the sky with drones, satellites and lasers. more

Why Small and Medium-Size Operators Should Care About Sustainability

A new resource dedicated to small and medium-sized digital infrastructure providers highlights the benefits of incorporating sustainability into their operations, offers a consolidated list of best practices and recommendations, and shares additional resources to help make practical changes to save time, energy, and money. more

Protecting Privacy Differently

My thesis is simple: the way we protect privacy today is broken and cannot be fixed without a radical change in direction. My full argument is long; I submitted it to the NTIA's request for comments on privacy. Here's a short summary. For almost 50 years, privacy protection has been based on the Fair Information Practice Principles (FIPPs). There are several provisions... more