eHealth: Start With the Professionals

With the prospect of broadband networks becoming more and more of a reality, it appears that concepts such as eHealth are not too far away. Digital healthcare describes the whole system of GPs, hospitals and regional healthcare centres, while eHealth describes the many health applications which will become available for people to use at home. more

NTAG Chair Blog: A Better Auction Framework

New gTLD Applicants now have a more fair and reasonable ICANN auction framework. A collaborative negotiation between the New TLD Applicant Group (NTAG) Auctions Working Group and ICANN Staff resulted in changes that improve the auction rules and bidder agreement. The indemnification and waivers in the agreement are now aligned with breaches that applicants can control. Applicants also now have an indemnification from Power Auction for third party claims related to IP infringement. more

The West Is Shooting Itself in Its IT Foot

In our globalized economy, it is vital that we do establish levels of fair trade, and the USA is right in addressing that issue. However, making technology a key element of the trade war will backfire. Let's take (again) the Huawei issue as an example. The company has admitted that the US boycott is hitting them severely with an estimated loss of $30 billion in revenues. One of the other elements of the trade boycott is that Google is no longer allowed to provide... more

WIPO Updates GDPR Guidance for UDRP

Three months after implementation of the European Union's (EU) General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), the World Intellectual Property Organization's (WIPO) Arbitration and Mediation Center has expanded and updated its already helpful web page with important questions and answers about how the GDPR is impacting the Uniform Domain Name Dispute Resolution Policy (UDRP). more

EURid Report Reveals Europe’s .EU TLD Shrank by Over 130K Domains in 2018

EURid, the registry manager of Europe's .EU top-level domain, released its Annual Report today, revealing that in 2018 the total net registrations decreased by 130,305 (from 3,815,055 to 3,684,750). more

OPTA revokes Diginotar License as TTP

Wout de Natris: "In this decision OPTA revokes the registration of Diginotar as a so called Trusted Third Party. Diginotar issued certified certificates for digital signatures. The security breach by Iranian hackers over the summer, which Diginotar did not report to the authorities, lead to severe credibility issues for all Diginotar certificates issued before. This included Dutch government websites, but also led to severe breaches of privacy for Iranian end users, in multiple countries. As a result of OPTA's decision all certificates issued by Diginotar have to be revoked, while at the same she is forbidden to issue new ones. more

Unexplained Glitch Disrupts Root-Server, Raises Security Concerns

For over four days, a crucial server within the Internet's domain name system (DNS) experienced an unexplained glitch, causing it to fall out of sync with its 12 peer root servers. The server, operated by Cogent Communications, is one of the 13 essential root servers that manage the Internet's root zone. more

Newer Cryptographic Advances for the Domain Name System: NSEC5 and Tokenized Queries

In my last post, I looked at what happens when a DNS query renders a "negative" response -- i.e., when a domain name doesn't exist. I then examined two cryptographic approaches to handling negative responses: NSEC and NSEC3. In this post, I will examine a third approach, NSEC5, and a related concept that protects client information, tokenized queries. The concepts I discuss below are topics we've studied in our long-term research program as we evaluate new technologies. more

Lessons From an E-Voting Debacle

There has been a significant focus over the past two years on the vulnerability and cyber threat risks faced for voting systems at the local level. That focus has typically been on State and local jurisdictions like cities, counties and towns, and resulted in the creation of the DHS Elections Infrastructure Information Sharing and Analysis Center (ISAC) to assist. However, there are other local governance entities at significant risk as well. more

Mobile Prices Unlikely to Be Affected by AT&T Decision

Contrary to what some financial analysts would have us believe, it is highly unlikely that the price increases for mobile broadband services which were recently announced by AT&T will be replicated by other mobile operators around the world. The mobile market in the US is one of the least regulated and therefore one the most monopolised markets in the western world. more

French Presidential Candidate Confirms Massive Hack, Emails Dumped Online Two Days Before Election

Leading French presidential candidate Emmanuel Macron's campaign confirmed on Friday a "massive" computer hack that dumped its campaign emails online less than two days before the election. more

Starlink Now Covers All of Australia

My colleague, Robert Smallwood in Geraldton, WA at the Department of Primary Industries and Regional Development (WA Government), has been testing Starlink now since March 2022 and he reports on his experience and in general, provides updates about Starlink and its mother company, SpaceX. He allowed me to use his report to write this article. more

Senators Introduce COPIED Act to Combat AI-Driven Deepfakes

In a bipartisan effort to address the growing threat of deepfakes, U.S. Senators Marsha Blackburn (R-Tenn.), Maria Cantwell (D-Wash.), and Martin Heinrich (D-N.M.) have introduced the Content Origin Protection and Integrity from Edited and Deepfaked Media Act (COPIED Act). more

Another Look at the Latest Domain Name Numbers and Trends

There are now 177 million domain names across all top-level domains, which is an increase by 16% (24 million domain names) compared to a year ago. These numbers are from the latest Domain Name Industry Brief, a quarterly report from VeriSign about the growth of the domain name industry. In this review, Royal Pingdom has broken down the numbers in order to demonstrate the growth of both gTLDs (generic TLDs, such as .com and .net) and ccTLDs (country-code TLDs, such as .cn, .se, .uk and .us). more

Broadband for Communities

When talking about the benefits of broadband, it's easy to overlook how broadband has become the glue that brings people and communities together. This is becoming particularly important for rural communities but matters to people everywhere. Rural communities have been rapidly losing other forms of media that were the focal point in the past. 2004 was the peak of the newspaper business in terms of readership and revenues. more