A little over two weeks from now the ICANN meeting in Cartagena de Indias will be over and, if ICANN has the courage of its convictions, the new generic top-level domain (gTLD) program should be on the home stretch, heading towards its official May 30 launch. The ground rules will be clear, the process predictable, and applicants will be able to begin to implement their strategies with confidence. As Elvis Presley once sang, it will be a time for "a little less conversation, a little more action, please". more
TorrentFreak reports: "Following on the heels of this week's domain seizure of a large hiphop file-sharing links forum, it's clear today that the U.S. Government has been very busy. Without any need for COICA, ICE has just seized the domain of a BitTorrent meta-search engine along with those belonging to other music linking sites and several others which appear to be connected to physical counterfeit goods. more
Highest share of mobile web usage isn't in the most developed nations, but rather in the developing nations of the world, based on StatCounter's October 2010 data. "The reason these countries have such high mobile web usage compared to desktop web usage (for lack of a better name) is very much a result of economics," says RoyalPingdom. "A relatively cheap mobile phone (most often from Nokia, as we have seen) will then be a much more realistic option, and it therefore becomes the way to reach the Web for many. " more
The European Commission is apparently considering the promulgation and adoption of a directive that would, at least in part, criminalize botnets. As I understand it, the premise behind adopting such a directive is that since botnets are capable of inflicting "harm" on a large scale, we need to separately criminalize them. I decided to examine the need for and utility of such legislation in this post. more
Earl Zmijewski reporting in Renesys Blog: "There's been sudden interest recently in a Chinese route hijacking incident that occurred way back in April, brought about by a new report to the US Congress that highlighted the event. A second Chinese event, also in the report, has received almost no attention despite being much more interesting (technically, anyway). A Chinese DNS censorship incident occurred just one month earlier, in March..." more
As an unwavering stalwart of ICANN's obligation to honor its commitments under the bylaws to "operate to the maximum extent feasible in an open and transparent manner" I make it a point to read the minutes of its board and committee meetings in large part because I spent most of my three years on the ICANN Board trying to get these documents timely published. In reviewing the recently published IANA Committee minutes the following item caught my attention. more
The public is taking an increasing interest in ensuring that IT assets of federal agencies are protected from cybersecurity attacks. FISMA is addressing this concern, in part, by initiating a standard setting process for continuous monitoring. The actions taken by NIST for the federal sector could have a very significant impact on the private sector because pending legislation would provide the federal government with the authority to mandate cybesecurity measures on the private sector. more
The recent declaration from the UK’s minister for communications that the Internet should be tiered, thereby allowing ISPs to charge for prioritised traffic (either rated by speed delivered or by content provider) is a knee-jerk response to network strain masking as a necessary network management tool, and is a potential threat to the concept of net neutrality. ...developments in the mobile data sector make it clear that capacity constraints are appearing on mobile networks as well, long before the anticipated launch of LTE-based services in the UK in 2013. more
The Internet Routing Registry (IRR) is a globally distributed routing information database. The IRR consists of several databases run by various organisations in which network operators can publish their routing policies and their routing announcements in a way that allows other network operators to make use of the data. In addition to making Internet topology visible, the IRR is used by network operators to look up peering agreements, determine optimal policies and, more recently, to configure their routers. more
An industry professional at Abusix is the backbone behind a proposal to improve and create better mitigation of abuse across different global internet networks. Basically, this introduces a mandatory "abuse contact" field for objects in global Whois databases. This provides a more efficient way for abuse reports to reach the correct network contact. Personally - as a Postmaster for a leading, white-label ISP, I applaud this with great happiness for multiple reasons. I also feel people who handle abuse desks, anti-abuse roles, etc. should closely follow this. more
This year's Cisco Collaboration Summit was a step up from last year, and I say that for good reason. Last year's event was good -- all of Cisco's events are good -- but the venue was too small and it took away from the messaging. For 2010, Cisco went out of town to the classy and classic Arizona Biltmore in Phoenix. They don't build them like this anymore, and to me, this setting did far more justice for what Cisco has to say about collaboration. more
You wake up, make coffee, sit down by the computer and start reading your favorite web sites. You fire up your favorite browser and type 'www.site.com' on the address bar, hit enter and continue sipping on that coffee. You wait for the page to load, sipping some more coffee - a few seconds later you get the Google search results for 'www.site.com'. You scratch your head, sip some more coffee, and start wondering if you did a typo, but no it is correct - Google is not correcting your spelling. more
November 11, 2010, marked the day when the new Internationalized Domain Name (IDN) contry code Top-Level Domain (ccTLD) .?? (Cyrillic for ?????????? ?????????, Russian Federation) was opened for general registration. Prior to that date the registration was open only for trademark owners and governmental institutions. ... It turned out they needed less than three hours to reach to the 100,000 domain names! Such a gold rush was not expected, and numbers continued to grow - 200,000 within 6 hours... more than 460,000 by today. more
Here's the question: is it meaningful or important for a federal agency to have regulatory authority over high-speed Internet access connectivity? Right now, the FCC (which is supposed to oversee "communication over wire and radio") has no clear authority to make policy about high-speed Internet connectivity. (Transport is different than content - this post is not about applications or uses of this connectivity. Be careful when you talk about the Internet "ecosystem," because transport has been historically and remains different from everything else. I'm talking about the capacity to send packets from Point A to Point B, whether provided by wired or wireless providers.) more
McAfee, Inc. today unveiled its McAfee Threats Report: Third Quarter 2010, which uncovered that average daily malware growth has reached its highest levels, with an average of 60,000 new pieces of malware identified per day, almost quadrupling since 2007. At the same time, spam levels decreased in volume this quarter, both globally and in local geographies. Spam hit a two year low this quarter while malware continued to soar. More than 14 million unique pieces of malware were identified in 2010, one million more than Q3 2009. more
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