Canada’s Anti-spam Bill C-28 is the Law of the Land

It's been a long time coming, but Canada has an anti-spam law, and one, which sets a new world standard, and a tough, but fair, opt-in protocol for everyone in North America who sends commercial email and other electronic messages. Yesterday, The Canadian Senate voted to accept Bill C-28, and today, December 15, at 13:00 eastern, it will be given Royal Asset of the Governor General of Canada, His Excellency the Right Honourable David Johnston. more

IPv6 : Rumours Are More Accurate Than Predictions

As rumours tend to be more accurate than predictions, the last /8's are hanging already on this years Christmas tree and one should hurry to get hold of a small little RIR block to put on next year's tree. I will miss the decade of heated and passionate debates between Tony Hain and Geoff Huston on when the exhaustion would actually happen. Estimates ranged all the way from 2008 to 2020 with Tony predicting early demise of IPv4 addresses while Geoff initially thought exhaustion would come later. As time passed the interval converged and here we are. more

WiFi in All U.S. Federal Buildings

Legislation has been introduced in the US that will require all public federal buildings to install WiFi base stations in order to free up cell phone networks. The Federal Wi-Net Act would mandate the installation of small WiFi base stations in all publicly accessible federal buildings in order to increase wireless coverage and free up mobile networks. The bill would require all new buildings under construction to comply and all older buildings to be retrofitted by 2014. It also orders $15 million from the Federal Buildings Fund be allocated to fund the installations. more

eco: 100K PCs Cleaned Through Anti-Botnet Center

eco, the German ISP association, mentions on its website today that the 100,000^th PC was cleaned from infection through its PC cleaning program. Since 15 September, German account holders could visit the website to download tools to clean up computers from digital infections. Botfrei ("botfree", translation WdN) is a cooperation between eco and the German government. First figures seem to prove that this is a successful public-private partnership, worth looking into for other countries as a best practice. more

How to Discredit Net Neutrality

On Tuesday (November 30) Internet backbone provider Level3 publicly accused cable-based ISP Comcast of trying to thwart competing video services delivered through the internet. Comcast was, according to Level3, suddenly choosing to charge it more because of its carriage of Netflix traffic. The accusation was consciously framed to raise net neutrality alarms. It appeared as if a cable TV giant was using its control of internet access to make access to a competing, over the top video service more expensive... Then the full story came out. more

Bad Timing: Comcast, Netflix, NN, Cable Modems, and NBCU

Comcast, the largest broadband provider, largest pay-TV company, and third-largest telephone company in the country, distributes communications services to more than a third of the country. Today Comcast's existing overwhelming market power was on display in major public battles with (1) Level 3 and (2) cable modem manufacturer Zoom. The takeaway from today: No market forces are constraining Comcast -- or any of the other major cable distributors, none of which compete with each other. more

ITU, the Internet, and a Very Contentious Footnote

I was part of a small APNIC delegation that attended the ITU Plenipotentiary Conference (PP-10) with a limited Sector Member role as an observer. Our aim was to be available to ITU Member States with questions on IP addressing issues and to follow Member State discussions on the ITU's role in Internet governance issues. Four adopted resolutions at PP-10 were of particular relevance to Internet management, of which one was new: "Facilitating the transition from IPv4 to IPv6". more

The Next Internet Revolution Will Not Be in English

This visual depicts about half of the currently approved internationalized domain names (IDNs), positioned over their respective regions. Notice the wide range of scripts over India and the wide range of Arabic domains. I left off the Latin country code equivalents (in, cn, th, sa, etc.) to illustrate what the Internet is going to look like (at a very high level) in the years ahead. more

The Internet Monopolies?

Tim Wu had an OpEd published in the Wall Street Journal this weekend: In the Grip of the Internet Monopolists. There are commentaries on the piece on The Technology Liberation Front and TechCrunch. The more I thought about the OpEd, the more troubling it seemed. more

Cyber Crime: It’s All About Data (Part 1)

Cyber crime = crime. How do we make police forces understand this and how to get it prioritized? In this series of blogs I am looking into whether aggregating data can change the way cyber crime is approached and prioritized. At a seminar at the IT Security trade fair in Utrecht detective super intendant Charlie McMurdie, head of the cyber crime unit of the London Metropolitan police, said that cyber crime was recently prioritized by the UK government. She also said the following and I'm allowed to quote this... more

.COM - The Riskiest Top-Level Domain? (Part 2)

Following up from my post yesterday, I thought I would take a look at how spammy each particular TLD is. At the moment, I only track 8 TLD's - .cn, .ru, .com, .net, .org, .info, .biz and .name. To check to see which one is the spammiest, I took all of our post-IP blocked mail and determined how many times those messages occurred in email, and how many times that email was marked as spam... more

Broadband Challenge Isn’t About Plumbing

It seems to me that too many people have focused government attention on intervening in the supply of broadband facilities. Let's face it, it is easier to look at a dozen or so suppliers to gather information and figure out who should receive a cheque to help direct their investment in broadband facilities. On the other side of the equation, it is hard work to stimulate demand. But this is precisely where our efforts should be focused, as was recommended by the recent report... more

Landing Sites, Internet’s Achilles Heel of the Internet?

For a student final dissertation TV documentary short, 10 minutes, I have ended up choosing to investigate whether the landing stations for trans-atlantic cables are the achilles heel of the internet. As an outsider to the world of internet infrastructure I have been struck by how easy it has been to identify the landing stations in Cornwall and the cables that enter them. (Thank you Google for the aerial photographs) more

United States Is the Most Bot-Infected Country. Right?

A couple of days ago, Threatpost posted an article indicating that the United States is the most bot-infected country... I think that Microsoft's mechanism of measuring bot infections is a good one, not necessarily because it is the most accurate but because it represents the most complete snapshot of botnet statistics. Because Microsoft Windows is installed on so many computers worldwide and because so many users across the world call home to the MSRT, Microsoft is able to collect a very large snapshot of data. more

Iran’s Top-Level Domain Approved by ICANN, That is .IRAN in Non-Latin

Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) announced today its approval of non-Latin string evaluation of Iran. This approval will allow the availability of Iran's top-level domain in its own native language, Persian, also known as Farsi (that is, the domain name .IRAN, in non-Latin characters). According to ICANN, there are currently 33 requests for Internationalized Domain Names (IDN) country code Top-Level Domains (ccTLDs) representing 22 languages out of which 18 countries/territories have so far been approved. Other countries that have also successfully passed this string evaluation by ICANN include: India, Republic of Korea, Syrian Arab Republic and Singapore. more