Liberty Reserve Now, Bitcoin Next?

The papers have been abuzz with the shutdown of Liberty Reserve, an online payments system, due to accusations of large scale money laundering via anonymous transactions. Many people have noted similarities between LR and Bitcoin and wonder whether Bitcoin is next. I doubt it, because with Bitcoin, nothing is anonymous. more

IPv6: Penny Wise and Pound Foolish

The theory put forward by the IETF was simple enough... while there were still enough IPv4 addresses, use transition technologies to migrate to dual stack and then wean IPv4 off over time. All nice and tidy. The way engineers, myself included, liked it. However those controlling the purse strings had a different idea. more

How to Stop the Spread of Malware? A Call for Action

On Webwereld an article was published following a new Kaspersky malware report Q1-2013. Nothing new was mentioned here. The Netherlands remains the number 3 as far as sending malware from Dutch servers is concerned. At the same time Kaspersky writes that The Netherlands is one of the most safe countries as far as infections go. So what is going on here? more

ICANN at the Inflection Point: Implications and Effects Of the GAC Beijing Communique

Although this article was first published just a few days ago, on May 8th, there have been several important intervening developments. First, on May 10th ICANN released a News Alert on "NGPC Progress on GAC Advice" that provides a timetable for how the New gTLD program Committee will deal with the GAC Communique. Of particular note is that, as the last action in an initial phase consisting of "actions for soliciting input from Applicants and from the Community', the NGPC will begin to "Review and consider Applicant responses to GAC Advice and Public Comments on how Board should respond to GAC Advice... more

What New gTLD Applicants Need Is a Quick, Lightweight Answer to the World’s Governments. Here It Is.

It's safe to say that with just a week to go before ICANN intended to sign the first contract for a new gTLD, the last thing anyone wanted was a 12-page document from the world's governments with 16 new "safeguards", six of which it wants to see applied to every new extension. But what the industry shouldn't overlook, especially in the face of the expected critical responses this week and next, is that the Governmental Advisory Committee's (GAC's) formal advice from the ICANN Beijing meeting represents an opportunity for the domain name industry to lock-in self-regulation at a critical point in its evolution. more

New Registry Agreement, All Good?

In the run-up to the launch of new gTLDs, ICANN has been negotiating both of its main supplier contracts. The registrar contract (Registrar Accreditation Agreement or RAA) negotiations are now all but complete. A new contract draft has been posted for public comment and it now seems likely that in little over a month, this will become the official new 2013 RAA. more

US Smart Grid Networks Exploiting Infrastructure to Provide Wireless Broadband

The USDA Rural Development's Rural Utilities Service (RUS) has now spent the $250 million committed for smart grid technologies. To this has been added an additional $201 million in funding approved by the Agriculture Secretary to electricity utilities in eight states to install smart grid technologies and improve their generation and transmission facilities. The beneficiaries are spread among a large number of states. more

Google Does the Right Thing Opening Several Closed Generic TLD Applications

Over the last few months one of the areas of attention in the new TLD project has been "closed generics". I've written about this several times in the past and I've also raised the issue in as many fora as possible. Yesterday ICANN published a letter they'd received from Google with respect to several of their new TLD applications. more

ICANN’s NomCom 2-Stage (R)evolution

ICANN's Nominating Committee (NomCom) is both a strange animal and a precious resource. Having a committee charged with first recruiting, then selecting suitable candidates to hold key positions within ICANN is something that is often little, or even mis, understood. Within the ICANN community itself. By the very nature of its recruitment role, the NomCom has to remain secretive. About who the candidates are, at any rate. But that doesn't mean the rest of the NomCom's processes must remain so. more

How Will Banks Ensure the Safety of Our Money? DDoS Attacks on NL Banks

This week bank costumers of The Netherlands were shocked when they realised that online banking may not be as safe as they thought. Perhaps some were surprised to hear that what they think is money, is nothing but digits, something that does not exist. Their money only exist because we all act as if it exists and accept transactions between each other aided by software run by banks, if they haven't outsourced that function. more

Much Ado About Nothing

With much fanfare last month, Uniregistry announced that proposals for dispute resolution between New TLD applicants in lieu of ICANN's so-called "Auction of Last Resort" posed significant antitrust risks. Their claim of concern was not based on any critical antitrust analysis, but rather on the fact that they had sought a "Business Review" letter from the Antitrust Division of the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ), and, according to Uniregistry, the DOJ failed to provide them a positive response and discussed the issue with them. more

ICANN Announces Blocking Usage Review Panel

Culminating a year-long policy development process, ICANN today launched its new Blocking Usage Review Panel (BURP). The BURP provides long-needed oversight over services that block Internet traffic. "While everyone understands that national laws such as the U.S. CAN SPAM define what traffic is or is not elegible to block, legal processes can be slow and cumbersome," said a spokeswoman. "Since the Internet is global and traffic often traverses multiple countries, the array of different laws cause uncertainty." more

The Spamhaus Distributed Denial of Service - How Big a Deal Was It?

If you haven't been reading the news of late, venerable anti-spam service Spamhaus has been the target of a sustained, record-setting Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) attack over the past couple of weeks... Of course, bad guys are always mad at Spamhaus, and so they had a pretty robust set-up to begin with, but whoever was behind this attack was able to muster some huge resources, heretofore never seen in intensity, and it had some impact, on the Spamhaus website, and to a limited degree, on the behind-the-scenes services that Spamhaus uses to distribute their data to their customers. more

SQL Injection in the Wild

As attack vectors go, very few are as significant as obtaining the ability to insert bespoke code in to an application and have it automatically execute upon "inaccessible" backend systems. In the Web application arena, SQL Injection vulnerabilities are often the scariest threat that developers and system administrators come face to face with (albeit way too regularly). more

So, How Big Is the Internet?

The results of an excellent study made, for reasons that will become clear, by an anonymous author reaches this conclusion... The problem is, to make the study, the author created a botnet - that is he wrote a small program that took advantage of insecure devices to enlist additional machines to help in the study. more