Friction-Free Commerce, Spam-Free Future

I'm sitting here at the Inbox conference on e-mail, and listening to an encouraging, plays-nicely-with-other-children talk from Ryan Hamlin, GM of anti-spam technology and strategy at Microsoft. Over the past couple of months, with evidence abounding at this conference, a number of big industry players have been getting together to fight spam. Most significantly, Microsoft, Yahoo! and AOL - plus a bunch of (other) ISPs are getting together behind a single standard for "Sender ID " - (actually, server authentication) name not yet determined... more

Mobile Apps vs. Mobile Web

With all of the buzz around apps & app stores it would be easy to assume that mobile apps have unstoppable momentum and that the mobile web is taking a back seat. It's worth taking a step back to see how this is all going to pan out. Will mobile apps dominate completely and overwhelm the mobile web or does the mobile web still stand a chance? more

A Day Which Will Live in Infamy: ICANN Board Approves VeriSign Settlement

ICANN's Board voted to accept the latest settlement proposal by a vote of 9 to 5: "Today, ICANN's Board of Directors approved, by a majority vote, a set of agreements settling a long time dispute between ICANN and VeriSign, the registry operator for the .COM registry. These settlement documents include a new registry agreement relating to the operation of the .COM registry..." more

Pentagon Gave Control of 175M Dormant IP Addresses to Florida Company Right Before Trump’s Departure

The US Department of Defense gave a small unknown Florida company control to millions of its dormant IP addresses, minutes before President Trump left office. According to reports, the unknown Florida company, Global Resource Systems LLC, initially obtained control of 56 million Pentagon-owned IP addresses on January 20 and later increased to near 175 million IP addresses. more

Internet Bifurcation: Will the US-China Digital Arm-Twisting Splinter the Open and Free Internet?

The Internet controversy between the US and China is escalating. The Trump Administration is fighting against Huawei, TikTok and We Chat. China is pushing back with new export regulations for Chinese IT technology. August 5, 2020 the US State Department launched a "Clean Network" initiative, aimed to remove Chinese digital corporations from the global supply chain in today's interconnected world. September 8, 2020 the Chinese Foreign Ministry replied with a "Data Security" initiative, aimed to enhance global cybersecurity in "Chinese colours." more

Are the FCC Workshops Fair?

The FCC has run three days of workshops on the National Broadband Plan now, for the purpose of bringing a diverse set of perspectives on broadband technology and deployment issues to the attention of FCC staff. You can see the workshop agendas here. The collection of speakers is indeed very diverse. As you would expect, the session on eGov featured a number of government people and a larger collection of folks from the non-profit sector, all but one of whom has a distinctly left-of-center orientation. Grass-roots devolution arguments have a leftish and populist flavor, so who better to make the argument than people from left-of-center think tanks? more

Cyber-Spin: How the Internet Gets Framed as Dangerous

At the beginning of this year, a set of powerhouse organizations in cybersecurity (CSO Magazine, Deloitte, Carnegie Mellon's CERT program, and the U.S. Secret Service) released the results of a survey of 523 business and government executives, professionals and consultants in the ICT management field. The reaction generated by this survey provides an unusually clear illustration of how cyber-security discourse has become willfully detached from facts. more

Law Requiring Sex Offenders to Hand Over All Internet Passwords Going Too Far?

Maybe you've seen one of the news stories about the revised Georgia statute (Georgia Code § 41-1-12) that now requires sex offenders to turn their Internet passwords, screen names and email addresses over to authorities. The purpose of the revised statute is to give authorities the ability to track what sex offenders are doing online, to, in the words of one news story, "make sure" they "aren't stalking children online or chatting with them about off-limits topics." more

The Christmas Goat and IPv6 (Year 2)

Last year the municipality of Gavle asked my company if we could help them load share the streaming pictures of the famous Christmas goat in Gävle. I accepted the invitation and set up a separate domain. My own interest in this was of course to track the usage of IPv6 and validation of DNSSEC from the visitors of the site. more

Short Domain Names Threatened by Proposed Policy on IGO Dispute Resolution Procedure

ICANN staff has published a draft report on dispute resolution procedures for IGO (inter-governmental organization) domain names. This proposal has deep flaws and should be rejected by the community, as it does not have the balance and protection of registrant rights present in the existing UDRP. Initially, the proposed policy would apply to new Top-Level Domains (TLDs), but via a Policy Development Process (PDP) it could be extended to existing TLDs. more

RIP Don Blumenthal

It is with a heavy heart that we note the passing of a dear friend, colleague and member of the CAUCE board of directors, Don Blumenthal, on September 28, 2019, in Ann Arbor, Michigan. He was 67. Don was an anti-spammer for as long a there was an anti-spam community: he helped design, deploy and maintain the famous 'Spam Fridge,' the repository of junk email maintained by the Federal Trade Commission (FTC). more

Africa’s Digital Darkness: Internet Shutdowns Reach Record High

Governments across Africa increasingly wield internet blackouts as a tool to suppress dissent, with 2024 marking a record high for digital censorship. According to a report by Access Now and #KeepItOn, 21 internet shutdowns were recorded across 15 African nations, surpassing previous highs in 2020 and 2021. more

Politico Writes of Comcast’s IPv6 Effort

Larry Seltzer writes: Politico? Comcast's PR gets an 'A' for this article, an upbeat tech-lite description of the impending depletion of the IPv4 space and efforts to adopt IPv6. It also seems that the Obama administration is behind this, and that the Federal government has had "remarkable foresight on this issue." I feel better already. more

Nation Scale Internet Filtering—Do’s and Don’ts

If a national government wants to prevent certain kinds of Internet communication inside its borders, the costs can be extreme and success will never be more than partial. VPN and tunnel technologies will keep improving as long as there is demand, and filtering or blocking out every such technology will be a never-ending game of one-upmanship. Everyone knows and will always know that determined Internet users will find a way to get to what they want, but sometimes the symbolic message is more important than the operational results. more

Brand Protection Domain Registrations: There Are More Than You Think

One of the major problems for brand owners is protecting the brand in new TLDs. Most new Top-Level Domain (TLD) registries will depend on brand protection registrations for a major part of their registration volume and some may become almost completely dependent on these registrations if the new TLD fails to capture the public's imagination. Short of comparing the registrant data for each individual domain, there is no 100% accurate method of measuring the level of brand protection registrations in a TLD. more