IPv4 Address Exhaustion and a Trading Market

There are discussions starting within the Regional Internet Registries (RIRs) about the creation of trading market in IPv4 addresses as we approach the inevitable exhaustion of unallocated addresses. The view being put forward is basically "this is likely to happen anyway and by discussing it now, we can ensure it happens in an orderly way". When I first heard this idea I was a bit surprised. The RIRs are policy based bodies and so a shift to a trading market appears to be an abandonment of that policy base. However I have been partly corrected on that. more

Hong Kong Billionaire Richard Li Becomes First Person to Own a TLD Matching His Name

The new top-level domain (TLD) .richardli secured for the Hong Kong billionaire Richard Li went live on the internet today. Kevin Murphy reporting in Domain Incite: "The registry is Pacific Century Asset Management (HK) Limited, a subsidiary of PCCW, the Hong Kong telecomms and internet giant of which Li is chair... The gTLD is a pure brand-protection play, according to the 2012 application" more

IPv6 Deployment Around the World: A New Digital Divide?

Alain Durand, Principal Technologist at ICANN, visited Georgia Institute of Technology last week for a talk on the global adoption of Internet Protocol version 6 (IPv6). The Internet Governance Project organized the talk in cooperation with Atlanta's Technology Development Center (ATDC) and the Institute for Information Security and Privacy. Durand, who was involved in the IPv6 standardization efforts at IETF back in the early to mid-1990s, offered a clear eyed assessment of the protocol's critical flaw... more

Hackers Hijack DNS Server for Cyrptocurrency Wallet BlackWallet, Over $400K Stolen From Users

Unknown hackers (or hacker) have hijacked the DNS server for BlackWallet.co, a web-based wallet application for the Stellar Lumen cryptocurrency (XLM). more

Leading Global Standards Organizations Endorse ‘OpenStand’ Principles

Five leading group of global organizations - IEEE, Internet Architecture Board (IAB), Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF), Internet Society and World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) - today announced that they have signed a statement affirming the importance of a jointly developed set of principles establishing a modern paradigm for global, open standards. The group have invited other standards organizations, governments, corporations and technology innovators globally to endorse the principles. more

So, Who Really Did Invent the Internet?

The beginnings of the Internet are shrouded in myth and misunderstandings that have led to some claims of proprietary ownership of the Internet. Where and when did the Internet begin? The only thing Internet historians seem to agree on is that it was not 1969, or the Pentagon, (or for that matter Al Gore). From there on, there is a wide divergence of views as to when, where, and by whom the Internet may have been invented... more

New gTLDs Will Work Way Better Than Vanity Domains Did

There are updates in the domain name business that I have never been able to understand: one of them is called "vanity domain names". A vanity domain name is a domain that keeps on using the first and the second level domain, to form a keyword; the third level domain is sometimes used too. Good examples of these would be: webc.am or marmala.de, aud.it or del.icio.us. more

AT&T’s Randall & Stankey: Wireless Data Growth Half The FCC Prediction

40%, not 92%-120%. "Data consumption right now is growing 40% a year," John Stankey of AT&T told investors and his CEO Randall Stephenson confirmed on the investor call. That's far less than the 92% predicted by Cisco's VNI model or the FCC's 120% to 2012 and 90% to 2013 figure in the "spectrum crunch" analysis. AT&T is easily a third of the U.S. mobile Internet and growing market share; there's no reason to think the result will be very different when we have data from others. more

Closer Look at Domain Name Transfer Policy and the Hijacking of Panix.com

Given the recent panix.com hijacking, I will give an outline of the current ICANN transfers process for gtlds. In the case of panix.com, evidence so far indicates that a third party that holds an account with a reseller of Melbourne IT, fraudulently initiated the transfer. The third party appears to have used stolen credit cards to establish this account and pay for the transfer. That reseller is analyzing its logs and cooperating with law enforcement. more

Inside Bitcoins

Electronic money is not a new idea. The Electronic Fund Transfer Act was passed by the U.S. Congress and signed by President Jimmy Carter 35 years ago (1978). Other forms of electronic money include payment processors, direct deposit, and digital currencies such as Bitcoin. What distinguishes Bitcoin from other electronic money is that it is a cryptocurrency... Will Bitcoin replace the dollar, euro, yen, franc, kroner, et al? Possible, but most authorities seem to be saying it is doubtful. 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

A Tangled Web

A recent ICANNfocus article discussed the magnitude of ICANN's legal fees. Specifically, ICANNfocus questioned whether the extent of ICANN's legal fees, about 20% of their total revenues, was related to the organization functioning as a regulator instead of simply as a technical manager of the internet.  more

Server-Side Mobile Web Detection Used by 82% of Alexa Top 100 Sites

About 82% of the Alexa 100 top sites use some form of server-side mobile device detection to serve content on their main website entry point. As you descend from the top 10 to the top 25 and top 100 sites the percentage of sites using server-side detection falls from 100% to 96% to 82%. This is an interesting fact given that all the recent discussion in the blogosphere is of responsive design using client-side techniques such as media queries. more

A Sustainable Framework For The Deployment Of New gTLDs - Part II

Part I of this article explored some of the current thinking and direction that key policy-makers seem to be headed with the creation of new gTLDS. This part focuses on a new alternative plan for the ongoing deployment of new gTLDs.

ICANN is likely to see many proposals over the coming weeks that attempt to deal with the thorny issue of how to rollout new gTLDs. Any plan that deals with the rollout of new generic top-level domain names must ensure that the expansion of the namespace does not disrupt the existing infrastructure and services. more

Another Try at Proof-of-Work e-Postage Email

Another paper from the Fifth Workshop on the Economics of Information Security, (WEIS 2006) is Proof of Work can Work by Debin Liu and L, Jean Camp of Indiana University. Proof of work (p-o-w) systems are a variation on e-postage that uses computation rather than money. A mail sender solves a lengthy computational problem and presents the result with the message. The problem takes long enough that the sender can only do a modest number per time period, and so cannot send a lot of messages, thereby preventing spamming. But on a net full of zombies, proof of work doesn't work. more