Social Operating System: Connecting Domains and Social Media

Wired Magazine (Aug 2007 print issue, page 50) defines "social operating system" as a platform for online living; a social network such as MySpace that seamlessly integrates activities including entertainment and shopping. But Jon Udell points out that MySpace is not Your Space. He envisions a future in which each child would receive his or her own chunk of managed storage at birth.. Of course, we'd want the ability for Bob's Space to connect with Jane's Space - suppose they are siblings starring in the same family vacation video, or co-authors of a research report? more

A Few Thoughts on the Future of Email Authentication

With the Online Trust Alliance Town Hall Meeting and Email Authentication Roundtable next week as well as the RSA Conference, I decided to pause and think about where we are and where we might be headed with regard to email authentication. Over the years, many of us have collectively worked to provide a framework for authenticating email... more

Holocaust Remembrance Day

Today is Holocaust Remembrance Day. Today we remember that the Nazis rounded up Jews, Roma, political dissidents, and other "undesirables" using the best data and technology of the day and sent them off to concentration camps. We don't normally deal with this type of political reality in ICANN, but now is the time to do so. In 1995, the recently formed European Union passed the EU Data Protection Directive. more

The FCC White Space Regulations: Pretty Good at First Look

My prediction is that LTE and WiMAX are toast. The new great thing will be WRANs (wireless regional area networks). WRAN's will extend and eventually subsume WiFi. The detailed regulations which implement the FCC decision to free the spectrum formerly known as TV white spaces have now been released. They look pretty good from the point of view of someone who believes the unlicensed use of this spectrum has the potential to make a huge difference in the way the world communicates. more

Unraveling the Myths of the Internet’s Origins - Part I

There are several myths that dominate the public perception of the Internet. These myths make it hard to understand the needs and nature of the Internet and its future development. One of the most dominant myths equates the early U.S. packet switching network known as the ARPANET with the metasystem linking diverse networks that we call the Internet. One such example is demonstrated by the time line at the AT&T web site. They write... more

The Slow Mainstreaming of IPv6

Slowly, we’re making progress mainstreaming IPv6. I wanted to post on a few interesting developments. Late last month, Netflix got an IPv6 allocation from ARIN, and they’re advertising it in BGP... I look forward to the day I can stream movies to my Netflix set-top box over IPv6. more

Email, Privacy, and Engagement

After they finished the tenth installment of their enormous multi-volume history, The Story of Civilization, Will and Ariel Durant wrote a set of thirteen essays entitled The Lessons of History. I happened to pick up this volume yesterday; it's both slim and sweeping. The Durants loved history, and wanted to show their readership what waves and tensions and trends they perceived. It's not a great book, but it's an undeniably forceful one. One essay discusses the essential moral characteristics of individuals, listing six traits and providing "positive" and "negative" descriptions of ways in which people act. more

The Power of Google

The other night I was chatting with my wife about things and I mentioned a TV show that I saw back in the 1980's about a home-brew nuclear device in which the bomb-squad person who cuts the cliche red or green wire makes the wrong choice. So I went to Google to find the movie. I had a hard time finding it. (I eventually did - it was the 1983 show Special Bulletin.) But along the way I more than once wondered whether my memory was playing games on me. The meta-thought that came about was this... more

Proposed New IETF Standard Would Create a Nationally Partitioned “Internet”

For those worried about the threat of a state-based takeover of the Internet, there is no need to obsess over the International Telecommunication Regulations (ITRs) exclusively. Three Chinese engineers are proposing a way to alter Internet standards to partition the Internet into autonomously administered national networks, using the domain name system (DNS). The idea was not proposed in the ITU; no, it was sent to a multi-stakeholder institution, the granddaddy of the Internet itself, the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF). more

ICANN Sets June Target for New gTLD Program Launch

npt its recent meeting in San Francisco, ICANN approved a new draft timeline for the launch of its new generic top-level domains (gTLDs) program that will let its Board of Directors approve the final Applicant Guidebook in June 2011, enabling companies to apply for gTLDs before the end of the year. more

False Positives and Ignorance

Content inspection is a poor way to recognise spam, and the proliferation of image spam recently drums this home. However if one must use these unreliable techniques, one should bring mathematical rigour to the procedure. Tools like SpamAssassin combine content inspection results, with other tests, in order to tune rule-sets to give acceptable rates of false positives (mistaking genuine emails for spam), and thus end up assigning suitable weights to different content rules. If one is going to use these approaches to filtering spam, and some see it as inevitable, one better know one's statistics... more

Amazon Gets the Green Light for .Amazon TLD Following Intense Negotiations Involving South America

ICANN has lifted the stop on delegating the .amazon top-level domain, allowing the delegation of the domain to the company Amazon Inc. over the South American region. more

ICANN and the Data Quality Act: Part IV

This is the fourth part of a multi-part series reported by ICANNfocus. This part focuses on the Information Correction Process. "The Data Quality Act provides affected persons the right "to seek and obtain correction of information maintained and disseminated by the agency that does not comply" with the Data Quality Act and implementing guidelines. ...The Department of Commerce's National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA) provides detailed instructions on how to request correction of information not meeting their Data Quality guidelines. NTIA is the operating unit of the Department of Commerce that is responsible for ICANN." more

What is Internet Protocol Address Management?”

The number of web-based devices is expanding at an exponential clip, virtualization is making a very static environment dynamic, and now with the exhaustion of IPv4 and the oncoming complexities of IPv6 network operators must reevaluate what IP Address Management (IPAM) really is. The goal of this post is to define the various functions that make up IP Address Management. more

The Year IPv6 Made it to Major League

May 6th 2007: ARIN board of trustees passes a resolution advising the Internet community that migration to a new version of the internet protocol, IPv6, will be necessary to allow continued growth of the internet. June 29th 2007, Puerto Rico: ICANN Board resolution states that: The Board further resolves to work with the Regional Internet Registries and other stakeholders to promote education and outreach, with the goal of supporting the future growth of the Internet by encouraging the timely deployment of IPv6. Oct 26th 2007 at the RIPE 55 meeting in Amsterdam... Nov 15th 2007: IGF meeting, Rio de Janeiro... This is but a small sample of the fast growing visibility IPv6 acquired this year, 2007. more