Ten SpaceX Starlink Updates

Starlink now has nearly 500,000 users and is available in 32 countries and nine languages. It is either available, wait-listed, or coming soon in every nation except Afghanistan, Belarus, Cuba, China, Iran, North Korea, Russia, Syria, and Venezuela. There are now 15,000 Starlink terminals in Ukraine with service throughout the nation through connections to ground stations in Poland, Lithuania, and Turkey and they have made a significant contribution in the war with Russia. more

NTIA’s New Broadband Map

The National Telecommunications and Information Administration surprised the broadband industry by issuing a new broadband map for the whole U.S. The map differs in dramatic ways from the FCC's broadband map, which is derived from broadband speeds that are reported by the ISPs in the country. It's commonly understood that the FCC broadband map overstates broadband coverage significantly. The NTIA map draws upon varied sources in an attempt to create a more accurate picture of the availability of broadband. more

The Design of the Domain Name System, Part III - Name Structure and Delegation

In the previous installments, we looked at the overall design of the DNS and the way DNS name matching works. The DNS gains considerable administrative flexibility from its delegation structure. Each zone cut, the place in the DNS name tree where one set of DNS servers hands off to another, offers the option to delegate the administration of a part of the DNS at the delegation point. more

SIP Co-Author Henning Schulzrinne Appointed CTO of the FCC

In a move to be celebrated by many of us with a VoIP background, the United States Federal Communications Commission (FCC) announced today the appointment of Henning Schulzrinne as Chief Technology Officer (CTO). As the release indicates, Henning's role as CTO will be to: ...guide the FCC's work on technology and engineering issues, together with the FCC's Office of Engineering and Technology. more

IPv6… the Year NAT-Enforced IPv4 Dam Showed Seepage

We don't give enough credit to people who will sacrifice themselves trying to plug the IPv4 dam with some NAT-putty. They even dream of a NAT66 filled afterlife. The growing IPv6 traffic trickle was given evidence at the recent RIPE 57 meeting in Dubai in a number of presentations, including a most edifying Google presentation. Noteworthy to see France with a 0.65% IPv6 penetration... more

DNS-over-HTTPS: Privacy and Security Concerns

The design of DNS included an important architectural decision: the transport protocol used is user datagram protocol (UDP). Unlike transmission control protocol (TCP), UDP is connectionless, stateless, and lightweight. In contrast, TCP needs to establish connections between end systems and guarantees packet ordering and delivery. DNS handles the packet delivery reliability aspect internally and avoids all of the overhead of TCP. There are two problems this introduces. more

Cloud Leak Exposes at least 14 Million Verizon Subscribers, Phone Numbers and Account PINs Included

A Verizon partner is reported to have exposed millions of Verizon customer accounts due to a misconfigured cloud-based file. more

5 Reasons Why Closed Generic New gTLDs Should Be Opposed

I'm on the record multiple times over the last few months for my opinions on "closed generics"... Since then I've sent several letters to ICANN (supported by many others) and have been quoted and referenced in several articles on the subject including Politico.com... If you're not a domain "geek" then the danger of this issue might not be that easy to understand, so here are five reasons why "closed generics" are a really bad idea. more

IP And The Internet: A Growing Need to Police Online Content

The Internet and corresponding online world have radically expanded the landscape Intellectual Property professionals need to investigate when monitoring for possible infringements of their trademarks, brands and other intangible assets. With few barriers to entry, coupled with the ability to operate anonymously, the Internet has rapidly become a significant target for unscrupulous individuals hoping to take advantage of the easily accessible Intellectual Property assets of legitimate businesses. more

Cloud Computing Growing Faster Than Expected, Reached $260 Billion in 2017

The global public cloud services market revenue is expetec to grow by 18.5 percent in 2017 reaching $260.2 billion, up from $219.6 billion in 2016, according to the latest report from Gartner, Inc. more

Recovering Domain Names Lost to Fraudulent Transfer

Domain Names composed of generic terms and combinations – dictionary words, random letters, and short strings – have achieved ascending values in the secondary market. DNJournal.com (Ron Jackson) reports on his year to date chart, for example (just a random sampling from the charts) in August 2019 joyride.com was sold for $300,000, in June voice.com sold for $30 million, in July rx.com sold for $1 million, and in January california.com sold for $3 million... The magnitude of the reported sales suggests that businesses have come to depend on resellers than go to the trouble of inventing brand names from scratch. more

Comcast vs the FCC - A Reply to Susan Crawford’s Article

This is a reply to Susan Crawford's circleid article "Comcast v. FCC - "Ancillary Jurisdiction" Has to Be Ancillary to Something". I started writing a reply to her article, adding some comments I had and also reminding her that she'd predicted this herself, in an earlier circleid article, but it turned out long enough that I decided to submit it as a circleid post instead. On the whole, the facts agree with this CNET article. This court decision was correct, and expected... more

FCC’s Stanford Hearing on Broadband Practices

About 300 people attended to the net neutrality hearing Thursday hearing which began with testimony from Larry Lessig, a Stanford Law School professor and founder of the Center for Internet and Society... The meeting was called by the FCC in reaction to the news that US net firm Comcast had been exposed as managing traffic by stopping some of its 13m customers uploading files to BitTorrent and other peer-to-peer networks. The FCC has started a formal investigation to see if Comcast merits a fine for its actions. more

The Dark Side of Decentralized Domain Names

Decentralization is exciting. Headline-grabbing, even. After all, in a world where frustration levels are sky-high and rising, it should not come as a shock that many individuals are willing to embrace what we might call "anti-system solutions." Decentralized solutions, in our case, which come with the ambitious promise of providing everything their centralized counterpart can provide but without centralized points of failure and regulations. In our previous article, we enumerated several advantages associated with decentralized domain names. more

U.S. CERT Issues Alert on DNS Amplification Attacks

Neil Schwartzman writes to report that U.S. Cert issued Alert TA13-088A on Friday March 29, 2013. "It is a solid how-to guide to test for, and remediate DNS configurations that can be used for Distributed Denial of Service attacks." more