Is Whois Data Accuracy Enough?

The Whois Task Force of the Domain Name Supporting Organization (DNSO) has been consulting with registrars over the past few months on the Whois accuracy issue for law enforcement. The Task Force has enumerated three primary areas of interest: accuracy, uniformity, and better searching capabilities. When the registrars met with the Task Force in Shanghai, a fourth area of interest was also brought forward and advocated by many of the registrars at the meeting as paramount to the other three areas. This fourth area of interest was privacy. more

You Just Signed a Registry Contract With ICANN. What Are Your Plans?

Back on February 4, 2013, I wrote a CircleID post entitled 'How the registrar Cash Flow Model Could Collapse with New ICANN gTLDs.' My key point back then was this: new gTLD applicants need to be mindful of how the cash flow policies of their registry (and of their back-end service provider) could impact whether their TLD is actively promoted by ICANN registrars... registries have historically assumed near-zero risk. This is going to change. more

IPv6 Percolates, IPv4 Regurgitates

APNIC happened to be the first Regional Internet Registry to meet in the IANA post IPv4 era. While discussions and proposals on how to divvy up the last 'slash 8' into tinier blocks are to be expected, it was rather unreal to see the energy spent divining how the RIR's would share IPv4 space that would eventually be returned to IANA and then regurgitated. A timewarp with the exhaustion clock turning backwards? more

Update on China SatNet’s GuoWang Broadband Constellation – Can They Do It?

In 2020, China applied to operate GuoWang, a constellation of 12,992 low-Earth orbit (LEO) broadband Internet satellites, and in 2021, it became clear that it was intended to become China’s global LEO broadband constellation. Can they do it? Maybe, but it will take a long time. China does not have the capacity to launch 12,992 satellites today. I don’t know the mass of their planned satellites, but GuoWang is informally referred to as China’s answer to Starlink. more

It’s Time to Talk Solutions on Mass Surveillance

The public discussion of surveillance one year on from the Snowden revelations remains a search for the biggest sinner. New stories 'outing' countries and companies are great transparency and essential for healthy societies but they have a side effect that isn't so benign: they create an evergreen source of new justifications for security services to demand more money for a surveillance and counter-surveillance arms race. more

Examples of Where ICANN Can Be More Accountable

During the "GNSO Discussion with the CEO" at the recent ICANN meeting in Durban, I stated that ICANN talks a lot about the importance of supporting the public interest, but in reality the organization's first priority is protecting itself and therefore it avoids accountability and works very hard at transferring risks to others. In response to my comments, ICANN CEO Fadi Chehadé asked me to provide him examples of where ICANN can be more accountable. Copied below is my response letter to Chehadé, which provides seven examples. more

The Internet and the Cloud Are Going Into Space

Unlike Bezos and Branson, they're going to stay there. Today we have space-based internet access and a terrestrial internet; within ten years, we'll have a space-based internet. Internet traffic will travel more miles in space than on terrestrial fiber. By that time, the great cloud data centers of Google, Amazon, Microsoft, and their competitors and successors will mostly be in orbit as well. Five years from now, this transition will be obvious, accepted, and well underway... more

IP Address Intelligence Burdening Content Providers with Regional Laws?

I've been looking into IP address filtering by content providers. I understand that IP addresses can be attached with confidence to geographical locations (at the country level, at least) about 80% of the time. You have to make up the rest with heuristics. So there are companies that are in the business of packaging those geolocation heuristics for sites. ...How widely are these services used? ...does it now make sense to put content sites to the burden of complying with the laws applicable to the people/machines they know are visiting them? more

France’s Proposed Web Blocking Law: A Threat to Internet Freedom, Warns Mozilla Foundation

France's forthcoming SREN Bill could mandate web browsers to block websites deemed illicit by the government, setting a precarious standard for digital freedoms, warns Mozilla Foundation in a recent blog post. more

Can Technology Can Spam?

It seems to be impossible to implement a law against spam - unsolicited bulk email - without making a hash of it. At best, anti-spam laws are ineffective; at worst, they cause more problems than spam itself. Can technology fare any better? ...But despite this flurry of initiatives, we are yet to see a definitive answer to the spam problem. An Anti-Spam Technical Alliance has been formed by Microsoft, America Online, Yahoo! and EarthLink, but these companies continue to proffer competing solutions. Meanwhile, the technology being deployed in the spam wars is causing collateral damage, in the form of 'false positives' - email that is incorrectly categorised as spam, and so never reaches its intended recipient. more

A Patent for SiteFinder-Like Resolution

I saw an interesting news item that broke Monday courtesy of DomainNameNews and SlashDot that hasn't been broadly covered yet. I'm surprised no one has posted on this yet on CircleID, so here goes. Apparently VeriSign has been awarded a patent for the resolution of mis-typed domain names. This was at the heart of the controversy back in 2003 around their SiteFinder Service. Amidst a storm of criticism ICANN insisted VeriSign shut down the service, and the company eventually agreed. more

Irish Government To Kill IE ccTLD?

While I was in LA last week John sent me details of the Communications Regulation (Amendment) Bill 2007. While there are some potentially positive aspects in the Bill some of the Bill's contents are, for lack of better word, simply crazy... more

Why DNS Blacklists Don’t Work for IPv6 Networks

All effective spam filters use DNS blacklists or blocklists, known as DNSBLs. They provide an efficient way to publish sets of IP addresses from which the publisher recommends that mail systems not accept mail. A well run DNSBL can be very effective; the Spamhaus lists typically catch upwards of 80% of incoming spam with a very low error rate. DNSBLs take advantage of the existing DNS infrastructure to do fast, efficient lookups. A DNS lookup typically goes through three computers... more

Europeans Moderate GAC Principles, But…

A U.S.-led Task Force in ICANN's Governmental Advisory Committee (GAC) released version 3 of its "Whois Principles" in preparation for the ICANN meeting in Brazil, where it will be debated and finalized. European countries pushed back against U.S. Government efforts to stop ICANN from respecting privacy concerns in its handling of domain name registrant contact data... more

Cyber-Terrorism Rising, Existing Cyber-Security Strategies Failing, What Are Decision Makers to Do?

While conventional cyber attacks are evolving at breakneck speed, the world is witnessing the rise of a new generation of political, ideological, religious, terror and destruction motivated "Poli-Cyber™" threats. These are attacks perpetrated or inspired by extremists' groups such as ISIS/Daesh, rogue states, national intelligence services and their proxies. They are breaching organizations and governments daily, and no one is immune. more