Special interests who oppose privacy are circulating draft legislation to cut short ICANN's Whois policy process, warns Milton Mueller in a post published today in Internet Governance Project. more
United States President Biden has recently commented: “But let me be very clear: Capitalism without competition isn’t capitalism; it’s exploitation. Without healthy competition, big players can change and charge whatever they want and treat you however they want. […] So, we know we’ve got a problem – a major problem.” It’s not every day you hear the President of the United States take on the very industry that supported his national economy remaining the world’s richest over the past couple of decades. Yet his tone resonates with a growing unease within the US... more
Think for a moment of the enduring legacy of African slavery in America. Think of the way it tainted this country's culture and politics; think of the bloody Civil War, the ghettos... What if we could roll back the clock and ensure that our society was "designed" so that slavery was never permitted and never happened? ... But what if I told you that my computer science lab was working on a "new Internet" that would solve all the terrible security and privacy problems of the existing one? Would you find this claim more credible than a proposed retroactive solution to the problem of slavery? more
Once again it is time for CircleID's annual roundup of top ten most popular posts featured during the past year (based on overall readership). Congratulations to all the 2015 participants and best wishes in the new year. more
Lost in all the discussion around the recent ITU meeting (TIES account required of course) is any discussion of the current policy regarding the formation of new RIRs. You may recall that one of the reports that the ITU commissioned on this subject suggests that it would be possible, even desirable for the ITU to be allocated a /12 of IPv6 from the IANA to be further allocated to Country Internet Registries. more
Over the past few years, cyberattacks and internet harassment have escalated against abortion clinics intended to disrupt services, intimidate providers and patients. more
We (the global corps of IPv6 evangelists) have done the trainings (over 200 training sessions in about 45 countries in Africa alone and counting). We've done the conferences (several variations of IPv6 World, IPv6 Business Conferences, IPv6 Hours and Days at the Africa Internet Summits, etc). We've even done the global coordinated events -- IPv6 World Launch. Governments have found it trendy to launch IPv6 Task Forces and come up with National Action Plans for IPv6. Now, almost more than 2000 network engineers (across Africa), thousands of hours of speeches and presentations, hundreds of blog articles and webinars later, where are we? more
Oracle today announced the launch of the Internet Intelligence Map website; a source available for free that provides country-level connectivity statistics based on traceroutes, BGP, and DNS query volumes on a single dashboard. more
Kevin reported on this last night. As you can see from the reactions to his post a lot of people are surprised, shocked and even quite upset that the DotGreen application has been withdrawn. It's not the only application for the string, which is why it was withdrawn, but to many people in the ICANN space it was the applicant everyone associated with the string. The unfortunate reality of the new TLD process is that money speaks more loudly than anything else. more
It has been widely taken as "obvious" that a "no blocking" rule for ISPs is a good regulatory policy. Is this really the case? Does it save consumers from harm... or cause harm? Netflix has reached the point of being well over 30% of Internet traffic at peak time for some ISPs. This places three costs on the ISP and its users... So for someone who isn't a streaming video user, they are paying a share of the direct costs. more
The saga of the IPv6 transition continues to surprise us all. RFC 2460, the first complete effort at a specification of the IPv6 protocol, was published in December 1998, more than twenty years ago. The entire point of IPv6 was to specify a successor protocol to IPv4 due to the prospect of running out of IPv4 addresses. Yet we ran out of IPv4 addresses more than a decade ago. more
Back in the dark ages of email delivery the only thing that really mattered to get your email into the inbox was having a good IP reputation. If your IP sent good mail most of the time, then that mail got into the inbox and all was well with the world. All that mattered was that good IP reputation. Even better for the people who wanted to game the system and get their spam into the inbox, there were many ways to get around IP reputation. more
Denmark experienced its largest-ever cyberattack in May, targeting the nation's critical infrastructure. SektorCERT, the Danish cybersecurity authority, reported breaches in 22 companies within days. Many resorted to 'island mode,' isolating themselves from the internet to contain the threat. more
Three companies, SpaceX, OneWeb and Boeing have announced ambitious plans to put thousands of Internet-service satellites in non-geostationary low-Earth orbit (NGSO) and other companies like ViaSat and SES are currently operating hundreds of communication satellites in medium-Earth and higher, geostationary orbits. With so many satellites orbiting in different planes and at different altitudes, there are bound to be frequent "inline events"... more
As you certainly noticed, a lot of traditional media has recently been focusing on click fraud. Is it as big of an issue as it is made out to be, compared to traditional advertising? Unfortunately Eytan Elbaz of Google will not answer this question with statistics, but he lets us know that Google has the problem under control. Here are some notes based on the Click Fraud Session at the Targeted Traffic Conference in Hollywood, Florida last week. more