In Memoriam: Frederick P. Brooks, Jr. – a Personal Recollection

Brooks is famous for many things. Many people know him best as the author of The Mythical Man-Month, his musings on software engineering and why it's so very hard. Some of his prescriptions seem quaint today -- no one these days would print out documentation on microfiche every night to distribute to developers -- but his observations about the problems of development remain spot-on. But he did so much more. more

Cloud Computing and Privacy

There has been a good deal of talk of late on the important topic of security and privacy in relation to cloud computing. Indeed there are some legitimate concerns and some work that needs to be done in this area in general, but I'm going to focus today on the latter term (indeed they are distinct -- as a CISSP security is my forte but I will talk more on this separately). more

Earthquake in Asia, Spam Plummets

An earthquake on Tuesday near Taiwan caused widespread disruption to telephone and Internet networks. The quake affected an area of the sea bottom with a lot of undersea cables that broke, and since there is only a limited number of cable repair ships, it will take at least weeks to fish them up and splice them. more

The Beginning of the End of the Internet?

Discrimination, Closed Networks and the Future of Cyberspace... Just over a month ago, Karl Auerbach asked, "Is the Internet Dying?". Today, Commissioner Michael J. Copps, of the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) in a speech at the New America Foundation, is asking the very same question, "Is The Internet As We Know It Dying?" and warning about FCC policies that damaged media now threatening the Internet. more

IPv6 and LTE, the Not So Long Term Evolution?

The Wall Street Journal reported that AT&T saw wireless networks about to drown under a deluge of data. To see YouTube content uploaded form an iPhone or Slingbox rerouting a favourite television program to your smart phone gives mobile network operators the shivers. Skype over 3G in the meantime gives sleepless nights, not because of surging megabyte floods but due to nightmares of considerable voice and roaming revenues washing away. Not easy to plan and engineer "managed transitions" under those circumstances. more

6 Ways to Strengthen DNS Security

The domain name system (DNS) grew to prominence during the initial, innocent days of the internet. During that time, early internet users tended to work for government or education organizations where trust was assumed, and security was not even a consideration. Since the online community was small and the internet was sparsely used, the importance of DNS was not widely understood, and as a consequence, left undefended. more

The Geography of Internet Addressing

The ITU-T has proposed a new system of country-based IP address allocations which aims to satisfy a natural demand for self-determination by countries; however, the proposal also stands to realign the Internet's frontiers onto national boundaries, with consequences which are explored here. ...we do indeed see the Internet as a single entity, and we even speak of the Internet's architecture as if there was one designer who laid out a plan and supervised its construction. But despite all appearances, the Internet landscape is indeed made up of many separate networks... This article will explore these issues, particularly in light of recent proposals to introduce new mechanisms for IP address management, a prospect which could, over time, substantially alter both the geography of the Internet, and its essential characteristics as a single cohesive network. more

ICANN, WSIS and the Making of a Global Civil Society - Part III

For a book project I decided to extend my interview with Milton Mueller from November 2003 (Part I | Part II). Exclusively for CircleID readers, here's part III that deals with WSIS, WGIG, US-American bias and the Internet Governance Project. "...One good result of the WGIG process is that the involved international community has already moved beyond those cliches. No one is proposing that the UN control the Internet. There is growing consensus that control of the DNS root needs to be internationalized..." more

Latest Cybersquatting Stats from WIPO

According to latest reports from the World Intellectual Property Organisation (WIPO), allegations of cybersquatting by trademark holders continued to rise in 2008, with a record 2,329 complaints filed under the Uniform Domain Name Dispute Resolution Policy (UDRP). This represented an 8% increase over 2007 in the number of generic and country code Top-Level Domain (gTLDs and ccTLDs) disputes handled and brings the total number of WIPO cases filed under the UDRP since it was launched ten years ago to over 14,000. To improve efficiency and respond to growing demand, WIPO has proposed an "eUDRP Initiative" to render the UDRP paperless... more

Typosquatting: A Solution

Typosquatting's negative effect on the surfing experience can be easily eliminated, and in a way that allows all parties to make money. What's called for is an affiliate program. You would not be happy if you typed a domain name into your browser and wound up in nowhere land because of a simple misspelling. That's the negative surfing effect of typosquatting... more

You Don’t Need to Hack Twitter.com to Control All Its Traffic and Email

A big security news event last night and today is that the Twitter.com Web site was hacked and content on the site replaced. TechCrunch reported it and it has been picked up globally. But - was the Twitter.com website really hacked? We now know it was not so. There are four ways that users typing in Twitter.com would have seen the Iranian Cyber Army page. more

The BIG Impact: How Cloud Computing is Changing the Face of Small Business

While 86 percent of small businesses see the importance of the cloud, 70 percent aren't using cloud solutions. This data, from a Microsoft report for National Small Business Week and reported by Talkin' Cloud, yields a sobering conclusion: Small businesses understand the broad value of cloud computing, but aren't sure how to apply the technology on a case-by-case basis. more

5G (and Telecom) vs. The Internet

5G sounds like the successor to 4G cellular telephony, and indeed that is the intent. While the progression from 2G to 3G, to 4G and now 5G seems simple, the story is more nuanced. At CES last month I had a chance to learn more about 5G (not to be confused with the 5Ghz WiFi) as well as another standard, ATSC 3.0 which is supposed to be the next standard for broadcast TV. more

Why Do We Care About Names and Numbers?

An article based on the most recent study for the European Commission on the Policy Implications of Convergence in the Field of Naming, Numbering and Addressing written by Joe McNamee and Tiina Satuli of Political Intelligence.

"With relation to the Internet and also IP addresses, the "scarcity" is more complicated: there are not only intellectual property issues with regards to domain names, but there is also an issue of managing the integrity of the system. For any naming or numbering system to work, it is essential that the names and addresses used cannot be confused with any other -- in other words, no one system can have two end-points with the same fully qualified number or name..." more

Court Approves Nortel’s Sale of IPv4 Addresses to Microsoft

Yesterday morning (26-April-2011), in US Bankruptcy Court for the District of Delaware, Judge Kevin Gross signed an order authorizing Nortel's sale of IPv4 addresses to Microsoft. This is an important moment for the Internet community, as it represents the beginning of a new market-based mechanism for the distribution of scarce IPv4 address resources. As the various Regional Internet Registry (RIR) organizations exhaust their supply, traditional "needs-based" distribution will become impossible. more