Why I’m No Longer So Worried About ICANN

"No, the new gTLD program isn't ready!" ... "Yes, I was wrong on the Trademark Clearinghouse!" Fadi Chehadé showed some strong leadership qualities during last week's ICANN regional registry and registrar meeting in Amsterdam. Honesty and courage... What started out as a speech soon turned into a heart to heart. As he responded to questions, Chehadé made some surprisingly honest comments. more

A Made Up Fantasy and the ICANN gTLD Reality

Gary Elliot, chairman of the Association of National Advertisers and vice president of global marketing at Hewlett-Packard, wrote a column in Advertising Age titled "ICANN's Promises Aren't Simply Speculation, They're Outright Fantasy." His arguments opposing ICANN gTLDs are similar to the other heads of various advertising associations around the world. While the main powerbrokers of the global advertising sector are mum, their association heads are using the same circulated message of cyber-squatting fears without any solid proof. Here is my analysis and an open challenge to the trade. more

Study Reveals U.S. Carriers Throttle Online Video on Their Mobile Networks Even When Not Congested

A study conducted by researchers at Northeastern University and the University of Massachusetts Amherst involving 650,000 tests indicates U.S. carriers are throttling online video on their mobile networks regardless of whether or not those networks are congested. more

Over 360 Security Experts Around the World From Group to Combat COVID-19 Hackers, Protect Hospitals

An international group of more than 360 cyber threat intelligence researchers from over 40 countries have joined forces to help the medical sector amid the COVID-19 crisis. more

First Nine English-Language newgTLDs Delegated by ICANN - .Camera, .Clothing, .Singles and More…

This past week brought word that the first nine Latin / ASCII "new Generic Top Level Domains (newgTLDs)" were delegated by ICANN and are now found in the root of DNS. This means that the registries behind these newgTLDS can now start the process of making "second-level domains" (the ones we normally register) available in each of these TLDs. more

Will a Global TAR Make DNSSEC Stick?

Two US Government contractors and the National Institute of Science and Technology have released a white paper, "Statement of Needed Internet Capability," detailing possible alternatives and considerations for a Trust Anchor Repository (TAR) to support DNSSEC deployment. The document was released through the DNSSEC-Deployment Group this week with a request that it be circulated as widely as possible to gather feedback. A Trust Anchor Repository (TAR) refers to the concept of a DNS resource record store that contains secure entry point keys... more

Spam Kings: Book Review (Part 2)

I'd like to continue on in my review of the book Spam Kings (read part 1) and make some more comments, particularly regarding the antispammers. One thing that I really liked about the book is learning the history of some of the spam tools. I was never a participant on NANAE (news.admin.net-abuse.email; a USENET newsgroup which discusses e-mail spamming), that was before my antispam time. But I was intrigued by its history. People would gather together and discuss spammers and tools for stopping them, and sometimes spammers would stop by and the flame wars would ensue. more

WIPO Proposal for Paperless UDRP

The World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) has sent to ICANN a letter proposing Paperless Uniform Domain Name Dispute Resolution Policy (UDRP)... This would save considerable amounts of paper, reduce courier charges (as the notice weighs far less than the full complaint), and thus would be good for the environment. more

Internet Governance: There Are No Masterplans

Please pardon me if I start this story by telling about an incident that happened to me at the Madrid airport while flying to the ICANN meetings in Rio.

It was about midnight when, after flying in from Turin, my hometown, I had to go through the passport control to reach my gate for the flight to Rio. The war between the US/UK and Iraq had started two days before, and even if the Spanish government was among its supporters, security checks were apparently proceeding as usual. Passport controls inside the EU for EU citizens usually take a few seconds, and the line ahead of me was proceeding quickly. more

7 Tips to Boost BYOD Security

The bring-your-own-device (BYOD) trend continues to make corporate inroads. According to Security Intelligence, more than 60 percent of enterprises now allow or "tolerate" employee mobile device use in the workplace. But companies still have significant security concerns, especially when it comes to the specter of lost data. Here are seven tips to boost BYOD security in 2015. more

Why SOPA Defender Joins Internet Society as Regional Director

Internet Society recently announced the appointment of former chief technology officer of Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA). The decision has raised concerns within the Internet community as Paul Brigner had campaigned for SOPA while at MPAA as well as being on record opposing net neutrality while being an official at Verizon. more

A New Way to Value Registry Business

There's a new site on the web - nTLDstats.com - that has a ton of valuable information about the new gTLD program. It shows numbers of registrations by registry, registrar, registry service provides - all the "Rs" in the domain name industry. It has quickly become the place where people go to measure how the industry, and the competitors in it, are doing. There's only one problem - not all domain registrations are created equal. more

Lessons from Egypt: We Need to Protect Our Connected Minds

We need to protect the power that allows us to connect our collective intelligence, as described a few weeks ago in my blog on connected minds. I argued that in order to address some of our global challenges we have to start looking at a radically new way to address them. The events in Egypt brought home the fact that if it comes to the crunch any government can disconnect us simply by bringing the Internet and other communications systems down at will... more

Cloud Security Hinges on IP Addressing

In the first part of this trilogy, I discussed the importance of automatically provisioned second generation DNS in connection with Software Defined Networking (SDN) and Software Defined Data Centre (SDDC). In the second post, I talked about IP addressing, private enterprise networks, and how DHCP does not meet the requirements of multitenant Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) cloud environments. I will now wrap up this trilogy by putting these two thesis into real-life context. more

Brazil: The Newest Up and Comer

The Virus Bulletin Conference last month had some good presentations, including this one by Fabio Assolini of Kaspersky. He spoke about how Brazil is the the newest up-and-comer on the cyber crime block. The tale begins with the story of Igor and Emily, two cyber criminals operating out of Brazil. Together, the two of them stole $300,000 US from a single Brazilian bank in one year. more