Earlier this month, MarkMonitor representatives were privileged to witness, at the first ICANN meeting of 2016 in Marrakech, Morroco, the historic presentation of the plan to transfer the stewardship of key internet functions (IANA) from the United States Government to a community and consensus-based model of governance through ICANN (Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers). more
All things come to those who wait, and bufferbloat measurement tools are no exception. When we hosted a workshop on reducing Internet latency way back in 2013, one of the identified outcomes was the need for better tools to help users understand when they had a bufferbloat problem, and now we have just such a tool from the awesome folks over at DSLReports. Before going any further I should probably clarify what we mean by bufferbloat. more
As 2014 winds down, cloud spending is up. That's the word from research firm IDC -- as reported by IT Jungle, cloud spending will reach over $56 billion this year and won't stop anytime soon. By 2018, predictions peg the cloud as worth $127 billion, and that's just counting "core" cloud services such as SaaS, PaaS and IaaS. Cloud-based peripherals, the Internet of Things and other cloud initiatives are also on track to make an impact; here's a quick look at top cloud considerations for the coming year. more
A group of researchers from Belgian University of Leuven and US-based Stony Brook University have conducted a one of a kind content-based typosquatting experiment that studies the typosquatting phenomenon "longitudinally", i.e., in time. more
The CAN SPAM act has been in place for five and a half years. Compatible state laws have been in place nearly as long. Anti-spam laws in the EU, Australia, and New Zealand were enacted years ago. But the number of significant anti-spam lawsuits is so small that individual bloggers can easily keep track of them. Considering that several billion spams a day are sent to people's inboxes, where are all the anti-spam lawsuits? more
There may still be a few security practitioners working in the field who didn't have a copy of Bruce Schneier's Applied Cryptography on their bookshelf the day they started their careers. Bruce's practical guide to cryptographic algorithms, key management techniques and security protocols, first published in 1993, was a landmark volume for the newly emerging field, and has been a reference to developers ever since. more
Anyone who reads the papers sees stories -- or hype -- about cyberwarfare. Can it happen? Has it already happened, in Estonia or Georgia? There has even been a Rand Corporation study on cyberwarfare and cyberdeterrence. I wonder, though, if real cyberwarfare might be more subtle -- perhaps a "cyber cold war"? more
Various news outlets on Wednesday reported Boeing being hit by the WannaCry virus; the incident had initially triggered a widespread alarm within the company. more
Here's another example of a domain name dispute where the top-level domain (TLD) was essential to the outcome of the case -- because it formed a part of the complainant's trademark: mr.green. In this decision under the Uniform Domain Name Dispute Resolution Policy (UDRP), the panel joined a short but (slowly) growing list of disputes in which the TLD plays a vital role. more
One can read in an Associated Press article that the US State Department have their email system bogged down due to too many people use the Reply-All function in their email client. IT Departments have asked people to not use Reply-All and also threaten with disciplinary action. To me, that is the wrong path forward. more
News of cyberattacks is slowly becoming a new normal. We are still at a stage where high-profile cases, like the recent attack against the American credit reporting company Equifax, in which 145.5 million users had their personal information compromised, raise eyebrows. But we need those eyebrows to stay up because we should never accept cyber threats as the new normal. more
Many have heard of botnets, but for those that aren't certain what they are: Botnets are armies of hacked zombie computers that have malware on them, and send spam email at the command of operators anywhere in the world. They can also be told to deploy denial of service attacks, by all hitting the homepage of a given company, or attacking the DNS server or a service or country. more
The Coalition for Internet Transparency (CFIT) filed an anti-trust suit against VeriSign for their monopoly control of the .COM registry and the expiring market of .COM domains. The claims were many including excessive financial pressure lobbying and lawsuits to force ICANN into renewing the VeriSign .COM agreement under very self-serving terms. ICANN inevitably was paid millions of dollars to settle the suit. However, the saga continues once again. ... In the light of continuous and relentless discussions and proposals by the Vertical Integration working group, one question is in the back of everyone's mind. Could the decision on Vertical Integration backfire on ICANN and invite similar suits in the domain name space? more
Telco front-man Scott Cleland, in a recent blog post, thumbs his nose at the Four Internet Freedoms and says that the FCC should too. Under current leadership, it probably will. Referring to the recent submissions to the FCC by Free Press and Public Knowledge and Vuze complaining about Comcast's use of reset packets to block applications that compete with Comcast's own proprietary video entertainment offering, Cleland says "Network management trumps net neutrality." There are lots of reasons for, ahem, managing. Cleland neglects to observe that controlling congestion the way Comcast does it is like scattering nails in the road for traffic control. more
Trevor Little reporting in the World Trademark Review writes: "The Chinese government has announced that registries and registrars will have to meet a number of conditions and obtain the approval of the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology (MIIT) before being allowed to engage in commercial and operational activities in China." more