When an IP Address Does Not Equal Individual Culpability - Breaking Glass Pictures v Does, DAZ 2013

Something bad happens online. I can tie that something-bad back to an IP address. Do I know who did the bad thing? According to the Federal District Court in Arizona, I don't. An IP address may identify the owner of an Internet access account; it does not identify who was online at that particular time and who may be responsible for the actions in question. In Breaking Glass Pictures v Does, DAZ 2013, Plaintiff brought a claim for copyright infringement, wants early discovery, but the court is refusing. more

The FCC is Taking the Right Step

Today's announcement from the Commission that it intends to roll back the exercise of Title II utility-style regulation over "any person engaged in the provision of broadband internet access service" at its 14 December meeting is the right step. As a veteran of 40 years of internet related regulatory wars in the FCC and numerous other venues, the Commission's decision and the actual Rules promulgated in the February 2015 Report & Order stand among the most ill-considered application of authority and regulatory gerrymandering ever witnessed. more

Verisign Mitigates 300 Gbps DDoS Attack and Other Q2 2014 DDoS Trends

It has been another busy quarter for the team that works on our DDoS Protection Services here at Verisign. As detailed in the recent release of our Q2 2014 DDoS Trends Report, from April to June of this year, we not only saw a jump in frequency and size of attacks against our customers, we witnessed the largest DDoS attack we've ever observed and mitigated -- an attack over 300 Gbps against one of our Media and Entertainment customers. more

The Christmas Goat and IPv6 (Year 3)

As Christmas were getting closer, the third time of load balancing the streaming pictures of the famous Christmas goat in the city of Gävle, Sweden, was on the agenda. My goal with this activity is the same as before, to track the use of IPv6 and DNSSEC validation. The results from the last two years are published on CircleID. more

Live Today - “IPv4 Exhaustion and the Path to IPv6” from INET Denver

If you are interested in the current state of IPv4 address exhaustion within North America as well as the current state of IPv6 deployment, there will be a live stream today, April 17, of the sessions happening at INET Denver starting at 1:00pm US Mountain Daylight Time (UTC-6). The event is subtitled "IPv4 Exhaustion and the Path to IPv6" and you can view the live stream at. more

Authorities Take Down the Mariposa Botnet

There are a number of sources talking about the takedown of the Mariposa botnet... Spanish authorities, working with researchers from Panda Labs, Defence Intelligence and a couple of other educational institutions, took down the Mariposa botnet (Mariposa is the Spanish word for "butterfly"). The Mariposa botnet is an absolutely enormous with around 12 million (!) nodes doing its bidding. It was involved in things like credit card phishing and identity fraud. more

DDOS Attackers - Who and Why?

Bruce Schneier's recent blog post, "Someone is Learning How to Take Down the Internet", reported that the incidence of DDOS attacks is on the rise. And by this he means that these attacks are on the rise both in the number of attacks and the intensity of each attack. A similar observation was made in the Versign DDOS Trends report for the second quarter of 2015, reporting that DDOS attacks are becoming more sophisticated and persistent in the second quarter of 2016. more

ICANN Hugs China’s Multilateral Internet Governance Initiative

The original title of this article was "ICANN CEO Hugs China's Multilateral Internet Governance Initiative". CEO has been dropped from the final version. That deletion helps make one of its two essential points. Which is that since ICANN CEO Fadi Chehade accepted a formal advisory role with China's World Internet Conference (WIC, which is a proprietary project of the Chinese Communist Party) while still engaged in leading the U.S.-based technical coordinator of the DNS, and as that ICANN role almost surely played a decisive role in his being offered the position... more

The Spamhaus Whitelist

For several months I have been working with the Spamhaus project on a whitelist, which we announced to the public this week. While this is hardly the first mail whitelist, our goals are somewhat different from other whitelists. Think of e-mail as ranging from inky black to pearly white... more

Broadband Initiatives: Impact Will Depend on Wireless and Fixed Strategies

Broadband; we want it, and we all depend on it; but where you live can impact access and adoption of the best that service providers have to offer. The FCC is looking to change both geographic and demographic limitations now plaguing the U.S. in the global race for broadband economic supremacy. Can a combination of a fixed and wireless-mobile strategy improve broadband economic viability by increasing access, adoption, and affordability across the broadband spectrum? more

New Work in the Development and Management of EPP Extensions

On Dec. 12, 2013, the Internet Engineering Steering Group (IESG) announced the formation of a new working group, Extensible Provisioning Protocol Extensions (eppext). The working group was formed to create an Internet Assigned Numbers Authority (IANA) registry of Extensible Provisioning Protocol (EPP) extensions and to review specifications of extensions for inclusion in the registry. EPP is the standard domain name provisioning protocol for generic top-level domain (gTLD) name registries that operate under the auspices of ICANN. more

Do We Need The New Top-level Domains?

After a long and exhaustive process it was finally decided by ICANN to introduce seven new top level domains in December. Well, they are not really introduced yet because the United States Government has the final word and they have not approved of them yet. Did you understand what I just wrote - the United States Government decides what names you can have on the Internet? more

Metrics of Major Standards Bodies

In a recent CircleID posting related to the ITU-T, the demise of that body over the years and the underlying causes were described. Among other questions, it raises the question of where has the industry technical collaborative activity gone. The short answer is just about everywhere else. This was exemplified by a recently compiled spreadsheet of some 200 different cloud forums prepared by the ITU-T's own cloud coordination group. more

Flame On!

Here we go again; another instance of really sophisticated spyware has been reported, a system that is "so complex and sophisticated that it's probably an advanced cyber-weapon unleashed by a wealthy country to wage a protracted espionage campaign on Iran". I won't get into the debate about whether or not it's really more impressive than Stuxnet, whether or not it's groundbreaking, or whether or not Israel launched it; let it suffice to say that there are dissenting views. I'm more interested in the implications. more

Call the Routing Police!

There was a somewhat unfortunate outage for a major communications service provider in Australia, Optus, in mid-November. It appears that one of their peer Border Gateway Protocol (BGP) networks mistakenly advertised a very large route collection to the Optus BGP network, which caused the routers to malfunction in some manner. more