NATO Announces 58 Million Euro Investment in Cyber Defence

The NATO Consultation, Command and Control Agency (NC3A) has announced the award of a contract for upgrading the NATO cyber defence capabilities. The award to private industrial companies will enable the already operating NATO Computer Incident Response Capability (NCIRC) to achieve full operational capability by the end of 2012. At approximately 58 million Euro, it represents NATO's largest investment to date in cyber defence. more

No False-Starts, Do-Overs, or Mulligans for Email

Josh Baer, former VP of Datran Media and current CEO of OtherInBox has been floating an idea at the DMA's Email Experience Council and a few other places, and recently got some traction in Ken Magill's Magill Report. What Josh is proposing is to create the technical means by which a Sender can decide when email 'expires' and is automatically removed from a recipient's inbox, either by deletion, or perhaps archiving (in the case of Gmail). This would supposedly help the end-user, by removing marketing offers that are no longer available. Why this idea shouldn't happen... more

Thoughts on World IPv6 Day

As I'm sure you've heard by now, June 8, 2011 is World IPv6 Day. On that day, several major content providers will turn on IPv6 on their public-facing services for a 24-hour period and see what happens. For some time, there's been concern that turning on IPv6 on a web site's main URL would cause unacceptable levels of breakage. Nevertheless, forward-looking organizations realized that they needed to start deploying IPv6. more

Rapidly Changing Triple and Quadruple Play Business Models

It is interesting to follow what is happening with triple and quadruple play broadband prices in competitive markets. Through triple and quadruple play, customers are increasingly getting more services for the same money. As most fixed telecoms markets are still largely monopolistic in nature, basic access charges remain high; but good prices are even available in markets with healthy wholesale competition, if one shops around. more

Spectrum Key to Broadband Utility

The explosion in mobile communications in the developing world has created social and economic changes that have exceeded all expectations and predictions -- even those made as recently as five years ago. There are still countries lagging behind, but now is the time to move on to the next stage -- and that means broadband. Already the developed world is showing an enormous appetite for mobile broadband, so the demand is most certainly there. The rapid development of low cost Smartphone, projected to approach $50 soon... more

Searching for Truth in DKIM: Part 1 of 5

DomainKeys Identified Mail (DKIM) is the leading email authentication technology, supported by major ISPs including Google, AOL, and Yahoo! (who invented its predecessor), popular mail server software like Sendmail, and many of the best minds in email technology. But if you peruse the archives of the IETF DKIM mailing list, or start up a conversation at MAAWG, it might appear that there's still a lot of disagreement about what a DKIM signature actually means. more

No Dates for the Next gTLD Round Yet, Says ICANN

According to a letter sent from ICANN's chair to the Registries Stakeholder Group (RySG) this week, the agency will not be setting a date for the next round of new gTLD applications anytime soon despite keen interest from registry operators. more

The Perfect Phone

Lee Dryburgh initiated a great thread in the Emerging Communications public group entitled What would your perfect phone be? There are 14 messages there at this moment with a lot of good ideas, but my first thought was the term "phone" is too limiting. Indeed, some of the correspondents' ideas also go far beyond the idea of a telephone. Here's what I want and fully expect to see, eventually. more

How Big Is That Network?

It's often observed that the Internet was a direct outcome of the progressive liberalization of national telecommunications markets in the late twentieth century. This allowed the entry of a wave of Internet entrepreneurs into various national telecommunications markets that were historically dominated by incumbent telephone monopolies. The resultant transformation of telecommunications over the past two decades is as much a testament to the transformational power of open markets as it is to the prodigious ability of the Internet's technology base to service the ever increasing demands being made of it. more

Desperate Attempts to Drag the USA Into the Digital Economy

In the USA an interesting initiative has been taken by a number of leaders in the telco industry who are frustrated with the inability of the country to start building the high-speed broadband infrastructure that is needed for the development of its digital economy. While the Obama Administration has the right vision to make this happen - and the American National Broadband Plan is a good example of this - the dysfunctional political state of the country makes it impossible to establish the industry transformation needed to make this happen. more

What’s Up With WEIRDS?

The IETF WEIRDS working group is defining a follow-on to WHOIS. Since this is the IETF, it's working on the technical issues about which it can deal with, not policy which is up to ICANN and the country registries. Somewhat to my surprise, the group is making steady progress. We've agreed that the basic model is RESTful, with queries via http, and responses as JSON data structures. The protocol is named RDAP for Registration Data Access Protocol, or maybe RESTful Data Access protocol. more

NIS2 Article 28 Guidance: A Positive Step Toward Reducing DNS Abuse Across Europe

The European Union (EU) has set a high bar by tackling domain name system (DNS) abuse head on via government regulation and seems to have successfully resisted attempts to water down DNS stewardship obligations. Recent guidance from a key European Commission cooperation group (the NIS Cooperation Group) handling sections of the Network and Information Security Directive (NIS2) intends for a robust implementation of Article 28, which will go a long way toward helping to mitigate some of the longstanding problems that persist in the DNS. more

New Revenue Models for the ‘Software Telco’

I was recently asked how telcos might come up with new business models for a world where all resources are under software control. The core idea is to match network supply and demand in space and time (and at all timescales). I've typed up my notes for the curious to critique...Today's telco is more like a static utility 'pipe', the way that gas, electric or oil are delivered. It sells direct access to raw network mechanisms, and users buy circuits that offer a fixed bandwidth in space and time. more

IPv6 and the 5 Billionth Customer

The POPClock tells us that there are 6,807,230,170 of us on this planet when I looked it up at 22:26 UTC (EST+5) Feb 26, 2010. In the meantime we are about to connect the 5 billionth cell phone user this year according to ITU Secretary-General Dr. Hamadoun Toure.
 more

Report On National Online Cybercrime and Online Threats Reporting Centres

Today I released a report on 'National cyber crime and online threats reporting centres. A study into national and international cooperation'. Mitigating online threats and the subsequent enforcing of violations of laws often involves many different organisations and countries. Many countries are presently engaged in erecting national centres aimed at reporting cyber crime, spam or botnet mitigation. more