Gaza Plunges into Near-Total Internet and Cellular Blackout Amid Intensified Israeli Strikes

The Gaza Strip is experiencing an almost complete blackout of internet and cellphone services. A communication blackout isolates Gaza's residents, impeding emergency responses and potentially escalating humanitarian crises. more

ITU: The Communication Wonderland

I kept wondering if all that I had said about Dr Toure was fair -- I hadn't met him before and had written so much to comment on the transcript of his speech at ICANN, Cairo . My discomfort was short-lived and even before a month elapsed I met him at the Internet Governance Forum, Hyderabad. Exchanged pleasantries before saying "I wrote some strong comments about your speech at Cairo". Dr Toure looked happy to see me, beamed with a bit of surprise and said he read my comment... more

DOTZON Study: Digital Company Brands 2023

DOTZON presents the sixth edition of the Digital Company Brands study. After having introduced the study in 2018, DOTZON continued to expand and enhance the underlying data to display how companies successfully use their Digital Company Brands. The Digital Company Brand is the digital dimension of a company brand and mirrors the "digitalness "of a company. more

Bandwidth Needed to Work from Home

The pandemic made it clear that the millions of homes with no broadband or poor broadband were cut off from taking the office or the school home. But the pandemic also showed many additional millions of homes that their current ISP connection isn't up to snuff for working or doing schoolwork from home. Families often found that multiple adults and students couldn't share the bandwidth at the same time. more

Omnibus Cybersecurity Bill May Not Go Where Original Authors Intended

In an interview with GovInfoSecurity, Sen. Thomas Carper said that the U.S. Senate is considering attaching cybersecurity legislation to a defense authorizations bill. Though clearly a ploy to be able to say "we did something about those evil hackers" before the elections, CAUCE applauds the attempt. There can be no doubt that the United States (and many other countries) sorely needs better laws to deal with these threats. more

Broadband Companies Take Connectivity Pledge Amid COVID-19 Crisis

Broadband and telephone service providers of all sizes in the US have signed on to a "Keep Americans Connected Pledge" aimed at maintaining connectivity for citizens amid disruptions caused by the coronavirus pandemic. more

The Rotten Roots - Summary of Issues and Sources on Net Neutrality

The timeline of the Net Neutrality issue has been detailed here. And quoting from Vox: 'Wheeler said that peering is "an issue that we are investigating, it's an issue we are very interested in, but it's not the issue here today."' more

EU-based DNS Internet Infrastructure Beginning to Take Shape, Planned to Onboard 100 Million Users

The EU has been pushing for the development of DNS4EU, a public European DNS resolver with built-in filtering capabilities, as a way to strengthen the "digital sovereignty" of the EU and protect citizens, companies, and public institutions from phishing attacks and malware. In December 2021, a consortium of 13 public and private companies from ten European countries were granted the project to build a public DNS resolution service tailored for the EU. more

Are We Giving Up On Broadband Equality?

One of the worldwide challenges in relation to the development of national broadband networks is equality. Broadband is critical for the digital infrastructure and it is essential that everybody enjoys the same level of quality and affordability. This is a major challenge and as a rough measuring stick approximately one-third of the people in developed economies would miss out if there were not a requirement for equality. We see some of the problems related to this issue arising in other countries. more

A Report on the ICANN DNS Symposium

By any metric, the queries and responses that take place in the DNS are highly informative of the Internet and its use. But perhaps the level of interdependencies in this space is richer than we might think. When the IETF considered a proposal to explicitly withhold certain top-level domains from delegation in the DNS the ensuing discussion highlighted the distinction between the domain name system as a structured space of names and the domain name system as a resolution space... more

Registering and Monetizing Personal Names

At the top of WIPO's list of the most cybersquatted trademarks for 2015 (issued on March 18, 2016) is "Hugo Boss" with 62 complaints. The report also reveals that the fashion industry led other commercial sectors with 10% of complainant activity. Not surprisingly, in this sector companies (couturiers extending their services to the general public) are branded with the personal names of their founders. Why any registrant would intentionally target well-known personal names in the fashion industry is a mystery because there's no future in it. In fact, complaints are never answered and always successful. more

2008 Report Analyzing Distribution and Trends of IP Address Allocation

The study report analyzes the distribution and the trends of IP address allocation in 238 countries for 2007. From the data analysis (see Table 1 & Chart 1), the United States tops the allocation list by holding 37.73% of the IP addresses worldwide. It follows by United Kingdom (12.83%), Japan (7.64%), China (5.74%), Germany (3.81%), France (3.65%), Canada (2.81%), Korea (2.74%), Netherlands (2.00%) and Italy (1.67%). These Top 11 countries in the list occupied more than 80% of total allocated IP address ranges in the world in 2007. more

Law as Unusual: Quantum Computing’s Five-Dimensional Challenge to the Legal Establishment

Quantum computers are coming, and the American Bar Association's SciTech section is beginning to consider the legal implications. This raises the question, will the legal profession be able to adopt emerging quantum technologies on a tech-business as a usual basis? Or will the developments flowing from quantum mechanical theory present a categorical challenge to the legal-industrial complex? more

Y2038: It’s a Threat

Last month, for the 20th anniversary of Y2K, I was asked about my experiences. (Short answer: there really was a serious potential problem, but disaster was averted by a lot of hard work by a lot of unsung programmers.) I joked that, per this T-shirt I got from a friend, the real problem would be on January 19, 2038, and 03:14:08 GMT. Why might that date be such a problem? On Unix-derived systems, including Linux and MacOS, time is stored internally as the number of seconds since... more

RIPE 71 Meeting Report

The RIPE 71 meeting took place in Bucharest, Romania in November. Here are my impressions from a number of the sessions I attended that I thought were of interest. It was a relatively packed meeting held over 5 days. So this is by no means all that was presented through the week... As is usual for RIPE meetings, it was a well organised, informative and fun meeting to attend in every respect! If you are near Copenhagen in late May next year I'd certainly say that it would be a week well spent. more