Do You .RUN?

I am not such a good runner but I have decided to run early in the morning. It is what I just started to do today and to be honest, I hated it. But it does not matter, I will run again tomorrow morning... So what is the market for .RUN? Do runners communicate on Internet? Do they need to communicate because they are runners? Is .RUN for runners only? more

Video Interviews of IANA Stewardship Transition Coordination Group (ICG) Members

Want to know more about what is going on with the IANA Stewardship Transition Coordination Group (ICG)? ICANN recently published a set of video interviews with members of the ICG. Here, for instance is the interview with Alissa Cooper who represents the IETF on the ICG... While this is certainly not the complete list of ICG members, it is a good sampling of the variety of people involved with the ICG and does provide a range of different viewpoints into what is going on within the ICG process. more

Creative Vertigo: The Spin of the ICANN Branding Revolution

The word gTLD has been added to the hardcore lexicon of global branding. Why is this new spin causing vertigo to some? Before you say anything else like 'what'? Just hold on. It makes no difference whether you already are an expert on gTLD or not. The fact is it's in your face and we all have to deal with it for a long time, so deal with it. On the internet today, from around the world, there are over 10,000 articles on ICANN's gTLD... more

BP and Incident Response: How Well Do Oil and Security Mix?

BP and the Oil Industry are taking a lot of heat these days - much of it rightly so. Moving beyond the drama and evaluating the overall response of BP and others reinforces much of what is taught in incident response training and preparation... by showing the outcomes when one does not respond well. This is probably the most important incident that the responders involved will deal with in their professional lives. For those of us working to protect Internet Infrastructure and resources there are useful lessons as we consider what is happening in the Gulf of Mexico and their response effort. more

Unregistered Gems Part 5: Using Groupings to Find Brandable Domains

The initial instalment of my recent series of articles on domain name discovery1 considered the use of phonotactic analysis - that is, the measure of the similarity of a string to the 'corpus' of other words in a language - to identify available unregistered candidate domains which may be of interest for potential brandability. more

Now Is the Time to Act: The Technical Community Must Engage in Support of Multistakeholderism

Over the next two years, several global dialogues about our shared digital future are taking place -- and big changes could be in the cards. An intensive series of negotiations will see United Nations (UN) Member States weigh in on the future of digital cooperation -- and multistakeholderism finds itself under the spotlight. The multistakeholder model allows everyone who has a stake in the internet to meaningfully engage in discussions and decisions about its future on equal footing, but a number of critics are calling for change. more

The ICANN Board by the ICANN Board

A self-appraisal of the ICANN Board has just been posted on the organization's website. In it, Board members rate 89 different measures of their own performance according to a seven-measure rating from "strongly agree" to "strongly disagree". Unfortunately, despite plenty of figures in the documents, there is zero analysis of what this all means, so I have gone through them and prepared one. more

Technologists vs. Marketers: Talking Incompatible Talk Leads to Walking in the Wrong Direction

As if conversations between technologists and marketers weren't already difficult enough, it appears that the Direct Marketing Association's (DMA) Email Experience Council wants to redefine long-standardized terms such as "header" and "message." more

Buying Open Source… It’s a Different Ecosystem

A lot of organizations are interested in open source software, but fail to give it a fair chance compared to proprietary solutions. One reason for this is that the typical invitation to tender process puts open source at a disadvantage. Open source, as it happens, is made in a different ecosystem. more

Is Teleworking Here to Stay?

Broadband networks are stretched thin today due to the large numbers of adults and students working from home. There are many stories on the web that indicate that a lot of employees are not going to be going back to the office when the pandemic is over. Here are two stories about a trend towards more teleworking from the dozens that a Google search uncovered. more

The Uses and Abuses of Cryptography

Another day, another data breach, and another round of calls for companies to encrypt their databases. Cryptography is a powerful tool, but in cases like this one it's not going to help. If your OS is secure, you don't need the crypto; if it's not, the crypto won't protect your data. In a case like the Anthem breach, the really sensitive databases are always in use. more

47 of the World’s 70 Largest Economies Now Have Active 5G Networks, US Takes the Lead Over China

The United States has taken the lead in the number of 5G cities, surpassing China for the first time. There has been a large increase of 5G cities in the U.S., with 503 cities now having 5G networks, compared to 297 in May 2022. more

Conditions for Launching your .Brand

The post addresses the factors affecting any decision to rebrand under a new Top-Level Domain (TLD). Depending on the TLDs owned by the competing companies, rebranding can be critical, merely advantageous, or a matter of wait-and-see. (This post does not address signal location/geography, strategies for expanding a brand, or the merits of defensive and offensive domain name registrations under relevant new gTLDs.) First, a simple definition... more

Clouds for Education

Bill St Arnoud blogs that he is a big advocate of using commercial cloud services rather than rolling out a do-it-yourself cloud for a number of reasons... The cloud market is intensively competitive and innovative, where scale can make a huge difference in terms of reliability and accessibility. It is much easier to develop a set of common contractual service and interface requirements with commercial suppliers in regards to privacy, reliability etc. more

China Mobile Growing Faster Than GDP

In the past five years, as one of the country's 'pillar industry', China's telecom service industry has grown at a faster rate than the country's GDP. Revenue from basic telecom service contributes approximately 2.1% of the country's GDP, while value added telecom services contribute a further 3.2% to total GDP. more