Data Security: Being Open About Secrecy

It must be tricky to be an advocate of transparency when your job involves selling serious encryption tools to government departments, large and small companies, hospitals and people who are concerned about having their bank account details hijacked from a home PC. After all, the point about good encryption software and the systems that surround it is that they provide a way to keep your secrets secret, while open government and the effective regulation of financial services would seem to require the widest possible dissemination of all sorts of operational data... more

Fixing Holes

According to press reports, DHS is going to require federal computer contractors to scan for holes and start patching them within 72 hours. Is this feasible? It's certainly a useful goal. It's also extremely likely that it will take some important sites or applications off the air on occasion - patches are sometimes buggy (this is just the latest instance I've noticed), or they break a (typically non-guaranteeed or even accidental) feature that some critical software depends on. more

Does Broadband Boost Local Economic Development?

A paper out of the Public Policy Institute of California (PPIC) examines answers to "Does Broadband Boost Local Economic Development?" Many might flame PPIC for daring to ask such a question, but with billions of dollars in public funds being spent by governments around the world, it seems appropriate for some science to be applied to study the benefits. more

Yahoo Agrees to Pay $50M and Other Costs for the Massive Security Breach Disclosed in 2016

Yahoo today announced it has agreed to pay $50 million in damages and will offer two years of free credit-monitoring services to 200 million people whose email addresses and other personal information were stolen as part of the massive security breach. more

Somalia’s Extended Internet Outage Results in Millions of Dollars of Loss per Day, Says Government

Somalia's internet connection was finally restored on Monday after weeks of outage due to a severed undersea cable. more

A Constitutional Moment for the IGF

The future of the Internet Governance Forum (IGF) is an important part of the WSIS+20 review process. But after 20 years, the key question should now be its organizational evolution, more than just how long its mandate should be extended or whether it should be rebranded. The time has come for a constitutional moment for the IGF. A dedicated review process should take place in 2026 around three core questions. more

Contention Is Best Settled by Those Who Know the Players & Industry

Several posts have been made on the topic of contention resolution and private auctions around the new gTLD program over the last few weeks on CircleID. Many of the Applicants we spoke to thought it was appropriate to weigh in from the RightoftheDot.com perspective. We want you to know that the RightOfTheDot auction offering for contention resolution for new gTLD's, unlike other offerings, remains unchanged from when it was first announced to the Domain Industry. more

Domain Abuse: Are We Speaking the Same Language?

For those of us in the domain name industry, it's clear that security threats and the way we track, report, and mitigate them has been a topic of increased discussion and focus in recent months. As we prepare to come together as a community again at the next ICANN public meeting in Marrakech, many of us will look to continue these conversations, as there is no doubt it is a topic of importance, relevance and urgency for our community at this time. more

Be Agile or Be Edged Out: “Live” from TM Forum 2017

I like a conference that's "Live". Not just a lively crowd coalescing together to passionately discuss and debate matters of common interests, but more so in the sense of physical presence: things you can feel and touch. In the case of the TM Forum Live! 2017 event, held last week at Nice, France, it's the Catalyst Pavilions where innovative solutions, best practices, and even exploratory experimentations were on full display. Do I mean that for an IT Operation Support Systems (OSS) and Business Support Systems (BSS) trade show, you can touch it? Yep. more

Video: Interview with Jari Arkko at IETF 96 in Berlin

Would you like to understand the major highlights of the 96th meeting of the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) last month in Berlin? What were some of the main topics and accomplishments? How many people were there? What else went on? If so, you can watch a short video interview I did below with IETF Chair Jari Arkko. more

Lessons from Sandy: Building Networks and Cyber-Infrastructure to Survive Climate Change

Hurricane Sandy has been a badly needed wake up call for the Internet community as to the threat of climate change. Although most people have forgotten, Sandy is the second hurricane to hit New York in as many years with Irene last August and a third tropical depression headed to New York at the time of this writing. Two, supposedly once in a hundred year storms, within such a short time frame should even make the most die-hard denialist that something's afoot. more

Patterns and Trends in Domain Tasting of the Top 10 Global Brands

Domain tasting is a long-established practice involving the short-lived existence of a domain, which is allowed to lapse a few days after its initial registration. The practice arose in response to an Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) policy allowing a domain to be cancelled -- with all fees refunded -- within a five-day grace period, intended to address the issue of accidental registrations1. However, the practice is open to abuse by infringers. more

Domain Name Registries and Registrars: The New Digital Trust and Safety Wardens in Bluesky

Just recently, Bluesky -- the decentralized social network running on an open protocol called AT Protocol -- announced that as a mechanism for supporting its business financially, it will directly sell domain names as handles for its users. The sales will be processed through an Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) accredited registrar, called Namecheap. Currently, the handles on social media platforms are internal handles and not independent domain names. more

Designing for RealTimeML

The steepening trajectory towards event-driven and real-time API architecture is imminent. This means incorporating event-based APIs into a technology strategy and leveraging existing API legacy systems that may have incurred a fair amount of technical debt, especially for historically progressive organizations. more

Achieving Multi-Stakeholder Progress on DNS Abuse

DNS Abuse and how to address it has been the topic of intense, often conflictual, and rarely conclusive discussions for many years, starting with the very definition of the term and the degree of responsibility bestowed upon DNS operators. In 2018, after several months of intersessional work, the Internet & Jurisdiction Global Conference brought together in Ottawa more than 200 key stakeholders to define a roadmap to address certain jurisdictional challenges on the Internet, including DNS abuse. more