Google Flags Entire Web Unsafe, Glitch Due to Human Error According to Company

A glitch in Google's security update on Saturday morning caused links to every search result -- including Google's own pages -- to get flagged with the warning: "This site may harm your computer." The errors caused panic among users around the world who at first feared the popular search engine had suffered a major security failure. The problem which lasted for approximately 40 minutes has now been acknowledged and fixed by Google. The reason for the hiccup, as explained by Google, was due to a human error in the list of URLs Google uses to identify and flag websites known to install malicious software. more

Will Broadband Go Wireless?

For years it's been impossible to go to any industry forum without meeting a few folks who predict that residential broadband will go wireless. This buzz has accelerated with the exaggerated claims that fast 5G broadband is right around the corner. I've seen even more talk about this due to a recent Pew poll that shows that the number of people that only use their cellphones for data has climbed significantly over the last few years – I'm going to discuss that poll in another upcoming blog. more

Watching the Watchers Watching Your Network

It seems that this last holiday season didn't bring much cheer or goodwill to corporate security teams. With the public disclosure of remotely exploitable vulnerabilities and backdoors in the products of several well-known security vendors, many corporate security teams spent a great deal of time yanking cables, adding new firewall rules, and monitoring their networks with extra vigilance. more

Ron Paul Caught in Domain Dispute with Supporters

Former U.S. presidential candidate and congressman Rob Paul has filed a complaint with the World Intellectual Property Organization against the registrants of RonPaul.com and RonPaul.org in order to gain control of the domains. more

OPTA revokes Diginotar License as TTP

Wout de Natris: "In this decision OPTA revokes the registration of Diginotar as a so called Trusted Third Party. Diginotar issued certified certificates for digital signatures. The security breach by Iranian hackers over the summer, which Diginotar did not report to the authorities, lead to severe credibility issues for all Diginotar certificates issued before. This included Dutch government websites, but also led to severe breaches of privacy for Iranian end users, in multiple countries. As a result of OPTA's decision all certificates issued by Diginotar have to be revoked, while at the same she is forbidden to issue new ones. more

Sites Under gb.com Go Offline Amidst Legal Battle Over Domain

Kevin Murphy reporting in DomainIncite: "Thousands of companies that use the pseudo-top-level-domain .gb.com have gone offline due to a legal fight between the registry and its founder. CentralNIC sells third-level gb.com domains as a 'Great Britain' alternative to .co.uk. A Google search reveals a great many small businesses use the extension for their web sites. They're all out of luck today."
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Airplanes Vulnerable to Hacking, Says U.S. Department of Homeland Security

Researchers have been able to successfully demonstrate a commercial aircraft can be remotely hacked. more

The West Is Shooting Itself in Its IT Foot

In our globalized economy, it is vital that we do establish levels of fair trade, and the USA is right in addressing that issue. However, making technology a key element of the trade war will backfire. Let's take (again) the Huawei issue as an example. The company has admitted that the US boycott is hitting them severely with an estimated loss of $30 billion in revenues. One of the other elements of the trade boycott is that Google is no longer allowed to provide... more

Those Who Don’t Remember 2014 Are Doomed to Repeat It

J. Gordon Crovitz is making his case against the IANA transition again today, in the pages of the Wall Street Journal. I think it's useful to once again go on record opposing his flawed logic against the transition. i2Coalition was among those that publicly praised the IANA transition report when it arrived this week. When the Washington Post covered our announcement, I was frustrated by a commenter who has a different take on the transition than I. more

U.S. House Committee to Hold Hearing on Recent Cyberattacks

U.S. Subcommittee on Communications & Technology and the Subcommittee on Commerce, Manufacturing, and Trade have announced a joint hearing to examine recent cyberattacks. more

eHealth: Start With the Professionals

With the prospect of broadband networks becoming more and more of a reality, it appears that concepts such as eHealth are not too far away. Digital healthcare describes the whole system of GPs, hospitals and regional healthcare centres, while eHealth describes the many health applications which will become available for people to use at home. more

WIPO Updates GDPR Guidance for UDRP

Three months after implementation of the European Union's (EU) General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), the World Intellectual Property Organization's (WIPO) Arbitration and Mediation Center has expanded and updated its already helpful web page with important questions and answers about how the GDPR is impacting the Uniform Domain Name Dispute Resolution Policy (UDRP). more

Mobile Prices Unlikely to Be Affected by AT&T Decision

Contrary to what some financial analysts would have us believe, it is highly unlikely that the price increases for mobile broadband services which were recently announced by AT&T will be replicated by other mobile operators around the world. The mobile market in the US is one of the least regulated and therefore one the most monopolised markets in the western world. more

Largest Spam Gang Operation in the World Shutdown by U.S. and New Zealand Authorities

U.S. authorities announced today that they have shut down one of the largest spam operations in the world, an extensive network with ties to Australia, New Zealand, India, China and the United States. The group, dubbed 'HerbalKing' by spam fighting organizations, had been active as far back as 2005 and became notorious as the number one worst spam gang on the Internet for much of 2007 and 2008 according to Spamhaus, a non-profit anti-spam research group. more

At the NCPH Intersessional, Compliance Concerns Take Centre Stage

The non-contracted parties of the ICANN community met in Reykjavík last week for their annual intersessional meeting, where at the top of the agenda were calls for more transparency, operational consistency, and procedural fairness in how ICANN ensures contractual compliance. ICANN, as a quasi-private cooperative, derives its legitimacy from its ability to enforce its contracts with domain name registries and registrars... more