Internet Society Launches CEO Search

The Internet Society Board of Trustees has retained the executive search firm Odgers Berndtson to help identify qualified candidates for the position of President & CEO. Lynn St.Amour, the Internet Society's current President & CEO, announced her plans earlier this year to step down in February 2014 at the conclusion of her contract. more

Competing With Satellite Cellular: AT&T Sees Little Threat but Niche Appeal Grows

AT&T’s CEO plays down the threat of satellite cellular, citing bandwidth and coverage limits. Yet growing interest in rural and IoT applications suggests the technology could still claim valuable niches in the wireless market. more

U.S. Library of Congress to Acquire Entire Twitter Archive

Every public tweet since Twitter's inception in March 2006 will be acquired and archived digitally by the U.S Library of Congress, according to announcements made today. The Library has been harvesting data from the web since 2000 and currently holds "more than 167 terabytes of web-based information, including legal blogs, websites of candidates for national office, and websites of Members of Congress". While an official press release has not been issued yet, the Library says "[e]xpect to see an emphasis on the scholarly and research implications of the acquisition". The Library chose to make its first mention of the Acquisition via its official Twitter account @librarycongress. more

China’s Internet Users Pass Half a Billion

The number of Chinese Internet users has surpassed 500 million, with nearly half of them using microblogs, or Weibo, according to latest official figures. About 55.8 million Chinese people became new Internet users last year, bringing the country’s Web population to 513 million, representing an Internet penetration rate of 38.3 percent, according to a report released by China Internet Network Information Center (CNNIC). more

UN Broadband Commission: Global Broadband Growth in Decline, 4 Billion Still Offline

Broadband Internet is failing to reach those who could benefit most, with Internet access reaching near-saturation in the world's rich nations but not advancing fast enough to benefit the billions of people living in the developing world, according to the 2015 edition of the State of Broadband report. more

Dozens of US House of Representatives Websites Hacked

US House officials have confirmed hackers breaching several websites belonging to House of Representatives members in the past week. Portions of the websites were replaced by digital graffiti which began earlier this month, according to zone-h. Brian Krebs of the Washington Post reports: "Rep. Spencer Bachus has sent a letter to the House's chief administrative officer, requesting more information about the attacks. Bachus cites information provided to him by Gary Warner, director of research in computer forensics at the University of Alabama at Birmingham. Warner suggested that the break-ins at the House sites were caused not by password guessing [as reported initially], but by 'SQL injection,' an attack that exploits security weaknesses in Web server configurations." more

AFNIC: 2014 Was the Year of the Big Bang for nTLDs

AFNIC has released an article providing a global overview of TLDs in 2014 and some thoughts about market prospects in 2015 and 2016. more

Dish Network Confirms Network Outage Was a Cybersecurity Breach Impacting Customers and Employees

The satellite television provider, Dish Network is currently dealing with a cybersecurity incident that has affected its internal networks, customer support systems, and websites such as boostinfinite.com and dish.com. It is currently investigating the incident and has confirmed certain data was extracted from its IT systems as a result. more

Poll Suggests Canadians OK With Internet Traffic Management If Treated Fairly

The Canadian Press reports: "Most Canadians support the idea of Internet traffic management as long as all users are treated fairly, a new poll suggests. The Canadian Press Harris-Decima poll found only about one in five of those surveyed had heard of Internet traffic management or "traffic shaping," a contentious issue now before the federal regulator... Sixty per cent of survey respondents said they found the practice reasonable as long as customers are treated fairly, while 22 per cent said Internet management is unreasonable regardless." more

Council of Europe Releases Strong Net Neutrality Guidelines

The net neutrality guidelines released today by the Council of Europe has laid out significant principles which, although not legally binding, could "almost certainly result in legislation that follows its lead being passed across Europe," reports Kieren McCarthy in The Register. more

High-Level Panel Formed on the Future of Internet Governance

ICANN released a report today announcing that a diverse global group of stakeholders from government, civil society, the private sector, the technical community and international organizations has formed a Panel on the Future of Global Internet Cooperation. The Panel's first meeting is scheduled for December 12 13 in London. more

BT Working on 300Mbps Residential Pilot Project

Openreach, the lead deployment arm of BT, has issued an announcement asking residents and landlords of apartment blocks to join a pilot project that will eventually bring broadband download speeds of up to 300Mbps to residents. "Participants will gain access to Openreach’s Fibre to the Premises (FTTP) technology which delivers super-fast broadband speeds," says Openreach. more

Grenadian Prime Minister Calls for Caribbean Businesses to Invest in AI

Grenadian Prime Minister Dickon Mitchell is calling for Caribbean policymakers and business leaders to recognise the significance of artificial intelligence technologies. Artificial intelligence, or AI, refers to the ability of computer systems to do tasks that typically require human intelligence, such as learning, reasoning, problem-solving, and decision-making. more

ICANN67 Round-Up

This past meeting of the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN), ICANN67, was intended to be held in person in Cancun, Mexico, but was actually the first meeting to be held entirely online and virtually. It was a well-managed affair with fewer sessions than the in-person meetings and less opportunity for the community to convene and meet as individuals. The last-minute change from an in-person to a virtual meeting impacted ICANN's ability to provide translation services for the full set of UN-supported languages, Arabic, Chinese, English, French, Russian, and Spanish. more

Building Resilient Broadband Networks: Lessons from the Power Industry’s Transformation

It's almost impossible to talk about broadband at the community level without talking about resiliency and redundancy. It's hard to find rural communities that haven't experienced a broadband outage due to a fiber being cut somewhere. The issue hits the news when there are reports of regional or national broadband outages. more