Broadband Now or Later?

I just heard about a U.S. County that is using its American Rescue Plan Act (ARPA) funds to build fixed wireless broadband. This is a traditional fixed wireless broadband technology that will probably deliver speeds of 100 Mbps to those close to the towers, slower speeds to homes further away, and which will not reach all homes in the County. more

China Forbids News Reporting from Social Media Unless Approved

The instruction, issued by the Cyberspace Administration of China, came only a few days after Xu Lin, formerly the deputy head of the organization, replaced his boss, Lu Wei, as the top gatekeeper of Chinese internet affairs. more

New York City’s Broadband Reversal

New York City has done a 180-degree turnaround on the concept of the City providing broadband to low-income households. In 2020, then-May Bill de Blasio announced a plan to bring affordable broadband to low-income households. That Master Plan said that the City would make a $157 million infrastructure investment to provide broadband to around 600,000 homes that includes 200,000 residents of public housing. more

Observation from Seminar on IANA Function Stewardship Transition Held by CAICT

On August 16 of 2016, the US Government announced its intention to transit the stewardship of the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority (IANA) function to the multistakeholder community upon the expiration of the IANA function Contract as of October 1 of 2016, barring any significant impediment... This announcement attracts the close attention of Internet community around the world and also in China. more

Honda Halts Domestic Car Production Plant Due to WannaCry Virus in Computer Network

Production at a Honda domestic vehicle plant was halted for a day this week as a result of the discovery of WannaCry ransomware in the computer network, the company reports.  more

Chromebooks, Google’s Long-Waited Laptop, to Ship Next Month

Google yesterday dove deep into its Chrome notebook project at its annual Google I/O conference. The company has had the notebook operating system in beta for almost two years now. Google announced the first market-ready Chromebooks from partners Samsung and Acer. The Chrome OS is dependent on the cloud for storage and various web-based applications. The result is a machine that boots in a matter of seconds and carries very little in the line of native hardware. more

Study Finds Spain Most Bot-Infected Country, Sweden Among Least Infected

According to a recent security report, Spain and the United States are the leading countries when comes to bot-infected computers. Based on data compiled from October by PandaLabs, the research arm of Panda Security, an alarming 44.49% of computers in Spain are infected with bots and United States -- a long way behind -- at 14.41%, followed by Mexico 9.37% and Brazil 4.81%. Countries least infected include Peru, the Netherlands and Sweden, all with ratios under 1 percent. more

Security Against Election Hacking - Part 2: Cyberoffense Is Not the Best Cyberdefense!

State and county election officials across the country employ thousands of computers in election administration, most of them are connected (from time to time) to the internet (or exchange data cartridges with machines that are connected). In my previous post I explained how we must audit elections independently of the computers, so we can trust the results even if the computers are hacked. more

Hacked ICANN Data Still Selling on Black Market Years After Breach

"Three years after hackers used a spearphishing attack to successfully gain access to internal data at the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN), the data is still being passed around and sold on black markets for $300, complete with claims that it’s never been leaked before," reports Patrick O'Neill in CyberScoop. more

EPDP Team Marches Toward Major Milestone

If it feels like the work of the latest group addressing registration data within ICANN has been going on forever, try participating in it! Since the summer of 2018, the team has regularly been meeting for several hours each week, participating in numerous face-to-face meetings and exchanging thousands of emails. Last week in Los Angeles, the team got together once again to continue our Phase 2 work creating policy that will (among other issues) govern the disclosure of non-public registration data to third parties. more

Google Fiber Launches 5-Gig Service in 4 of Its 12 Existing Metro Markets

Google Fiber is boosting its internet speeds and availability by offering a new 5-gig tier in four of its existing markets. Nick Saporito, Head of Multi-gig and Commercial Product, made the announcement in a blog post on Valentine's day titled: Fall in love with fast -- 5 Gig is here! more

Policy Review: Botnets are eWMD, electronic Weapons of Mass Destruction

The latest issue of Policy Review from the Hoover Institution, a public policy research center -- focused on advanced study of politics, economics, and political economy -- has an essay titled eWMDs – electronic weapons of mass destruction. The Policiy Review readers are warned that botnets should be considered a serious security problem and that "cyber attacks present a grave new security vulnerability for all nations and must be urgently addressed." more

Technology Vendors Must Be Proactive in Dealing With COVID-19 Problems

Early action now on possible performance issues will "flatten the curve" of customer problems in the coming weeks and months. Here are three things technology and software vendors can do right now to get ahead of problems that may appear (if they are not already) with services such as development, implementation and support... Check your contracts to see whether there are any "material assumptions" that have failed or will fail - perhaps because of some governmental action or unavailability of personnel... more

WiFi QoE Assurance with TR-069 - Part 2: Optimizing a Single Access Point

As we have seen in the first installment of this series, TR-069 offers unprecedented visibility into the customer premises network to highlight devices beyond the gateway, and in the case of WiFi, the issues affecting service quality. Insights into the surrounding WIFI landscape alone provide ample data to provision the access point (AP) to operate in a part of the spectrum with the least amount of interference. more

Hearing Scheduled to Examine Future Relationship of US and ICANN

Rick Boucher, Chairman of the House Energy and Commerce Communications Subcommittee, will hold a hearing on June 4th to examine the future of U.S. government's relationship with ICANN. Tech Daily Dose of the National Journal reports: "Boucher has previously expressed interest in holding an ICANN hearing, particularly since a joint project agreement that has allowed Commerce Department oversight of ICANN is slated to sunset on Sept. 30 amid accountability and transparency concerns." more