Networks

Internet to ITU: Stay Away from My Network

An ITU document entitled "Beyond Internet Governance" crossed my desk earlier this week. Given that I had absolutely nothing better to do, I decided to give it a read. The audacity of the ITU Secretariat is nothing less than shocking. It has been a long while since I read such a self-serving, narrow-minded and inaccurate document. The backbone of the ITU's contention rests on the premise that something called the Next Generation Network and the contention that this network will act as one big bug fix for all the problems created by current inter-networking technology.

Thoughts on IPv6 Day

Jeff Pulver proposed an interesting idea called IPv6 Day... In geeks term, we call this a 'flag day'. The last time we have a flag day was 1st Jan 1983 when Internet moved from NCP (Network Control Protocol) to IPv4. So why not do it for IPv6?

A Network by Any Other Name

Last month Wired News, the online service that grew out of Wired Magazine, decided that it was going stop using an upper-case 'I' when it talked about the internet. At the same time Web became web and Net became net. According to Tony Long, the man responsible for their style guide, the change was made because 'there is no earthly reason to capitalize any of these words'. In fact, he claims, 'there never was.' ...Forgive me for saying, but those who choose 'internet' over 'Internet' are as wrong as those who would visit london, meet the queen or go for a boat trip down the river thames.

Sender ID: A Tale of Open Standards and Corporate Greed? - Part I

A long long time ago when the Internet was still young and most people were still using clunky Apples, PCs and mainframes; two documents were published by the Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA), part of the US Government's Department of Defense. They were called "RFC 821 - Simple Mail Transfer Protocol" and "RFC 822 - Standard for the format of ARPA Internet text messages" respectively. Written by the John Postel and Dave Crocker respectively, often referred to as some of the founding fathers of the Internet, they defined a simple text-based email system for the use of the fledging network then called the "ARPA Internet"...

10 Reasons Why Involving Government in Spam Control is a Bad Idea

1. Many jurisdictions already have laws which cover abuse of computer systems and networks -- and spam is of course abuse. These laws are only sporadically enforced, however, usually when a sufficiently visible/powerful entity is the aggrieved party. Adding more laws (a) is redundant and (b) does not increase enforcement. 2. Laws are only enforced as law enforcement has resources available. Spam/abuse is not a high priority unless a sufficiently visible/powerful entity makes it so, and those cases are rare.

80% of Spam Originating from Home PCs

The majority of spam -- as much as 80 per cent of all unsolicited marketing messages sent -- now emanates from residential ISP networks and home user PCs. This is due to the proliferation of spam trojans, bits of surreptitious malware code embedded in residential subscriber PCs by worms and spyware programs. Worm attacks are growing in frequency because they provide a fast means of infecting a vast number of computers with spam trojans in a very short period of time. It's no surprise that many service providers report an upsurge in spam traffic immediately following a worm attack.

U.S. Moving Forward with ENUM

One of the pieces of infrastructure that makes all kinds of networks work and yet gets very little attention is the directory. Directories are big business. For example, there's directory of telephone numbers run by NeuStar, Inc. NeuStar has annual revenues of $92 million. Now, according to Light Reading, AT&T Corp. and MCI Inc., together with unidentified cable companies, telephone companies, and ISPs are preparing to form a Limited Liability Corporation (LLC) that will run a process to define a new company that will run ENUM.

Bad Journalism, IPv6, and the BBC

Here's a good way to frighten yourself: Learn about something, and then read what the press writes about it. It's astonishing how often flatly untrue things get reported as facts. I first observed this back in 1997 when I was a Democratic lawyer in the U.S. House of Representatives working on the (rather ridiculous) campaign finance investigation. (The investigating committee's conspiracy-minded chairman was famous for shotgunning pumpkins in his backyard in order to figure out exactly how Hillary snuffed Vince Foster)...More recently, I've seen the same discouraging phenomenon in reporting on technology and, in particular, the Internet.

NAT: Just Say No

Fueled by the lack of public IP addresses, 70% of Fortune 1000 companies have been forced to deploy NATs (Source: Center for Next Generation Internet). NATs are also found in hundreds of thousands of small business and home networks where several hosts must share a single IP address. It has been so successful in slowing the depletion of IPv4 addresses that many have questioned the need for IPv6 in the near future. However, such conclusions ignore the fact that a strategy based on avoiding a crisis can never provide the long-term benefits that solving the underlying problems that precipitated the crisis offers.

The Internet Infrastructure: Stability vs. Innovation

Stratton Sclavos of VeriSign distills the essence of the SiteFinder controversy in his CNet interview...There is a subtle but essential misunderstanding here. Innovation can and should happen in Internet infrastructure, but there are a handful of core elements that must remain open and radically simple if the Internet is to remain, well, the Internet. These include TCP/IP, SMTP, HTTP, BIND, BGP, and the DNS (especially the .com registry). Any change in these protocols should be very carefully vetted through a consensus-based process.