Fergie replied on NANOG to my recent post on the subject of broadband routers insecurity: "I'll even go a step further, and say that if ISPs keep punting on the whole botnet issue, and continue to think of themselves as 'common carriers' in some sense -- and continue to disengage on the issue -- then you may eventually forced to address those issues at some point in the not-so-distant future..." He is right, but I have a comment I felt it was important - to me - to make. Not just on this particular vulnerability, but on the "war"... more
Black's Law Dictionary defines it as "the extraterritorial operation of laws; that is, their operation upon persons, rights or jural relations, existing beyond the limits of the enacting state, but still amenable to its laws. The term is used to indicate jurisdiction exercised by a nation in other countries, by treaty..." Extraterritoriality is also the most significant emerging development today in the law shaping virtual network architectures and services that includes OTT and NFV-SDN. more
August 2014 is proving yet again to be an amusing month in the Australian political scene, and in this case the source of the amusement was watching a number of Australian politicians fumble around the topic of digital surveillance and proposed legislation relating to data retention measures. The politicians assured us that the proposed data retention measures were nothing untoward, and all that was being called for was the retention of "metadata" by Australian ISPs for a period of two years. more
1974, Bob Kahn and Vint Cerf checked in the Crown Plaza Hotel in Palo Alto, worked a couple of days and presented to the world the TCP/IP protocol. Stanford hosted one of the four computers connected on equal footing (ARPANET) in 1969... A framed document in the hotel lobby remembers the historic moment. On March 31, 2014 a crowd of about 30 people from all over the world checked in the same Crown Plaza hotel for the first working meeting of the new Coordination Council (CC) of the NetMundial Initiative (NMI). more
As we have previously observed, the efforts undertaken by ICANN, the World Economic Forum (WEF), and CGI.BR to launch a NETmundial Initiative (NMI) to follow up on last spring's NETmundial meeting in Sao Paulo has encountered heavy skepticism and substantial resistance from the major civil society and technical groups from which endorsement and participation was sought. more
The saga of the IPv6 transition continues to surprise us all. RFC 2460, the first complete effort at a specification of the IPv6 protocol, was published in December 1998, more than twenty years ago. The entire point of IPv6 was to specify a successor protocol to IPv4 due to the prospect of running out of IPv4 addresses. Yet we ran out of IPv4 addresses more than a decade ago. more
NANOG 62 was held at Baltimore from the 6th to the 9th October. These are my observations on some of the presentations that occurred at this meeting. .. One of the more memorable sides in this presentation was a reference to "map" drawn by Charles Minard in 1869 describing the statistics relating to the Napoleonic military campaign in Russia, and the subsequent retreat. more
The DNS Operations, Analysis, and Research Centre (DNS-OARC) convened OARC-35 at the start of May. Here are some thoughts on a few presentations at that meeting that caught my attention... These days it seems that the term "the digital economy" is synonymous with "the surveillance economy." Many providers of services on the Internet spend a lot of time and effort assembling profiles of their customers. These days, it's not just data in terms of large-scale demographics but the assembling of large sets of individual profiles. more
The Internet of Things (IoT) is on an explosive growth trajectory. According to Transforma Insights, the number of IoT-connected devices is projected to increase to 24.1 billion worldwide by 2030. That's almost a three-fold increase from 2019. Much of this growth will be fueled by the coming 5G revolution, which will enable businesses and consumers to take advantage of a wide range of increasingly sophisticated connected devices. more
Last Saturday marked the 53rd anniversary of the Internet. While the vast majority of its five billion users have been online for less than a decade, the Internet was taken into use on October 29th, 1969, when two computers connected to the ARPANET exchanged a message. Although the Internet has been around for a while, it remained below most people's radar until the late 1990s when the dot com boom started. more
At APNIC Labs we've been working on developing a new approach to navigating through some of our data sets the describe aspects of IPv6 deployment, the use of DNSSEC and some measurements relating to the current state of BGP. The intent of this particular set of data collections is to allow the data to be placed into a relative context, displaying comparison of the individual measurements at a level of geographic regions, individual countries, and individual networks. more
On Monday May 23 2022 at 3 -- 5pm EEST (12:00 -- 14:00 UTC) the Finnish Internet Forum will convene a panel at the University of Helsinki with the topic 'Internet and War'. A panel of experts will address the question of how the war has affected the Internet and how the Internet has been used to influence Finland and elsewhere during the war. The event will be conducted in English. more
On Monday, 11 April 2011, Level 3 announced they had entered a definitive agreement to acquire Global Crossing. According to the Renesys Market Intelligence rankings, this merger would bring together the world's #1 and #2 global providers, with over half the Internet market on earth dependent on the combined entity. If the deal gained regulatory approval in the US and elsewhere today, how would the Internet provider landscape change? We'll answer that question in this blog, giving the proposed union a fictional name of Level Crossing for the purposes of our discussion. more
Your first line of defense to any DDoS, at least on the network side, should be to disperse the traffic across as many resources as you can. Basic math implies that if you have fifteen entry points, and each entry point is capable of supporting 10g of traffic, then you should be able to simply absorb a 100g DDoS attack while still leaving 50g of overhead for real traffic... Dispersing a DDoS in this way may impact performance -- but taking bandwidth and resources down is almost always the wrong way to react to a DDoS attack. But what if you cannot, for some reason, disperse the attack? more
The Association of German Cable Operators' annual trade show has a new name. Europe's principal cable industry exhibition and convention was previously known as ANGA Cable, but last week (June 4-6, 2013), the show launched as ANGA COM. This new title - an abbreviation of communication - highlights how the convergence of technologies and networks is blurring the line between cable operators and other communication and entertainment services providers. more