Networks

Software-Defined Networking: What’s New, and What’s New for Tech Policy?

The Silicon Flatirons Conference on Regulating Computing and Code is taking place in Boulder. The annual conference addresses a range of issues at the intersection of technology and policy and provides an excellent look ahead to the tech policy issues on the horizon, particularly in telecommunications. I was looking forward to yesterday's panel on "The Triumph of Software and Software-Defined Networks", which had some good discussion on the ongoing problem surrounding security and privacy of the Internet of Things (IoT)... more

Study Finds IPv6 Adoption Exposes More Residential Devices to Unsolicited Traffic

As IPv6 adoption accelerates, a new study warns that the disappearance of NAT in home networks is exposing millions of devices to online threats -- potentially fueling a new wave of powerful IoT botnets. more

What COVID-19 Means for Network Security

The COVID-19 Pandemic is causing huge social and financial shifts, but so far, its impact on network security has gone under-reported. Yet with thousands of companies worldwide requiring millions of employees to work remotely, network administrators are seeing unprecedented changes in the ways that clients are using their networks and new threats that seek to leverage the current crisis. more

Why R&E Networks Should Be Aware of the CDN Interconnect Initiative (CDNI)

At the recent IETF meeting there has been considerable discussion about interconnection of Content Delivery Networks. A lot of this is being driven unfortunately by the incumbent telco/cableco's who never understood CDN in the first place, and now want to assert control over this critical new Internet architecture, much in the same way that they want to take control over open WiFi hot spots as part of an integration strategy with their 3G/4G networks. more

Seattle Restores ISP Privacy Rules. Could be First of Many Cities to Defeat FCC’s Privacy Roll Back

The city of Seattle this week will move forward with its own plan to restore broadband user privacy rules despite the recent law passed by U.S. Congress, signed by President Trump in April, which gave ISPs the green light to collect customer data. more

Internet Service Quality Measured from Thousands of Locations

RIPE Atlas, the new active measurements network maintained by the RIPE NCC, gives you a way to easily measure the quality of your Internet services. RIPE Atlas is designed in such a way that it can collect data for analysis from a great number of locations on the Internet. The actual measurement devices, or "probes", are so small that they can be easily deployed in a home environment. more

Ericsson Predicts 50 Billion Connections by 2020

At a recent shareholders' meeting in Stockholm, Ericsson's CEO has reaffirmed company's vision of having 50 billion internet-connected devices by 2020: "Today we already see laptops and advanced handsets connected, but in the future everything that will benefit from being connected will be connected." As an example of connected devices, a research engineer showed real life mobile health applications and how heart monitoring can be done remotely over mobile networks. more

Encryption, Our Last Line of Defense

Encryption is fundamental to our daily life. Practically everything we do online makes use of encryption is some form. Access to our financial transactions, health records, government services, and exchanged private messages are all protected by strong encryption. Encryption is the process of changing the information in such a way as to make it unreadable by anyone except for those possessing special knowledge (usually referred to as a "key"), which allows them to change the information back to its original, readable form. more

DDoS Awareness Day - Oct 23, Register Today for Live Virtual Event

In support of National Cyber Security Awareness Month, DDoS Awareness Day is a virtual, global event focused on raising awareness and education around the threat of DDoS attacks. Hosted by Neustar with and exclusive media partner CSO, DDoS Awareness Day brings together top experts in global security to share their views, technical tips and from-the-trenches experience. Attendees will also be given access to a wealth of DDoS materials: white papers, surveys, presentations, best practices and more. more

Reducing the Risks of BYOD with DNS-Based Security Intelligence; Part 1: Understanding the Risks

Ah, BYOD. How I love thee. BYOD, or "Bring Your Own Device", gives me choices. I can use a device at work I actually like and am most effective with. (How did I ever get by without my iPad?) But BYOD comes with challenges. Personal devices can be infected with malware. Once they're connected to an enterprise's network, they can be controlled by a bot master to hijack enterprise resources and wreak havoc as part of a botnet. more

Community Networks Could Help Strengthen the Caribbean Internet

By some estimates, only half of the world's population has internet access, leaving the other half at a sizeable competitive disadvantage. This profound connectivity gap is especially significant in the unserved and underserved areas of developing and least-developed countries. For people who live in these places, Internet connectivity is not just about the Internet. It is a lifeline that gives access to electronic commerce and telehealth services, distance learning, social and political engagement, government services... more

Critical Role for R&E Networks+Commercial Clouds in US Government “Big Data” Initiative

It is great to see US and European governments undertake initiatives to promote the development of research into Big Data utilizing commercial clouds. Many cloud providers are offering free resources to support these initiatives. R&E networks will play a critical role in linking researchers to the commercial clouds and developing collaboration platforms and portals. more

Google’s Acquisition of Nest and Smart Homes

Google's $3.2 billion acquisition of high-tech thermostat and smoke-detector maker Nest Labs will allow the company to further infiltrate people's lives, not just via their smartphones but now also via a range of home appliances. It is a logical development for the digital media giant and based on their record of innovation we can expect a range of interesting products and services, also known as machine-to-machine (M2M) communication and the Internet of Things (IoT), to enter this market. more

The Early History of Usenet, Part VIII: The Great Renaming

The Great Renaming was a significant event in Usenet history since it involved issues of technology, money, and governance. From a personal perspective -- and remember that this series of blog posts is purely my recollections – it also marked the end of my "official" involvement in "running" Usenet. I put "running" in quotation marks in the previous sentence because of the difficulty of actually controlling a non-hierarchical, distributed system with no built-in, authenticated control mechanisms. more

In a Networked World Knowing the Right Time Is Essential but How Accurate Are the Computer Clocks?

Computers have always had clocks. Well maybe not clocks as you might think, but digital computers have always had oscillators, and if you hook the oscillator to a simple counter then you have a clock. The clock is not just there to tell the time, although it can do that, nor is it there just to record the time when data files are created or modified, though it does that too. Knowing the time is important to many functions, and one of those is security. more