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
The recent launch of a new internet exchange point in Saint Martin has propelled the territory towards a better, faster and more resilient Internet. The French Caribbean territory's new IXP, called Smart-IX, was launched in October under the auspices of a recently launched CaribIX project, which is coordinated by the Caribbean Telecommunications Union (CTU), supported by the Caribbean Network Operators Group (CaribNOG), funded by the INTERREG Caraïbes programme... more
Do you know someone who has made outstanding contributions in service to the Internet community? Someone who has made the Internet better in some way who deserves more recognition? Maybe someone who has helped extend Internet access to a large region? Or wrote widely-used programs that make the Internet more secure? Or served in some capacity behind the scenes in Internet services? more
Would you like to help guide the future of the Mutually Agreed Norms for Routing Security (MANRS) initiative? As the MANRS community continues to develop new efforts to make the routing layer of the Internet more secure (ex. the equipment vendor program), would you like to help lead the work? The MANRS community is seeking volunteers for its new Steering Committee. The committee will lead the community as it evolves its governance model. more
Recently I was asked by a customer how they can easily set up rollback capabilities on the endpoints in their corporate network. They had seen the marketing hype by various security technology providers that their products included rollback capabilities they could utilize if/when one of their workstations or servers was infected by malware. Having gotten this question more than once, I thought it would be a good subject to share with a broader audience. more
Last month, I announced our Open Data Hub to the CircleID community, inviting anyone interested in making the digital sector more transparent to join our efforts. Today, I am excited to share summaries of our three-part series describing our vision for a sustainable European cloud. It’s a key part of our Roadmap to Sustainable Digital Infrastructure by 2030, and one that is meant to not merely challenge the dominance of the big, non-European cloud providers, but offer an entirely different paradigm that is open-source, fair, sustainable, and creates economic opportunities for all. more
The Swedish carrier group Telia has recently announced the sale of its international wholesale business to Polhelm Infra, an infrastructure investment manager jointly owned by a number of Swedish pension funds. Why would a telco operator sell off what was a core part of its operation to a pension fund? The Internet was originally conceived as a telephone network for computers. (I should mention that this was not a concept that was unique to the Internet at the time. more
On the afternoon of June 17 of this year, there was a widespread outage of online services. In Australia, it impacted three of the country's largest banks, the national postal service, the country's reserve bank, and one airline operator. Further afield from Australia, the outage impacted the Hong Kong Stock Exchange and some US airlines. The roll call of affected services appeared to reach some 500 serv more
Do you know of someone who has made the Internet better in some way who deserves more recognition? Maybe someone who has helped extend Internet access to a large region? Or wrote widely-used programs that make the Internet more secure? Or served in some capacity behind the scenes in Internet services? Or maybe someone who has been actively working for open standards and open processes for the Internet? more
Scientists and engineers are always looking for ways to speed up and more efficiently configure computing devices to maximize data flow. There are a lot of applications today that require the exchange of huge volumes of data in real-time. MIT scientists have created a hair-like plastic polymer cable that can transmit data ten times faster than copper USB cables. 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
Today's Internet is just one application of the powerful idea of best-efforts connectivity. The home router (NAT) decouples the connectivity within the home from the larger internet, enabling innovation that leverages the Internet without being limited by it. Connectivity starts at home. Your computers and devices all interconnect locally. In a sense, the larger Internet is just one more connected device. You are free to innovate and experiment without asking a provider's permission. more
Why are networks so insecure? One reason is we don't take network security seriously. We just don't think of the network as a serious target of attack. Or we think of security as a problem "over there," something that exists in the application realm, that needs to be solved by application developers. Or we think the consequences of a network security breach as "well, they can DDoS us, and then we can figure out how to move load around, so if we build with resilience (enough redundancy)... more
For many years the consuming topic in DNS circles was that of the names themselves. If you wind the clock back twenty years or so, you will find much discussion about the nature of the Internet's namespace. Why were there both generic top-level labels and two-letter country codes? If we were going to persist with these extra-territorial generic country codes in the namespace, then how many should there be? Who could or should manage them? And so on. more
As the pandemic continues, the network operator community continues to meet online. NANOG held its 81st meeting on February 8 and 9, and these are my notes from some of the presentations at that meeting... Ethernet, developed in 1973 at Xerox PARC, was a revolutionary step in network architectures in many ways. The common bus architecture imposed several constraints on the network that have echoed through the ensuing four decades in all kinds of ways. more
A World-Renowned Source for Internet Developments. Serving Since 2002.