Cyber and Telecommunications Defence One of the Fastest Growing Industries in the World

In the past five years, cyber and telecommunications defence has left its niche market to become one of the fastest growing industries in the world. In 2011, governments, industry and ordinary computer users spent roughly £65 billion shoring up their computer networks, a figure that is predicted to double within five years. more

J.D. Falk Award

This morning M³AAWG announced the creation of the J.D. Falk award to recognize and honor people like J.D. who work to make the Internet safer for all users... J.D. was a legend in the abuse prevention world when I first started learning about spam and abuse prevention back in the late 90's. more

Regulation as Innovation

The European Telecommunications Network Operators' Association (ETNO) has issued a press release in which its Executive Board Chair and the ITU's Secretary-General "reiterated the importance of the WCIT to lay the framework that will facilitate the further growth of an innovative, and sustainable future for the telecom and information and communication technology sector (including the Internet)". more

FCC Chief Criticizes Russia for Passing Internet Censorship Bill

Brendan Sasso reporting in the Hill: "Julius Genachowski, chairman of the Federal Communications Commission (FCC), issued a statement late Wednesday slamming Russia for passing a bill that would allow the government to blacklist certain websites. He said the country had moved in a 'troubling and dangerous direction.' ... 'The world’s experience with the Internet provides a clear lesson: a free and open Internet promotes economic growth and freedom; restricting the free flow of information is bad for consumers, businesses, and societies,' he said. more

IP Addresses and Privacy Sensitive Data - A Level Playing Field Needed

Reading Peter Olthoorn's book on Google (a link is found here), I ran into a passage on IP addresses. Where Google states that it does not see an IP address as privacy sensitive. An IP address could be used by more than one person, it claims. The Article 29 Working Party, the EU privacy commissioners, states that it is privacy sensitive as a unique identifier of a private person. It got me wondering whether it is this simple. Here is a blog post meant to give some food for thought and debate. I invite you to think about the question 'how private is an IP address'? more

Carriage vs. Content

Does anyone remember the Internet before Google? And no, using Google to ask about the pre-Google Internet is not going to work all that well! For those of you who can recall the Internet of around 2000, do you also recall what debates were raging at the time? Let me give you a hand in answering that question. One big debate at the time was all about the relationship between the carriage service operators and the content providers, and, as usual, it was all about money. The debate was about who owed who money, and how much. Ten years later and it seems that nothing much has changed. more

Some of the World’s Largest Investors Are Investing in FttH

While some governments are still struggling with the concept of FttH - some of the world's largest investors such as the Dutch superannuation funds (ABP, PGGM and Pensioenfonds Vervoer (PfV)), have been investing in FttH in the Netherlands since 2010. This is happening in a country with a broadband cable network that covers 95% of the country and nationwide access to ADSL2+ networks. more

Update on Assigning 32-bit ASNs

As mentioned in Assigning 32-bit ASNs published one year ago, 16-bit Autonomous System Numbers (ASNs) are becoming a scarce resource just like 32-bit IP addresses. In 2007, the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) addressed this scarcity by developing a new format: 32-bit AS Numbers (RFC 4893), which increased the supply of ASNs to four billion. more

ICANN’s New TLDs: Of Course There Will Be an Auction - Part 2

A few days ago I opined that if several people want the same Top-Level Domain (TLD) and can't come to terms otherwise, they should arrange a private auction. It would be an odd sort of auction, since the buyers and sellers are the same people, so unlike normal auctions, the goal is not to maximize the selling price. How might it work? more

Broadband Demand-Side Management

Countries, cities and commercial organisations around the globe are facing problems associated with the rollout of fibre-to-the-home networks... We have been warning about these issues for well over a decade. The problem arises because the telecoms industry has been based on the principle 'build and they will come'. more

ICANN’s New TLDs: Of Course There Will Be an Auction - Part 1

The process for ICANN's new TLDs says that if there are several equally qualified applicants for a TLD, and they can't agree which one gets it, ICANN will hold an auction to decide. Recently some people have suggested that the applicants could use a private auction instead. Well, of course. In a situation like this, the question isn't whether there will be an auction, but only who will keep the money. more

High Performance DNS Needs High Performance Security

There's been a lot of emphasis on DNS performance lately because faster DNS contributes directly to a better user experience. There's an interesting flipside to DNS performance though, higher performance DNS servers may be better targets for cache poisoning attacks. Faster servers give attackers more opportunities to insert fake entries into the DNS - speed can kill (or at least inflict a nasty wound!) so it's important to understand the security implications if you're looking to upgrade DNS performance. more

A Report on the OECD/BEREC Workshop on Interconnection and Regulation

I presented at a OECD/BEREC workshop that was held on the 20th June in Brussels, and I'd like to share some personal impressions and opinions from this workshop. The OECD/BEREC workshop was a policy-oriented peering and exchange forum. It was not a conventional operational peering forum where the aim is to introduce potential peers to each other and facilitate peer-based interconnection of network operators, but a workshop that involved both network operators and various national and EU regulators, as well has having inputs from the OECD. more

The Sportsmanship of Cyber-warfare

As a bit of a history buff I can't avoid a slight tingling of déjà vu every time I read some new story commenting upon the ethics, morality and legality of cyber-warfare/cyber-espionage/cyberwar/cyber-attack/cyber-whatever. All this rhetoric about Stuxnet, Flame, and other nation-state cyber-attack tools, combined with the parade of newly acknowledged cyber-warfare capabilities and units within the armed services of countries around the globe, brings to the fore so many parallels... Call me a cynic if you will, but when the parallels in history are so evident, we'd be crazy to ignore them. more

Let a Thousand Flowers Bloom… But Watch Out for Weeds

When ICANN committed -- after no small debate -- to an open, rather than limited application process for new gTLDs, supporters likened it to "letting a thousand flowers bloom." On reveal day we got our first glimpse at the thousand (plus) flowers they promised. Now it falls to ICANN to tend this wild new garden... But now the fun of spreading the seeds has already begun to fade, and the hard work of turning this new, unprecedented flowerbed into a safe, innovative and worthwhile global garden has already begun. more