10 Reasons Why New gTLDs May Not Work For You

World's mega businesses are about to wake up to the domain name expansion reality, where suddenly a name identity's exclusive ownership on global canvas of cyber branding and functionality will be ensured via gTLD. Something that traditional trademark system took years to achieve. A gTLD brand is not for everyone, structurally designed for powerful new ideas and established organizations around the world; however, following are the ten reasons why it may not work for you. more

Mobile Internet Usage at 8.5%, Doubled From Last Year

Global internet usage through mobile devices, has almost doubled to 8.5% in January 2012 from 4.3% last year according to a new report from web analytics StatCounter. While this stat excludes tablets, firm's research arm highlights the increasing use of mobile devices to access the internet with market share doubling year on year since 2009. Nokia leads worldwide, most probably driven by its dominance in India. Apple is second globally but leads the US and UK markets. In the UK RIM is second only to Apple. more

The FBI and Scotland Yard vs. Anonymous: Security Lessons

A lot of people are fascinated by the news story that Anonymous managed to listen to a conference call between the FBI and Scotland Yard. Some of the interest is due to marvel that two such sophisticated organizations could be had, some is due to schadenfreude, and some is probably despair: if the bad guys can get at these folks, is anyone safe? more

WIPO Provides New Top-Level Domain Resources for Rights Holders

Courtesy of Brian Beckham from the WIPO Arbitration and Mediation Center in Geneva, here are a few important links with information that may be helpful for rights holders with ICANN's New gTLD program now launched and accepting applications more

No Big Run on IPv4 in 2011

2011 was an interesting year for IPv4: in February 2011, the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority (IANA) handed out their last free IPv4 address blocks to the Regional Internet Registries (RIRs). In April 2011, the APNIC (the Regional Internet Registry for the Asia Pacific region) started allocating from its last /8. At the RIPE NCC we did not see a big jump in IPv4 address allocations in 2011, as anticipated by some observers. more

DNSChanger Trojan Still Running on Half of Fortune 500s, US Govt

More than two months after authorities shut down a massive Internet traffic hijacking scheme, the malicious software that powered the criminal network is still running on computers at half of the Fortune 500 companies, and on PCs at nearly 50 percent of all federal government agencies, new research shows," reports Brian Krebs. more

AT&T’s Randall & Stankey: Wireless Data Growth Half The FCC Prediction

40%, not 92%-120%. "Data consumption right now is growing 40% a year," John Stankey of AT&T told investors and his CEO Randall Stephenson confirmed on the investor call. That's far less than the 92% predicted by Cisco's VNI model or the FCC's 120% to 2012 and 90% to 2013 figure in the "spectrum crunch" analysis. AT&T is easily a third of the U.S. mobile Internet and growing market share; there's no reason to think the result will be very different when we have data from others. more

Prof. Dave Farber on Where the Internet is Headed

"Internet protocols simply aren't adequate for the changes in hardware and network use that will come up in a decade or so," says Professor Dave Farber who was recently interviewed by Andy Oram. "Dave predicts that computers will be equipped with optical connections instead of pins for networking, and the volume of data transmitted will overwhelm routers, which at best have mixed optical/electrical switching," writes Oram.  more

DMARC: New Email Authentication Protocol

A consortium of companies including Google, Microsoft, Facebook and Paypal have announced that they were collaborating and coming up with a new protocol known as DMARC -- the Domain-based Message Authentication, Reporting and Conformance. What is DMARC? more

Public-Private Cooperation Policy for Cyber Security Suggested by Commissioner Kroes

At a speech during the Security and Defense Agenda meeting on 30 January Vice-President of the European Commission, Neelie Kroes, showed how the Commission envisions public-private cooperation on cyber security. more

DDoS Attacks Increased by 2000% in Past 3 Years, Asia Generating Over Half of Recent Attacks

In the past three years, Akamai has seen 2,000% increase in the number of DDoS attack incidents investigated on behalf of its customers. The latest State of the Internet report released today by Akamai also identifies top countries from which this observed attack traffic originates, as well as the top ports targeted by these attacks. more

Holding Google to a Higher Standard in Search

Danny Sullivan has been the go-to guy for understanding the world of search for over 15 years. This week he published a really good story on Google Plus Your World. A group of engineers have launched a site called Focus on the User that shows exactly how the new Google service could be including other social media content listings besides only Google Plus, but is not. more

BT Working on 300Mbps Residential Pilot Project

Openreach, the lead deployment arm of BT, has issued an announcement asking residents and landlords of apartment blocks to join a pilot project that will eventually bring broadband download speeds of up to 300Mbps to residents. "Participants will gain access to Openreach’s Fibre to the Premises (FTTP) technology which delivers super-fast broadband speeds," says Openreach. more

Selecting ICANN’s Next CEO - Letter 2

In November 2011, a group of "friends of ICANN" from various countries sent a letter to the Chair of ICANN's Board, expressing concern about the process used previously, and suggesting improvements. Towards the end of 2011, the ICANN Board set up a Search Committee, chaired by George Sadowsky, and some significant improvements have been integrated into the selection process... more

The State of Mail Database Marketing

My mail server has a lot of spamtraps. They come from various sources, but one of the most prolific is bad addresses in personal domains. Several of my users have their own domains, such as my own johnlevine.com, in which they use a handful of addresses. Those addresses tend either to be people's first names, for individual mailboxes, or else the names of companies. If I did business with Verizon (which I do not) I might give them an address like verizon@johnlevine.com. All those domains get mail to lots of other addresses, which is 100% spam. more