Missing in Action - ICANN’s 2010 Annual Report

In preparation for some upcoming long-haul international flights, I was looking for some "light" ICANN reading material. One document that came to mind was ICANN's 2010 Annual Report. Over the last four years ICANN has produced a year end report. While this document was probably originally conceived as a means to demonstrate ICANN's progress... more

The Insecurity of the IoT is Only Getting More Profound, Says Principal Researcher at F-Secure

"Three years after Mirai first appeared, and two years after WannaCry, it shows that we still haven't solved the problems leveraged in those outbreaks," said F-Secure Principal Researcher Jarno Niemela. more

EFOW Wants Total Protection for Geographical Indications Domains in .VIN, .WINE and All Other TLDs

This is a letter sent from the European Federation of Origin Wines (EFOW) to the courteous attention of Dr Steve Crocker, Chair of the ICANN Board , Mr Cherine Chalaby, Chair of the new gTLD Program Committee Board, Mr Fadi Chehadé, CEO of ICANN and Mr Akram Atallah, COO of ICANN. This letter, sent by its President Riccardo Ricci Curbastro, was sent today to ICANN and is entitled "ICANN initiatives for the attribution of new generic top-level Internet domains -- PDO and PGI wines' concerns". more

Name Collisions, Why Every Enterprise Should Care (Part 3 of 5)

Do you recall when you were a kid and you experienced for the first time an unnatural event where some other kid "stole" your name and their parents were now calling their child by your name, causing much confusion for all on the playground? And how this all made things even more complicated - or at least unnecessarily complex when you and that kid shared a classroom and teacher, or street, or coach and team, and just perhaps that kid even had the same surname as you, amplifying the issue! What you were experiencing was a naming collision (in meatspace). more

A Look Back at the World of IP Addressing in 2020: What Changed and What It Means

Time for another annual roundup from the world of IP addresses. Let's see what has changed in the past 12 months in addressing the Internet and look at how IP address allocation information can inform us of the changing nature of the network itself. Back around 1992, the IETF gazed into their crystal ball and tried to understand how the Internet was going to evolve and what demands would be placed on the addressing system as part of the "IP Next Generation" study.  more

.nxt Conference Inspires and Informs New gTLD Debate

The first-ever .nxt conference recently concluded in San Francisco. The conference featured two days of productive, educational, and passionate discussion about the business of new generic top-level domains (gTLDs). While ICANN's public meetings have recently focused on debating the policies that will go into its gTLD Applicant Guidebook, the .nxt meeting moved the discussion into the future to tackle the issue of what to do when the program has actually launched... more

Wireless Innovations for a Networked Society

Last week, I had the honor of moderating an engaging panel discussion at Mozilla on the need for community networks and the important role they can play in bridging the digital divide. The panel highlighted the success stories of some of the existing California-based initiatives that are actively working toward building solutions to get under-served communities online. more

Mobilizing Russian Population Attacking Georgia: Similar to the Estonian Incident?

It seems like the online Russian population is getting mobilized. Like a meme spreading on the blogosphere, the mob is forming and starting to "riot", attacking Georgia. This seems very similar to the Estonian incident, only my current guess is natural evolution rather than grass-roots implanted -- but I am getting more and more convinced of the similarities as more information becomes available. Determining exactly when the use of scripts by regular users started, is key to this determination. more

Four New Generic Top Level Domains

At its meeting in Durban, ICANN signed contracts with the applicants for four new top level domains. The new domains are ????, which means "web" in Arabic, ?????? and ????, which mean "online" and "site" in Russian, and ??, which means "game" in Chinese. They should give us an interesting hint about the future of the new TLDs, because all four are utterly, totally, generic. more

Metrics for New gTLDs Performance

The essay describes six groups of gTLD performance indicators: (1) the presence of a secondary market; (2) uses of second-level domain names; (3) the identity of the owners of parked and not-in-use domain names; (4) domain name renewals; (5) the market size of the supporting complementary assets; and (6) the character of the person in charge of a given registry. A time-trend of these indicators would convey any price inefficiencies and bubbles, and the health of the industry. more

Web Server Botnets and Server Farms as Attack Platforms

Are file inclusion vulnerabilitiess equivalent to remote code execution? Are servers (both Linux and Windows) now the lower hanging fruit rather than desktop systems? In the February edition of the Virus Bulletin magazine, we (Kfir Damari, Noam Rathaus and Gadi Evron (me) of Beyond Security) wrote an article on cross platform web server malware and their massive use as botnets, spam bots and generally as attack platforms. Web security papers deal mostly with secure coding and application security. In this paper we describe how these are taken to the next level with live attacks and operational problems service providers deal with daily. more

Google Is Installing 1.6 Million Solar Panels for Its New Tennessee and Alabama Data Centers

The company has pledged that in the coming years, it will purchase the output of several new solar farms. more

The U.S. House Judiciary Committee Is Investigating Google’s Plans to Implement DNS Over HTTPS

The U.S. House Judiciary Committee is investigating Google's plans to implement DNS over HTTPS (DoH) in Chrome according to a report by the Wall Street Journal over the weekend. more

IPv6 Day a Couple of Days After

June 8th IPv6 World day came and went without any major glitches, let alone disruption of the internet, and witnessed varying traffic fluctuations depending where on the net observations were made. From a Tata Communications AS6453 perspective, a global tier 1 IP wholesale network, data gathered by a number of probes gave an interesting pulse on what happened in some major international arteries of the internet. more

Next Round of New TLDs May Not Happen Until 2020, Says ICANN

Speaking at this week's World Summit on the Information Society (WSIS), taking place in Geneva, head of ICANN's global domains division, Akram Atallah, has pointed to 2020 as the earliest realistic timeframe for the next round of new gTLD applications. more