The world of the Internet mourns the loss of a pioneering force, as Dave Mills, a luminary in the realm of computer networking, passed away on January 17, 2024, at the age of 86 (announced by Vint Cerf). A trailblazer and visionary, Mills played a pivotal role in shaping the very foundations of the interconnected world we inhabit today. more
Jon Brodkin reporting in Ars Technica: "Federal Communications Commission Chairman Ajit Pai and his staff met yesterday with the Internet Association, a trade group whose members include Amazon, Dropbox, eBay, Facebook, Google, Microsoft, Netflix, PayPal, Reddit, Spotify, Twitter, and about 30 other Web companies. The meeting occurred about a week after Pai reportedly met with broadband industry lobby groups to discuss his plans for eliminating net neutrality rules." more
Facebook has announced the construction of a new $220 million (€200 million) data centre in Clonee, County Meath, Ireland. This will be Facebook's sixth data center worldwide and the company's second in Europe, after Luleå in Sweden. more
When it comes to protecting the end user, the information security community is awash with technologies and options. Yet, despite the near endless array of products and innovation focused on securing that end user from an equally broad and expanding array of threats, the end user remains more exposed and vulnerable than at any other period in the history of personal computing. more
ICANN has been busy in managing several parallel processes that are also closely tied together in one way or the other. The processes include the new gTLD process, the IANA transition and most currently and important action yet that would act as the synergizing factor is the accountability process. ICANN has also posted for public comment proposed Bylaws revisions that would incorporate a higher voting threshold for the Board to determine not to follow the advice of the Governmental Advisory Committee. more
A glitch in Google's security update on Saturday morning caused links to every search result -- including Google's own pages -- to get flagged with the warning: "This site may harm your computer." The errors caused panic among users around the world who at first feared the popular search engine had suffered a major security failure. The problem which lasted for approximately 40 minutes has now been acknowledged and fixed by Google. The reason for the hiccup, as explained by Google, was due to a human error in the list of URLs Google uses to identify and flag websites known to install malicious software. more
Google and ETECSA have signed a memorandum of understanding agreeing to negotiate a peering agreement that would allow cost-free data exchange between their networks once an undersea cable physically connects them. Google has worked hard to establish a relationship with ETECSA and the Cuban government. In recent years, Cuba, not the US, has limited the Cuban Internet. This agreement telegraphs a change in Cuban policy. more
Huawei is the strong favorite of Canadian network builders, for good products and extraordinary support. It displaced the incumbents at Bell Canada years ago and has a joint "Living Lab" in Vancouver with Telus. Huawei had already won the 5G contracts. It has a thousand researchers and spends a quarter billion dollars on Canadian R&D. It was a government decision. more
When talking about the benefits of broadband, it's easy to overlook how broadband has become the glue that brings people and communities together. This is becoming particularly important for rural communities but matters to people everywhere. Rural communities have been rapidly losing other forms of media that were the focal point in the past. 2004 was the peak of the newspaper business in terms of readership and revenues. more
Since January 2016, discreet campaigns involving malware called Trojan.Odinaff have targeted a number of financial organizations worldwide, warned Symantec Security Response team on Tuesday. more
During the last decade, the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) has been designing IPv6 as a replacement for IPv4. Most of the initial benefits of IPv6 (security, QoS, autoconfiguration,...) have been ported to IPv4 and IPv6 deployment has been limited. However, thanks to the huge IPv6 addressing space, it is possible to design protocols and mechanisms that are more scalable and more powerful than with IPv4. A typical example is the multihoming problem. This problem occurs when a site is attached to several Internet Service providers... more
I've always been impressed by the marketing folks at the big cable companies. They are masters of extracting money from customers willing to pay for better broadband. The latest example comes from Comcast. The company is introducing a new product in the Northeast that offers faster upload speeds -- for a price. Comcast knows that its biggest weakness is upload speeds. more
Today, in U.S. Patent and Trademark Office v. Booking.com, the Supreme Court of the United States has affirmed that generic terms including .com domain names may be trademarked when consumers do not perceive the mark to signify the class of services, with heightened distinctiveness and recognition attributable to top-level domains that add meaning like .club, .guru, and .vip. more
Kieren McCarthy reporting in .Nxt: ICANN's new CEO Fadi Chehade has embarked on a bold restructure of the organization's management on his first day in the job. Announcing two new senior management members -- Sally Costerton as head of stakeholder relations and communications and Tarek Kamel as head of governmental affairs -- Chehade says his focus was on engaging at a global level with stakeholders, building relationships and improving accountability. more
Web applications, on average, experience twenty seven attacks per hour, or roughly one attack every two minutes, according to the newly released Imperva Web Application Attack Report. Report also notes that when websites came under automated attack they received up to 25,000 attacks in one hour, or 7 attacks every second. more
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