The Internet's Domain Name System undertakes a vitally important role in today's Internet. Originally conceived as a human-friendly way of specifying the location of the other end of an Internet transaction, it became the name of a service point during the transition to a client/server architecture. A domain name was still associated with an IP address, but that 1:1 association was weakened when we started adjusting to IPv4 address exhaustion. more
In the upcoming Black Hat London presentation, security researcher from University College London, Vasilios Mavroudis and colleagues are going to describe and demonstrate the practical security and privacy risks that arise with the adoption systems enabled with ultrasonic cross-device tracking (uXDT). more
With the effective deregulation of the domain name industry through the imminent launch of up to 1,000 new gTLD's, the competitive landscape is going to get a whole lot hotter over the next 24 months. We will likely see some financially and commercially successful ventures. It is likely that we will see many unsuccessful ones as well. The gap between success and failure will be slim. more
fTLD Registry Services, the operator of .BANK top-level domain, reports that nearly seven months after .BANK launched, U.S. banks are continuing to register domain names. more
Public Interest Registry, the non-profit organization managing the .ORG top-level domain, says it will not be offering any further volume discounts to domain registrars when the current agreements expire. more
Afnic, the French Network Information Centre and manager of the .fr TLD, today published its report on the global domain market in 2016. more
U.S. Sen. Mark R. Warner (D-VA), a member of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence and co-founder of the bipartisan Senate Cybersecurity Caucus, has released a letter asking three federal agencies for information on the tools available that prevent cyber criminals from compromising consumer products, such as Internet of Things (IoT) devices. more
The telecoms industry has two fundamental issues whose resolution is a multi-decade business and technology transformation effort. This re-engineering programme turns the current "quantities with quality" model into a "quantities of quality" one. Those who prosper will have to overcome a powerfully entrenched incumbent "bandwidth" paradigm, whereby incentives are initially strongly against investing in the inevitable and irresistible future. more
For well over a decade, it was fairly easy to understand the trajectory of the broadband industry. In the residential market, cable companies snagged all the growth while telcos shrank as customers abandoned DSL. Other technologies like fiber or fixed wireless gained customers but were a blip on the national scale. more
Brexit will impact many things. One that has not been getting much attention, however, is domain names and more specifically .eu domains. Under the current regulations, you need to be a resident of the European Union to register a .eu domain name. As I covered in a blog post last year, there is the potential for hundreds of thousand of .eu domain names being pulled overnight. more
A newly released Internet of Things ecosystem forecast from International Data Corporation (IDC) attempts to clarify the hardware, software, services, connectivity, and security that make up the evolving Internet of Things (IoT) ecosystem. The worldwide IoT market is forecast to grow from $1.3 trillion in 2013 to $3.04 trillion in 2020 with a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 13%. more
Over the past weeks, communities gathering experts from government, business, Civil Society, and the academic and technical communities, have been working through open mailing lists and online virtual meetings on IGF Best Practices. The discussion was documented by independent experts that will feed into five 90 minute Forums in Istanbul and that will in turn report into a Best Practices Main Session. more
In my last post, I looked at what happens when a DNS query renders a "negative" response -- i.e., when a domain name doesn't exist. I then examined two cryptographic approaches to handling negative responses: NSEC and NSEC3. In this post, I will examine a third approach, NSEC5, and a related concept that protects client information, tokenized queries. The concepts I discuss below are topics we've studied in our long-term research program as we evaluate new technologies. more
Ethos CEO Erik Brooks and I are grateful to ICANN for hosting this important community dialogue on the future of PIR and .ORG earlier this week, and we listened intently to the questions posed. To echo what John Jeffrey said in his opening remarks, we are very interested in the community's input. We appreciate the openness and candor that was expressed during the Public Forum, and we would like to take this opportunity to recap a few of the overarching themes and questions asked. more
This year, the Internet Society celebrates its 25th anniversary. Our own history is inextricably tied to the history of the Internet. We were founded in 1992 by Internet pioneers who believed that "a society would emerge from the idea that is the Internet" -- and they were right. As part of the celebration, this September we will launch a comprehensive report that details the key forces that could impact the future of the Internet. The report will also offer recommendations for the Future and we need your input. more