Much has been said in recent weeks about various forms of cyber spying. The United States has accused the Chinese of cyber espionage and stealing industrial secrets. A former contractor to the United States' NSA, Edward Snowden, has accused various US intelligence agencies of systematic examination of activity on various popular social network services... These days cloud services may be all the vogue, but there is also an emerging understanding that once your data heads into one of these clouds, then it's no longer necessarily entirely your data; it may have become somebody else's data too... more
Fedora 19 is the community-supported Linux distribution that is often used as a testing ground for features that eventually find their way into the Red Hat Enterprise Linux commercial distribution and its widely used noncommercial twin, CentOS. Both distributions are enormously popular on servers and so it's often instructive for sysadmins to keep an eye on what's happening with Fedora. more
Do you know of a person or organization who has made a great contribution to the Internet community? If so, have you considered nominating that person or organization for the 2013 Jonathan B. Postel Service Award? The nomination deadline of May 31 is fast approaching! more
Could you sign off of the Internet today -- right now, in fact -- and not come back online for 12 months? If you are a reader of CircleID, odds are pretty good that the answer is probably an emphatic "No!" This is, after all, a site for "Internet Infrastructure" and for most of us visiting the site (or writing here) the "Internet" is completely woven into the fabric of our lives... and we have a hard time thinking of a life without it. more
Fast and reliable infrastructure of any kind is good for business. That it's debatable for the Internet shows we still don't understand what the Internet i -- or how, compared to what it costs to build and maintain other forms of infrastructure, it's damned cheap, with economic and social leverage in the extreme. Here's a thought exercise... Imagine no Internet: no data on phones, no ethernet or wi-fi connections at home - or anywhere. No email, no Google, no Facebook, no Amazon, no Skype. That's what we would have if designing the Internet had been left up to phone and cable companies... more
Of all the many applications and services that run on top of the Internet, arguably none has been more successful than that of the World Wide Web. Invented by Tim Berners-Lee back in 1989 while he was a physicist at CERN, the "Web" has fundamentally changed almost every aspect of our life... and become a part of basically every aspect of our life. Think of a part of your life... and then think of the websites that are part of that. more
What if there was a relatively simple fix that could be applied to home WiFi routers, cable modems and other gateway devices that would dramatically speed up the Internet access through those devices? Many of us may have heard of the "bufferbloat" issue where buffering of packets causes latency and slower Internet connectivity, but at IETF 86 last month in Orlando I got a chance to see the problem with an excellent demonstration by Dave Täht as part of the "Bits-And-Bytes" session. more
One of the staggering numbers introduced during the opening remarks at ICANN 46 here in Beijing by multiple speakers, including ICANN CEO Fadi Chehade and speakers from the Chinese government, was this: China now has over 564 million Internet users! Think about that for a minute. more
The results of an excellent study made, for reasons that will become clear, by an anonymous author reaches this conclusion... The problem is, to make the study, the author created a botnet - that is he wrote a small program that took advantage of insecure devices to enlist additional machines to help in the study. more
There is a very interesting video posted on YouTube.com from Matt Cutts of Google who answered the question about how ccTLD's are viewed by Google especially when they are being used as domain hacks. Here is the question: "We have a vanity domain (http://ran.ge) that unfortunately isn't one of the generic TLDs, which means we can't set our geographic target in Webmaster Tools. Is there any way to still target our proper location?" more