It was just announced that every member of Congress will be able to create his or her own channel on YouTube. Viewers can go to the House or Senate home pages and navigate via a map to find the videos they're interested in. While it is good that citizens will have more insight into what their Senators and Representatives think, the way this is being done poses a serious privacy risk. more
Willis Alan Ramsey, who wrote "Muskrat Love," recorded one and only one studio album. The cognoscenti of country think it's a gem, an all time top ten. There's an apocryphal story that when Ramsey was pushed to make another record he allegedly retorted, "What's wrong with the first one?" We who use the Internet every day risk losing sight of what a miracle it is, and the openness that keeps it so miraculous... We also lose sight of the fact that even as the Internet's miracles occur, it's almost always broken or malfunctioning or threatening or worse in many places along the line. more
Is your website "mobile-friendly"? If your site is NOT and you care about how your site ranks in Google search results (and let's face it, we pretty much all do!)... well... you need to get busy! As Google very clearly indicated: "Starting April 21, we will be expanding our use of mobile-friendliness as a ranking signal. This change will affect mobile searches in all languages worldwide and will have a significant impact in our search results." more
Without rehashing the mainstream headlines, it's clearly on the table now that eBay has given up trying to create synergies with Skype, so the focus now is on making the best of things as distinct entities. The preferred route for eBay would be to keep Skype and recoup their investment via an IPO sometime next year. That would certainly bring an end to things with both parties leaving on a high note. Of course this hinges heavily on the state of capital markets... more
Domain holders need to test their sites for 'DNS Flag Day' which will kick off on Friday, Feb. 1, 2019. more
Maybe you saw the stories recently about comments that were made at a recent World Economic Forum debate on cyberwarfare. As one of them notes, Hamadoun Toure, Secretary General of the International Telecommunications Union, proposed a treaty in which countries would pledge not to attack each other without having been attacked. This post isn't about Mr. Toure's proposal. It's about a comment the story attributes to Craig Mundie, Chief Research and Strategy Officer for Microsoft. According to The Raw Story, Mundie "called for a `driver's license' for internet users." more
Close to 773 million unique email addresses and 22 million unique passwords were found to be hosted on cloud service MEGA. more
As I wrote in December 2015, some Internet commerce companies - including domain name registries, registrars, advertising providers, social media platforms, payment processors and shippers - are doing right by patients in taking voluntary action against illegal online drug sellers. This is no small feat as 97% of the roughly 35,000 active online drug sellers are operating illegally. more
An IDN is a domain name which uses a particular encoding and format to allow a wider range of scripts to represent domain names such as Gujarati, Arabic, Chinese, Cyrillic, Devanagari and many more scripts. In simple words, a domain name with non-English characters will be called an Internationalized Domain Name. Humans have a variety of languages and alphabets that are familiar to them, and domain names do too. IDN unlocks an increased familiarity and affinity for humans. more
Abdul Rahim's Internet governance experience spans over 20 years and most recently she served on the Board of Directors for the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN). more
We read with interest the 20 Sept., 2011 article in The Hollywood Reporter. This confirmed that there is a lot of misinformation about the expansion of the domain name space circulating. Sadly, a creative opportunity is being seen as a threat by the most creative of industries. The arrival of an open playing field for .ANYTHING is not a threat, it is unquestionably a long awaited opportunity and solution to the murky waters of the .COM namespace.
The opportunity is the restoration of trust and authenticity. Trust and reputations have been eroded by cybersquatting, phishing and fraud that are endemic to the current naming system. more
Over 20 years ago, in 1997, the very first social media platform, SixDegrees.com, was launched. Most of us have probably not heard of it, and that's not surprising since the platform survived for only four years. Since then, there has been a surge in the number of social media platforms that have been launched: Friendster, MySpace, Foursquare, Classmates, Orkut, Facebook, Twitter, Flickr, Tumblr, Google+, Pinterest, WeChat, Vine, WhatsApp, Blogger, WordPress, LinkedIn, Youtube, TikTok, Instagram, Snapchat, ClubHouse, the list goes on. more
The first part of this series explained how Amendment 35 to the NTIA-Verisign cooperative agreement is highly offensive to the public interest. But the reasons for saving the Internet are more fundamental to Western interests than a bad deal made under highly questionable circumstances. One of the world's foremost experts on conducting censorship at scale, the Chinese Communist Party's experience with the Great Firewall... more
Ok, ok - it's pretty hard to ignore the bombshell news that's on front pages everywhere today in Canada. It looks like Nortel is going to seek bankruptcy protection, perhaps as early as today. This may be a minor story in the U.S. business press, but it's a big story in tech/telecom, and a HUGE story here in Canada. You don't need me to tell you what Nortel means to Canada in terms of pride and joy, although that's more of a distant memory these days... more
Large Language Models (LLM) like GPT -- 4 and its front-end ChatGPT work by ingesting gigantic amounts of text from the Internet to train the model and then responding to prompts with text generated from those models. Depending on who you ask, this is either one step (or maybe no steps) from Artificial General Intelligence, or as Ted Chiang wrote in the New Yorker, ChatGPT Is a Blurry JPEG of the Web. more