Millions of websites under Germany's top-level domains, .de, went offline on Wednesday due to a technical error according to various sources. While the exact cause of the outage is still unknown, the problem is reported to have originated from DENIC, the central registry for the .de top-level domain. more
For the past 27 years, or at least as long as I can remember, I have heard one phrase on an endless loop: "youth are the future." It is a statement that always caused me to feel mild confusion. I thought, "How can I, for instance, be the future if I'm here now?" As I "grew up" and the term "youth" seem to expand in both meaning and breadth of inclusion, I quickly realized that when this statement is used by many it is platitudinous at best and disingenuous rhetoric at worst. What should actually be clarified is that, as no one is immune from the natural progression of the life course (at least not yet anyway), youth will one day constitute the key decision-makers in political, economic and social institutions. more
Jeffrey Rosen has a great article in the New York Times Magazine this weekend titled Google's Gatekeepers. In it he deals with the question of whether we are becoming too overly dependent on a few big web companies like Google – and whether it's wise over the long run for us to trust their team of (currently) very nice, well-meaning people who are trying hard to do the right thing when faced with government censorship demands and surveillance pressures. He writes... more
This week I'm going to Washington to argue against regulating Internet access as if it were phone service. Twenty years ago I was there for the same reason. My concern now as it was then is that such regulation will damage the economy and reduce opportunity by stifling innovation and protecting the current dominant players from the startups which would otherwise threaten them. 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
ASOP (Alliance for Safe Online Pharmacies) is often seen as taking a rather confrontational stance towards domain name registrars, registries and hosting providers. However both ASOP and others, including LegitScript, often cite the assistance they've received from internet industry players in their work. This year ASOP has decided to take this a step further... 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
Recently, an article I wrote for Bitcoin Magazine talked about how we can use DNS underscore scoping to better abstract Lightning addresses and even create a de facto specification that could work on any resource (like a wallet or a smart contract) across all blockchains. more
Last week, I re-tweeted Cloudflare's announcement that they are providing universal SSL for their customers. I believe the announcement is a valuable one for the state of the open Internet for a couple of reasons: First, there is the obvious -- they are doubling the number of websites on the Internet that support encrypted connections. And, hopefully, that will prompt even more sites/hosting providers/CDNs to get serious about supporting encryption, too. Web encryption -- it's not just for e-commerce, anymore. more
Who do you think deserves recognition in the Internet Hall of Fame? Do you know of someone who has played a key role in the Internet's development who should be recognized? (And is not already among the existing IHOF inductees?) If you know of someone who deserves the recognition, nominations are open until March 15, 2017. As outlined by Internet Society President & CEO Kathy Brown in a blog post today, the Internet Hall of Fame seeks to honor three types of inductee. more
Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act (CDA), says that "No provider or user of an interactive computer service shall be treated as the publisher or speaker of any information provided by another information content provider." The law was passed in 1996 in order to shield ISPs that transported content or platforms that hosted it from lability. Bloggers were not responsible for comments on their posts, YouTube and Facebook were not responsible for things users posted, etc. more
By now we've all had a chance to digest the concept around the new TLD program and in some cases even come up with our own amazing ideas for the next .com or a niche TLD that will make us millionaires overnight! Well maybe some of us have... Others are taking a far more practical approach to the exciting new changes to the Internet and how it will be adopted and used, in particular within the corporate arena. more
If current predictions are correct, 2009 will be a tougher year than 2008 in terms of the economy. In tough economic times such as these it becomes increasingly important for us to follow recommended safety practices when going online. As the numbers of Internet-related fraud and financial scams continue to increase we should expect the current economic situation to produce more victims of cybercrime. Knowledge and vigilance are the keys to remaining safe while online. more
World Wide Web founder Tim Berners-Lee speaking during an interview this week, warned Silicon Valley technology giants have grown so dominant they may need to be broken up. more
Today, June 26, is the final day that you can help the Internet Society with its "Future of the Internet" survey. It takes about 20-25 minutes and will help my colleagues at the Internet Society develop a number of scenarios about the possible future of the Internet. These scenarios can help all of us in talking to policy makers, leaders, media and the general user population about the choices we have before us for the future of the Internet. more
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