Cyber Criminals Infiltrate Even Small Businesses

I read an interesting article in the Wall Street Journal today entitled Cyber Criminals Sniff out Vulnerable Firms. It's a story of a small business owner in New York whose company was broken into by cyber criminals and stole $1.2 million from its bank accounts, although the owner was able to later recover about $800,000 of that. The moral of the story is that small businesses feel like they are not a major target for online thefts like these. more

Silly Bing

Bing is Microsoft's newish search engine, whose name I am reliably informed stands for Bing Is Not Google. A couple of months ago, as an experiment, I put up a one page link farm at wild.web.sp.am. As should be apparent after about three seconds of clicking on the links there, each page has links to 12 other pages, with the page's host name made of three names, like http://aaron.louise.celia.web.sp.am. The pages are generated by a small perl script and a database of a thousand first names. more

Google’s Secret Strategy With the Kansas City Fiber Project

I have long been perplexed at how Google plans to make a profit with their Kansas City Fiber project. Originally the project was touted as an altruistic move by Google to really understand the underlying costs of deploying fiber in a large municipality. But as anyone who has been in the trenches can tell you, it is not the technology that determines the cost of a fiber deployment, but the tyranny of the take-up. more

ICANN Shows Safe Decisions Aren’t Always the Right Decisions

When ICANN selected Deloitte and IBM to provide technical database administration services for a key part of its new gTLD program, it became quickly clear that the choice was not made on whose proposals scored highest, but rather it was based on which partner presented the least perceived business risk but at a much higher than necessary cost. I know this because I wrote a response to the original RFP and as a result am pretty familiar with what the original specification required. more

The GAC Strikes Back

Last week in Prague, the GAC (Government Advisory Committee) relentlessly hammered ICANN over a range of issues relating to the new gTLD program. And while their criticisms were legitimate, one has to wonder to what extent governments were punishing ICANN for past offenses. At the same time, the ICANN board and management seem to have finally - much belatedly - figured out how important it is to maintain a constructive and positive relationship with governments. more

Cloud Redundancy: How Amazon Should Repair Credibility

I'm curiously puzzled, but not entirely surprised, how a company such as Amazon (NASDAQ: GS) allowed its servers to be interrupted for any length of time due to severe storm damage in northern Virginia this past weekend. Companies using cloud servers are both expectant and dependent on being able to pull information from cloud sources to operate their businesses without interruption. After all, IT professionals have been preaching the security and reliability of the cloud for quite some time to manage large data off-site. Steps for Amazon to repair credibility should be transparent and swift. more

Is IPv6 a Boon to Criminals and Foe to the FBI?

Declan McCullagh recently opined that the "FBI [and the] DEA warn [that] IPv6 could shield criminals from police." His post was picked-up relatively widely in the past few days, with the headlines adding more hyperbole along the way. So just how real is this threat? Let's take a look. more

Is the Future of the Internet at Risk?

The debate about the control of the internet is intensifying, with interesting discussions expected later on this year in Dubai at the WCIT conference organised by the ITU. Over the last 25 years the industry has moved from being mainly telephony-based to being mainly IP-based, and many say that what is now at stake is the future of the internet as we know it at this point in time... The reality now is that the political stakes of the internet have risen significantly. more

NTIA Awards IANA Functions Contract to ICANN

The U.S. Commerce Department's National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA) announced today that it has awarded the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority (IANA) functions contract to the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN). The IANA functions are key technical services critical to the continued operations of the Internet's underlying address book, the Domain Name System (DNS). more

Towards a More Fully Accountable and Transparent ICANN

ICANN held its second international meeting of 2012 last week in Prague, Czech Republic. While the agenda focused heavily on issues related to new gTLDs and on welcoming incoming CEO Fadi Chehade, ICANN also conducted a community consultation on its accountability and transparency reviews. more

Accountability, Transparency, and… Consistency?

ICANN Compliance now has two conflicting answers on record concerning the enforceability of RAA 378 on WHOIS inaccuracy. This is a topic of extreme importance and one we are trying to get to the bottom of. ...inconsistency needs to be resolved as it directly impacts the current RAA negotiations and certainly before new gTLDs are deployed. more

What If New gTLD Applicants Held Private Auctions Where Losing Applicants, Not ICANN Gets The Money

Over the last week at ICANN the arguably best idea coming out of the ICANN meeting is the concept that applicants for new gTLD strings with more than one application, hold a private auction amongst themselves with the winning amount going to the other losing applicants instead of to ICANN. As a backdrop, under the Guidebook multiple applicants for a new gTLD extension are encouraged to work together and come to an agreement to resolve the conflict. more

Measuring World IPv6 Launch: Comparing IPv4 and IPv6 Performance

Following on from last year's measurements after World IPv6 Day, the RIPE NCC carried out active measurements on World IPv6 Launch on 6 June 2012. These measurements included latency measurements both on IPv4 and IPv6 from our vantage points to selected hostnames of World IPv6 Launch participants and other dual-stacked parties. We used these measurements to determine the performance of IPv4 versus IPv6 connections. more

ICANN Has Opened Up Opportunities for Everyone Including Africa

The ICANN latest reveal of the applications pending batching has shown a number of very crucial details of what the new domains system is like. The new system before batching presents new applications with the North Americas having the highest applications amounting to 911, Europe follows with 675, Asia pacific which already has one continental domain .asia has three hundred and three domains, Latin America which shares the same ecological niche with Africa has 24 new applications 7 domains higher than Africa which has presented 17 new domains. more

A History of Holding ICANN to Account

I'm attending only my second ICANN meeting here in Prague since I left the role as Executive Officer and Vice President Corporate Affairs at ICANN in January 2010... Today at the meeting's opening, outgoing President and CEO Rod Beckstrom said that on his first day on the job he was given a 'blank sheet of paper' and told that the Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) with the US Department of Commerce was not going to be renewed by ICANN and "you better come up with something better and you have to get it done in 90 days because the MoU is going to expire." It's great rhetorical flourish but the reality is vastly different. more