New gTLDs: Comments on the Unsigned “The Economic Case for Auctions”

When Kurt Pritz briefed the Generic Names Supporting Organization (GNSO) Council (and observers) in Los Angeles April 10th and 11th, the new generic Top-Level Domain (gTLD) process model flows transition through an "auction" state in two of the three paths where two or more applications existed for the same (or similar) strings. At that time Kurt, speaking for Staff, was clear that the existence of a well-defined community was not dispositive, which surprised the Council members from the Intellectual Property Constituency... more

Lies, Damn Lies, and Anti-Spam Vendor Press Releases

There's a lot of chatter about a recent study purporting to show that 29.1% of internet users has bought something from spam. As ITWire reported, "Marshal were not only interested in how many people were purchasing from a spam source, but also what goods and services they were buying. Perhaps less surprisingly this revealed that sex and drugs sell well online." But at downloadsquad, Lee Mathews discovered the shocking truth: "the survey only involved 600 people." more

WiMAX Will Be Successful, as a Fringe Technology

A recent Infonetics press release says "WiMAX has gained such momentum across so many regions that it is no longer sensible to suggest that WiMAX growth will be flattened by the emergence of LTE [Long Term Evolution] in the next few years." Probably true, but it's also clear WiMAX will never reach the scale of either mainstream wireless family, i.e., WiFi or GSM/3GSM. By comparison with these giants, WiMAX will be a fringe operation. The critical issue is volume, and what counts is the wireless technology brand, not the technology itself. more

IPv6 Considered a Problem by Some Users

I have a Google Blog Search Alert looking for posts over IPv6 in my RSS reader. What strikes me is the number of posts explaining how to disable IPv6 in Windows Vista, MacOSX, Ubuntu and other flavours of Linux. It looks like disabling IPv6 makes web browsing faster for a lot of people, independently of which operating system is being used. more

Did Russian Cyber Attacks Precede Military Action?

The RBNexploit blog states that the website 'president.gov.ge' was under DDoS attack since Thursday. That site is now hosted out of Atlanta, Georgia (don't you love coincidence?) by Tulip Systems who is prominently displaying an AP story... "Speaking via cell phone from Georgia, Doijashvili said the attacks, traced to Moscow and St. Petersburg, are continuing on the U.S. servers." Rusisan military surrogates in the form of the criminal Russian Business Network are engaged in attacks against servers on US soil. This point should be brought up as the Group of 8-1 discusses appropriate responses to Russia's attack on Georgia. more

Gartner on New Generic Top Level Domains

Gartner, the well known IT consulting company, has published a report on the new top level domains that will appear some time next year. The report totally misses the mark. In a pure US centric vision, it focuses on ".com" as the must-have TLD, totally overlooking the fact that a ".com" is mostly worthless e.g. in Germany, where ".de" is the TLD one must have to succeed locally... more

McCain Tech Plan: The Only Vision is Backward-Looking

So I've spent more time with the McCain tech plan today. At a time when this country is suffering economically and looking for fundamental change, it looks as if Sen. McCain is in the back office having lunch with a bunch of accountants. The heavy emphasis in the policy on tax cuts seems designed to appeal to people who equate lower taxes with progress. Haven't we already had years of that kind of approach? more

Georgians Use Spam to Explain Their Situation

Call it outreach, call it propaganda or call it brilliance or even desperate measures, spammers (people) who favour the Georgian side in the recent conflict have been spamming using email, to get their point across. Depending on where in the world you are from, your ideological standpoint on Russia and your beliefs, when it comes to what email should be like, can be different and you may judge the action as you will. I call it spam. An Estonian colleague Viktor Larionov was quoted saying that whether there is a cyber war in Georgia or not, we know there is in fact a media war in play... more

CNN Spam Outbreak Quickly Morphing Into a New Breed

This past week we have been seeing some heavy CNN spam -- that is, spam in the form of breaking news stories from CNN.com... These all look like legitimate news stories, and indeed, they probably are taken straight from an actual CNN news bulletin (I don't subscribe so I wouldn't know). Indeed, the unsubscribe information and Terms of Use actually link to actual CNN unsubscribe pages. However, if you mouse-over all of the news links, they go to a spam web page wherein the payload is either a spam advertisement or you click on another link to download a file and flip your computer into a botnet. more

Mobilizing Russian Population Attacking Georgia: Similar to the Estonian Incident?

It seems like the online Russian population is getting mobilized. Like a meme spreading on the blogosphere, the mob is forming and starting to "riot", attacking Georgia. This seems very similar to the Estonian incident, only my current guess is natural evolution rather than grass-roots implanted -- but I am getting more and more convinced of the similarities as more information becomes available. Determining exactly when the use of scripts by regular users started, is key to this determination. more

ICANN Paints Itself Into a Corner

ICANN recently commissioned a report from a domain auction company to see whether it would be a good idea to auction Top-Level Domains (TLDs) that have multiple applicants. Remarkably, the domain auctioneers came to the conclusion that auctions are a great idea, which they surely are for some people. But are they a good idea for ICANN? And if ICANN admits they can't evaluate competing applications on their merits, how can they keep the process from turning into another speculative land grab? more

Email Portability, DKIM, and Socio-Political Implications on Tech Development

A few years ago, cell phone portability was introduced in the United States which caused a major shift in the market. The same thing happened this past year in Israel, following a major battle involving the cell carriers, consumer groups and the Israeli parliament (The Knesset). What if the same happened with email addresses? Ridiculous, you say? May be so, but there is chatter here in Israel to create a law which forces the local service providers hands to do just that. more

Personal Names, Politics and Cybersquatting

Thinking about the www.kerryedwards.com auction reminds one of the uneasy relationship between personal names, politics and cybersquatting. When reporters learned that the domain name was taken by Kerry Edwards, the Indiana bail bondsman, at least some headlines were quick to brand Mr. Edwards' conduct as cybersquatting. The Chicago Sun-Times, for example, ran the headline "Kerry Edwards is the Name, Cybersquatting is the Game." Mr. Edwards, of course, had registered his own name as a domain name long before Kerry picked Edwards as a running mate. more

Hunting Unicorns: Myths and Realities of the Net Neutrality Debate

In many ways, the emotionally charged debate on Network Neutrality (NN) has been a lot like hunting Unicorns. While hunting the mythical horse could be filled with adrenalin, emotion, and likely be quite entertaining, the prize would ultimately prove to be elusive. As a myth, entertaining; but when myths become reality, then all bets are off. The Network Neutrality public and private debate has been filled with more emotion than rational discussion, and in its wake a number of myths have become accepted as reality. Unfortunately, public policy, consumer broadband services, and service provider business survival hang in the balance. more

ICANN to Auction New Generic Top Level Domains

ICANN has just published a paper from its contractor PowerAuctions LLC, regarding the use of auctions to award new Top Level Domains (TLD) strings in case of contention. I can understand what ICANN wants to avoid. In the past, it has been criticized for using the "beauty contest" model with the redelegation of the .net TLD... However, the auction model is based on the idea that whoever wins the auction will be able to recoup its investment on the sale... more