CircleID

Will the GNSO Review Be Pushed Back Another Year?

ICANN bylaws mandate periodic reviews of the organisation's main structures. For the body that handles gTLD policy making, the GNSO, that review was due to start in February this year. The review appears much needed. The GNSO Council is the manager of the gTLD policy process and as such, it has representatives of all GNSO groups. But according to repeated statements by many of those representatives, the Council's current bicameral structure has not lived up to expectations. more»

Belgian Country Code Now Supports Internationalized Domain Names

Earlier this week dns.be launched Internationalized Domain Names (IDNs). The Belgian registry opted to support the accented characters for Dutch, French and German. In so doing they've also ended up providing support for other European languages, such as Swedish, Finnish and Danish... The registry reported quite a bit of interest in the launch with over 3000 IDN domains being registered in the first hour. That number had practically doubled by close of business on the first day. more»

Don't Overlook the Network When Migrating to the Cloud

The success or failure of public cloud services can be measured by whether they deliver high levels of performance, security and reliability that are on par with, or better than, those available within enterprise-owned data centers... IDC forecasts that public cloud IT spending will increase from $40 billion in 2012 to $100 billion in 2016. To provide the performance, security and reliability needed, cloud providers are moving quickly to build a virtualized multi-data center service architecture, or a "data center without walls." more»

Poll on New TLDs Shows Value of Brand Loyalty, Willingness to Try New Equivalents to .COMs

Internet users are willing to navigate to, use, and trust new web addresses that will be flooding the Internet later this year, and brand name websites will carry more weight with Internet users than generic sites. These are among the results of a public opinion survey commissioned by FairWinds Partners. The poll also found that the owners and operators of these new addresses should be technically prepared or risk driving away or losing traffic intended for their sites. more»

The Cable Show Experience

I had the opportunity this week to take part in the National Cable & Telecommunications Association (NCTA) Cable Show - a traveling show in the U.S. that took place in Washington, DC, this year... In the U.S. capital, it's difficult to avoid the topic of politics and its effects on the telecommunications industry. This was especially true during The Cable Show in light of recent news around communication monitoring, wiretapping, and how far it's going. more»

So, Your gTLD was Approved - What Now?

The world is just waking up to the fact that ICANN has been accepting applications for new generic top-level domains, or gTLDs, since 2012 and that hundreds of these gTLDs have already been approved through Initial Evaluation, with more being approved every week. It is expected that the new extensions will begin appearing online in the second half of 2013... But if you're reading this, you've known this for a long time. In fact, you may have just gotten word that your application is approved. Congratulations! Awesome news... but, what now? more»

Broadband Meets Content at ANGA COM 2013

The Association of German Cable Operators' annual trade show has a new name. Europe's principal cable industry exhibition and convention was previously known as ANGA Cable, but last week (June 4-6, 2013), the show launched as ANGA COM. This new title - an abbreviation of communication - highlights how the convergence of technologies and networks is blurring the line between cable operators and other communication and entertainment services providers. more»

Intelligence Exchange in a Free Market Economy

The U.S. Government is causing a huge disservice to protection and defense in the private sector (80%+ of CIKR) by creating an ECS that contains monetary incentive for a few large players to exert undue control over the availability, distribution, and cost of security threat indicators. While there may be a legitimate need for the federal government to share classified indicators to entities for protecting critical infrastructure, the over-classification of indicator data is a widely recognized issue that presents real problems for the private sector. ECS as currently construed creates monetary incentives for continued or even expanded over-classification. more»

CAN SPAM Issues in Zoobuh V. Better Broadcasting

Last week a Utah court issued a default judgement under CAN SPAM in Zoobuh vs. Better Broadcasting et al. I think the court's opinion is pretty good, even though some observers such as very perceptive Venkat Balasubramani have reservations. The main issues were whether Zoobuh had standing to sue, whether the defendants domain names were obtained fraudulently, and whether the opt-out notice in the spam was adequate. more»

World IPv6 Day: A Year in the Life

On the 6th June 2012 we held the World IPv6 Launch Day. Unlike the IPv6 event of the previous year, World IPv6 Day, where the aim was to switch on IPv6 on as many major online services as possible, the 2012 program was somewhat different. This time the effort was intended to encourage service providers to switch on IPv6 and leave it on. What has happened since then? Have we switched it on and left it on? What has changed in the world of IPv6 over the past 12 months? Who's been doing all the work? more»

First Private Auction for New Generic Top Level Domains Completed: 6 gTLDs Valued at Over $9 Million

On behalf of Innovative Auctions, I am very happy to announce that we've successfully completed the first private auction for generic Top Level Domains (gTLDs). Our auction resolved contention for 6 gTLDs: .club, .college, .luxury, .photography, .red, and .vote. Auction winners will pay a total of $9.01 million. All other participants will be paid from these funds in exchange for withdrawing their application. more»

BIND 9 Users Should Upgrade to Most Recent Version to Avoid Remote Exploit

A remote exploit in the BIND 9 DNS software could allow hackers to trigger excessive memory use, significantly impacting the performance of DNS and other services running on the same server. A flaw was recently discovered in the regular expression implementation used by the libdns library, which is part of the BIND package. The flaw enables a remote user to cause the 'named' process to consume excessive amounts of memory, eventually crashing the process and tying up server resources to the point at which the server becomes unresponsive. more»

A Look Ahead to Fedora 19

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»

The Pros and Cons of Vectoring

Vectoring is an extension of DSL technology that employs the coordination of line signals to reduce crosstalk levels to improve performance. It is based on the concept of noise cancellation: the technology analyses noise conditions on copper lines and creates a cancelling anti-noise signal. While data rates of up to 100Mb/s are achievable, as with all DSL-based services this is distance related: the maximum available bit rate is possible at a range of about 300-400 meters. more»

One Year Later: Who's Doing What With IPv6?

One year on from the World IPv6 Launch in June 2012, we wanted to see how much progress has been made towards the goal of global IPv6 deployment. Both APNIC and Google are carrying out measurements at the end user level, which show that around 1.29% (APNIC) and 1.48% (Google) of end users are capable of accessing the IPv6 Internet. Measurements taken from this time last year show 0.49% (APNIC) and 0.72% (Google), which means the amount of IPv6-enabled end users has more than doubled in the past 12 months. more»