A favorite Sherlock Holmes story has the detective unraveling the mystery of a murdered horse trainer and the theft of a prized thoroughbred by concentrating on the fact that a dog didn't bark in the night when the horse was stolen. This silence implied for Holmes that it was no stranger who entered the stall. From this he deduced that it was the trainer himself who had removed the horse to fix a race for his profit and that the horse had killed the trainer when he tried to cripple it. ICANN 41 has been afflicted by a similarly curious silence. more»
Here's the question: is it meaningful or important for a federal agency to have regulatory authority over high-speed Internet access connectivity? Right now, the FCC (which is supposed to oversee "communication over wire and radio") has no clear authority to make policy about high-speed Internet connectivity. (Transport is different than content - this post is not about applications or uses of this connectivity. Be careful when you talk about the Internet "ecosystem," because transport has been historically and remains different from everything else. I'm talking about the capacity to send packets from Point A to Point B, whether provided by wired or wireless providers.) more»
Pinning down the number of infected computers is really, really hard. I'd go as far as saying it's practically impossible to calculate, let alone observe. Still, that's not going to stop people from attempting to guess or extrapolate from their own observations. Over the years I've heard "reliable" numbers ranging from 10% through to 60% -- and I don't trust any of them. There's a whole gaggle of reasons why the numbers being thrown out to the public are inaccurate and should ideally be interpreted with a lot of skepticism by any right-minded folks. more»
In a move that shouldn't come as a surprise to anyone, the EU Commission has given a rather mixed welcome to the IANA bid. While they obviously like a lot of what they are seeing, they're also not overly impressed with the contract only being open to US companies. more»
Virtualization of core network services such as DDI has created a lot of controversy over the last couple of years. Perhaps most notably, Infoblox and Gartner have been both claiming that virtualized network services are not on the agenda of larger organizations, nor will they ever be. I'm not sure I have ever seen a convincing technological reasoning for this position. Rather, the logic has always been circular: it's not going to happen because we're not seeing it happening. more»
Danny Sullivan has been the go-to guy for understanding the world of search for over 15 years. This week he published a really good story on Google Plus Your World. A group of engineers have launched a site called Focus on the User that shows exactly how the new Google service could be including other social media content listings besides only Google Plus, but is not. more»
In a recent press release ICANN has stated that they will publish the list of applicants for new generic Top-Level Domains (gTLDs) on April 30th. Previously many had spoken of a "big reveal" on May 1st, though that would have coincided with a public holiday in many countries and might have been "missed". However ICANN CEO, Rod Beckstrom, claims that the organisation had always planned to publish the list two weeks after the application window closed. more»
There are only a few occasions in any of our lifetimes where what we know and have grown used to is turned on its head. We have now lost the generation that heard radio for the first time; there are only a few who can recall the first television pictures; but many, many more saw color appear on their screens for the first time. more»
The trade press is abuzz today with reports about a security breach at Verisign. While a security breach at the company that runs .COM, .NET, and does the mechanical parts of managing the DNS root is interesting, this shouldn't be news, at least, not now. Since Verisign is a public company, they file a financial report called a 10-Q with the SEC every quarter. According to the SEC's web site, Verisign filed their 10-Q for June through September 2011 on October 28th. more»
"Smartphones (and tablets, WdN) are invading the battlefield", reports the Economist on its website of 8 October 2011. On the same day the hacking of U.S. drones is reported on by several news sites. ("They appear friendly". Keyloggers???) Is this a coincidence? more»
In this part I want to focus on the gathering of cyber crime data. Are there best practices in the world on how cyber crime data is reported to law enforcement and aggregated to show the impact of said crime? Previously the discussion focused on the fact that cyber crime = crime and on a basic cyber (crime) training for every police officer. From the reactions this received, it is clear that some people see this as a possible solution. more»
The headlines this week say that over 200 million domain names now exist on the internet. Pretty impressive... But consider the explosive growth of Social Networks. The top twenty social networks alone have over 2 billion user names. With User Names on social networks rapidly becoming the Internet's new brand identifiers, I wonder: is it time that we apply the same trademark rules we have for domain names to user names as well? more»
Chad White wrote an article for MediaPost about best practices which parallels a lot of thinking I've been doing about how the email marketing industry treats best practices. After several conversations recently about "best practices," I'm convinced that the term is now meaningless. It's been bastardized in the same way that the definition of "spam" has shifted to the point that it has very different meanings to different groups of people. more»
A few days ago, I sat in a meeting here in Ottawa with our IT Director and Director of Marketing and Communications. These are two highly intelligent people working on the same team, for the same company, talking about a common subject. And yet, something was amiss in achieving mutual understanding. Each was seeing things from his own distinct perspective and as such, speaking his own language. As I reflected on my team's internal dynamic, I began to see parallels in areas that have an even more direct impact on the Internet ecosystem. more»
The US Federal Communications Commission (FCC) recently issued a public notice that it will be holding two workshops on the transition of the public switched telephone network (PSTN) to "new technologies" such as voice-over-IP (VoIP). The workshops will be held on December 6 and 14, 2011, at the FCC's office in Washington, DC. The public notice states the goal as... more»
DNSSponsored byNeustar UltraDNS | |
IPv6Sponsored byNominum | |
MobileSponsored bydotMobi | |
SecuritySponsored byVerisign | |
DNS SecuritySponsored byAfilias | |
Top-Level DomainsSponsored byMinds + Machines |
