Featured Blogs

The Latter is Coded to Criticize the New - Lessons from Depew

This month, we are seeing a very busy global ecosystem with the ICANN 51, UN General Assembly meeting to discuss ICT for Development in New York and now the 19th ITU Plenipotentiary in Busan. Pinktober, Oktoberfest has also become saturated with ICTober so it makes me more reflective. First I would like to make a massive shout out to all those battling cancer, survivors and families who wage war against cancer. May you all walk on and walk strong! more

Measuring the Pulse of Our Networked Society

Ericsson has released its latest Mobility Report, providing a wealth of analysis and insights into current communications traffic and market trends. As one of the leading mobile infrastructure providers, Ericsson has performed in-depth data traffic measurements since the earliest days of mobile broadband, leveraging its large base of live networks in all regions of the world. more

Combining the ONT and Smart Meters

In my recent blog on utilities and the NBN I mentioned that the ultimate prize would be a combination of the ONT (Optical network terminal: the network interface device used in fibre-to-the-home applications, which operates as a demarcation point between the local loop of the carrier and the wiring in the user premises) and intelligent gateway the electricity company need for their smart meters and home energy networks. Perhaps I should expand on this a little... 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

Using Facebook for Verisimilitude? For real?

I recently became aware of the new pay-by-mobile phone service Venmo.com. "Pay friends with your phone, skip the ATM, Settle up on meals, rent, bills and drinks" ... Venmo are using Facebook connect as a way of verifying user identities, at least that is what they claim. more

When It Comes to gTLDs, Follow the Money (Part 2)

In my previous article I showed that ICANN expects to recover a lot of money from the first round of applications for new generic Top-Level Domains (gTLDs) -- $92.5 million, to be exact -- and that even that dramatic figure is probably substantially underestimated. For that reason, I argued that ICANN probably will recoup a windfall from the first round of gTLD applications and pointed out that ICANN's promise to consult with the Internet community before spending such a windfall is unsatisfactory because it has failed to say beforehand what surplus revenues might be spent for. more

How Digital Asset Management May Change Due to COVID-19

One of the "fathers of the internet," Vint Cerf, in a September 2019 article he published, said: "Today, hackers routinely break into online accounts and divert users to fake or compromised websites. We constantly need to create new security measures to address them. To date, much of the internet security innovation we've seen revolves around verifying and securing the identities of people and organizations online. more

An Internet for Identity

In World of Ends, Doc Searls and Dave Weinberger enumerate the Internet's three virtues: 1. No one owns it. 2. Everyone can use it. 3. Anyone can improve it. ... Online services and interactions are being held back by the lack of identity systems that have the same virtues as the Internet. This post describes what we can expect from an Internet for identity. more

Improvements in Undersea Fiber

We often forget that a lot of things we do on the web rely on broadband traffic that passes through undersea cables. Any web traffic from overseas gets to the US through one of the many underwater fiber routes. Like with all fiber technologies, the engineers and vendors have regularly been making improvements. The technology involved in undersea cables is quite different than what is used for terrestrial fibers. A long fiber route includes repeater sites where the light signal is refreshed. Without repeaters, the average fiber light signal will die within about sixty miles. more

Brands and Domains Conference Recap

The best and most knowledgeable experts of dot Brand met in the Brands and Domains conference, on October 2 and 3 in the Hague, Netherlands. Brand and project owners were also present, coming from all around the world -- from Australia or Japan to the USA and Canada. The keynote by Georges-Edouard Dias, CEO of Quantstreams and founder of the concept of brand hospitality, explained how customers are not anymore the targets of brands. more

A Less Than Candid PP-2018 OTT Resolution

As the ITU-T 2018 Plenipotentiary Conference rolls toward a close this week, its most controversial and contentious subject appeared baked into a new treaty instrument resolution that has apparently reached a kind of steady-state. After distilling the many input proposals through ten revisions and a corrigendum, the tasked drafting committee has produced a new resolution with the simple title of "OTTs." more

The 2019 IPv4 Market: Mid-Year Report

After a slow start to 2019, the volume of IPv4 numbers traded is picking up – though still far below the peak trading periods of 2018. By this same time last year, the total quantity of numbers flowing to and from organizations in the ARIN region was just over 27 million. more

Principles, Factors, and Elements that Promote or Undermine the Outcome of UDRP Cases

Panels adjudicating cybersquatting claims, defenses, and rebuttals under the Uniform Domain Name Dispute Resolution Policy (UDRP) expect parties to prove their contentions, and this means having a working understanding of what this entails. There is, first, a set of fundamental rules or principles -- such as pending applications for a mark do not constitute a right, or recognizing unregistered marks as constituting rights... more

Deadline of Oct 31 to Register for IAB Workshop on Stack Evolution in a Middlebox Internet

Can we develop better transport protocols for communication across the Internet? In a world where the "end-to-end" principle is no longer certain and middleboxes are common, which paths through the Internet are actually available to applications? Which transports can be used over these paths? How can applications cooperate with network elements to improve path establishment and discovery? ... These are all questions posed for the Internet Architecture Board's (IAB) Workshop on Stack Evolution in a Middlebox Internet (SEMI). Taking place in Zürich, Switzerland from 26-27 January, 2015. more

DNSSEC Root Signature, Almost There!

IT security specialists have known for years that the plain DNS is not to be trusted. Any hope for improvement rests on the DNSSEC protocol deployment. In this post, I will review the current status in one critical aspect, namely the DNS root signature key management. The other two foremost are the application usage of DNSSEC protocol functionality and the operational front, or the extent of deployment in the DNS infrastructure. The operational front includes the support by the DNS root nameservers, but my focus on signature key management leaves this issue aside. more