Telesat will use Google's network operating system. Telesat is making progress. Within the last month, they announced a launch contract with Blue Origin, a successful antenna test with Ball Aerospace and completion of system requirements reviews, but perhaps more interesting is an agreement to use the software defined network (SDN) platform Google has developed for their Project Loon. more
Edward Mc Nair will deliver the keynote address at the next regional meeting of the Caribbean Network Operators Group (CaribNOG), to be held in Bridgetown, Barbados from April 10 to 12. The featured talk will take place on Thursday 11 April at 9 am AST. A live netcast will be available. Mc Nair is the Executive Director of the North American Network Operators Group (NANOG). more
Recent events have shown the threat of domain hijacking is very real; however, it is also largely preventable. As Verisign previously noted, there are many security controls that registrants can utilize to help strengthen their security posture. Verisign would like to reiterate this advice within the context of the recent domain hijacking reports. Domains are an important element of internet infrastructure; their functionality and security rely upon many factors such as their delegated name servers. more
Soon it'll be time again for some of us to pack our bags and head for the ICANN64 meeting in Kobe, Japan. Even if you plan to stay at home, it still will be helpful to understand the national and global context in which the meeting is taking place. One way to do that is by looking at Japan's Prime Minister's Shinzo Abe recent Keynote Speech at the World Economic Forum Annual Meeting, (Jan 23rd, 2019) entitled: "Toward a New Era of "Hope-Driven Economy" more
It has become popular today around Washington and the venues of its coerced allies to issue threats to ban telecommunications equipment from certain countries - especially equipment intended for 5G use. The guise is vague assertions of "national security." It is an old tactic dating back to the turn of the last century and recurrent for decades. A combination of treaty instruments and collaborative industry standards activity several decades ago largely put an end to the banning tactic - significantly benefitting the entire world. more
What will the cost and capability of these antennas be in ten or twenty years? What would be the applications and implications of ubiquitous wireless networks? You might have some short-term guesses, like smart cities, but farther out it's science fiction -- Gaia, the Noosphere, 1984? ... Three companies, OneWeb, SpaceX and Telesat, plan to provide global, low-latency broadband Internet service using constellations of low-Earth orbit (LEO) satellites. more
In January 2018, I looked back at 2017 to figure out how routing security looked globally and on a country level. Using the same metrics and methodology, I've recently taken a look at 2018 to see if we're making improvements. The good news is, it seems like the routing system is doing better! But there is still much work to be done. Using BGPStream.com, a great public service providing information about suspicious events in the routing system, I analyzed the number of incidents... more
My involvement in the ICT industry over the last 40 years has always been to look at the strategic advantages that new technologies have to offer. I entered the industry through a proto-internet development called videotext. I looked at this technology, at what organisations could do with it, and assisted, for example, in the 1980s when the Commonwealth Bank introduced the world's first national online banking service called Telebank. more
ETECSA, Cuba's government monopoly ISP, is offering a number of stopgap Internet services -- navigation rooms, home DSL and WiFi hotspots, but the recently rolled out 3G mobile service is the most important. The plot to the right shows the normalized rate of Cuban domain name requests to Oracle servers during the first full month of operation - a surrogate estimate of Internet traffic volume. more
Will you be at the ICANN 64 meeting in March 2019 in Kobe, Japan? If so (or if you can get to Kobe), would you be interested in speaking about any work you have done (or are doing) with DNSSEC, DANE or other DNS security and privacy technologies? If you are interested, please send a brief (1-2 sentence) description of your proposed presentation before 07 February 2019. more
Time for another annual roundup from the world of IP addresses. Let's see what has changed in the past 12 months in addressing the Internet and look at how IP address allocation information can inform us of the changing nature of the network itself. Back in around 1992 the IETF gazed into the crystal ball and tried to understand how the internet was going to evolve and what demands that would place on the addressing system as part of the "IP Next Generation" study. more
It has become clear that having a big cybersecurity war room is not enough to deliver true end-to-end security throughout the complex networks, systems and structures on which our modern society is based. Furthermore, looking at the forever changing draconian government interventions in this space, it is also obvious that they are often stabbing in the dark. more
As often occurs in networking and cryptographic history, anecdotes and insularity conspire to mask how developments actually occurred, and seminal roles undertaken by women are forgotten or ignored. One of the notable examples of this proclivity occurred in the cybersecurity cryptology arena as it involves a critical platform known as the Transport Layer Security Protocol (TLS) and the pioneering role of Ruth Nelson. more
Brexit will impact many things. One that has not been getting much attention, however, is domain names and more specifically .eu domains. Under the current regulations, you need to be a resident of the European Union to register a .eu domain name. As I covered in a blog post last year, there is the potential for hundreds of thousand of .eu domain names being pulled overnight. more
The new year has only just begun, but the work of ICANN's Expedited Policy Development Process for gTLD Registration Data (EPDP for short) is already in full swing. The team just wrapped up several days of meetings in Toronto and I thought it would be a good time for an update on where we are in the process. Before I go any further, I would be remiss if I didn't again take the opportunity to thank the ICANN team supporting our efforts. more
US Congress asked to develop an internet data privacy legislation similar to the EU's General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) to enhance consumer protections. more
The Indian government has proposed a bill to suppress online content in the country, increase control over messaging and trace messages to their origin. more
A blog post by Google CEO, Sundar Pichai, today announced that company plans over $13 billion in investments throughout 2019 in data centers and offices across the U.S., with significant expansions in 14 states. more
According to various news outlets, Russia is reported to be planning a complete Internet shut down, as part of a test of its cyber-defenses. more
Internet disruptions observed in 2018 as a result of government shutdowns, cable problems, power outages, and distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks have already seeped into 2019. more
U.S. Sen. Roger Wicker, chairman of the Committee on Commerce, Science, and Transportation, announced today that it will convene a hearing titled, "Policy Principles for a Federal Data Privacy Framework in the United States." more
A new security report reveals cryptominers infected ten times more organizations than ransomware in 2018, but only one in five IT security professionals were aware their company's networks had been infected by mining malware. more
A new report warns that unless government and private sector decision makers begin developing specific procedures and trust now against cyber-enabled economic warfare (CEEW), the United States will find itself flat-footed during a major cyber event. more
Google says it is now blocking close to 100 million more spam messages daily following the recent implementation of TensorFlow, its in-house open-source machine learning AI framework. more
CIRA, Canada's .CA operator, today announced that it has successfully migrated the nations TLD to its homegrown domain registry platform it calls Fury. more
ICANN has published its first new monthly report providing statistics and insight into security threats to generic top-level domains (gTLDs). more
The Coalition Against Unsolicited Commercial Email (CAUCE) has announced that Dave Piscitello, formerly VP of Security at the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) has joined the CAUCE Board of Directors. more
Everyone who participated in supporting DNS Flag Day initiative should feel they have accomplished something worth-while, says ISC's Vicky Risk. more
The Council of European National Top-Level Domain Registries (CENTR) has published a paper on Domain name registries and online content which explores the domain name registries' relation and role regarding content online. more
How Many .com Domain Names Are Unused? Singapore Data Company recently conducted a study to answer this question. more
Domain holders need to test their sites for 'DNS Flag Day' which will kick off on Friday, Feb. 1, 2019. more
Dan Coats, Director of US National Intelligence warns China and Russia are increasingly using cyber operations to steal information, influence citizens and to disrupt critical infrastructure. more
ICANN has denied a request by new top-level domain operators to reduce the $25,000 annual fee. more
In March of 2018, abuse.ch, a non-profit cybersecurity organization in Switzerland, launched a project called URLhaus to collect and share URLs identified to be distributing malware. more
Ars Technica's Dan Goodin reports that an "investigation shows the spam run worked by abusing a weakness at GoDaddy that allowed the scammers to hijack at least 78 domains belonging to Expedia, Mozilla, Yelp, and other legitimate people or organizations." more
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Afilias announces the availability of 20 Afilias TLDs approved for sale in China by the China Ministry of Industry and Information Technology (MIIT). The announcement clears the way for millions of Chinese businesses and other registrants to operate sites using these additional 15 popular TLDs which are owned and operated by Afilias. more
Radix today announced that its new Top-Level Domain .SITE has surpassed 1 million domains under management. This makes Radix the first nTLD portfolio registry to have two of its TLDs, .ONLINE and .SITE, in the coveted "1 million club". more
Radix is excited to share its bi-annual premium report for the second half of 2018. This report gives a full overview of the premium domain sales in all of the company's new gTLDs. more
The GCSC, setup in 2017, helps to promote the peaceful use of cyberspace to facilitate economic growth and the expansion of individual freedoms. more
Radix announced that it has received the official approval from the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology ("MIIT") of the People's Republic of China for operating four more of its nine gTLDs within the country. more
The i2Coalition has announced the results of its 2019 elections for the Board of Directors and Board leadership roles. As previously planned, current i2Coalition Chair Elect, Cheval Capital President Frank Stiff, will replace outgoing Board Chair Michele Neylon and serve as i2Coalition's Board Chair for 2019. more
On December 6th, the Australian Internet Parliament formally passed the "Assistance and Access Bill." This package includes a series of provisions which require tech firms to help the country's security agencies bypass encrypted communications in their systems. more
Today, Verisign released the latest issue of the Domain Name Industry Brief, which shows that the third quarter of 2018 closed with approximately 342.4 million domain name registrations across all top-level domains (TLDs), an increase of approximately 2.6 million domain name registrations, or 0.8 percent, compared to the second quarter of 2018. more
Known to be one of the world's largest tech conferences, Web Summit was held in Lisbon from 5th-8th November 2018. This was the third consecutive time that the Startup League was at Web Summit with startups on Radix TLDs. more
The Internet is often described as a network of networks. In reality though, staying connected is often more complicated than that, especially as internet traffic volume increases by more than 40 percent every year. more
ONLINE is one among the few nTLDs that have crossed the 1 million mark, which now makes it the 5th largest nTLD by zone size. more