CircleID

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IPv6: SAVA, Ca va pas?

• Comment posted Mar 20, 2013 12:28 pm PDT — by The Famous Brett Watson
  Sender Address Validation and Authentication (SAVA) is the silver bullet. It will send to Cyberia all dark forces that make us shiver when we make a purchase on the internet, pose a threat to our very identities and have made…

Google: Not All ccTLD's Are Created Equally in Generic Search Rankings

• Comment posted Mar 02, 2013 7:48 am PST — by The Famous Brett Watson
  Google has ignored my request for an answer to this observation. How did you raise the question? They don't exactly engage with the public very much, except on their own terms, so the fact that they've ignored your request is…

30 Years Ago Today, the Switch to TCP/IP Launched Today's Internet

• Comment posted Jan 02, 2013 9:21 am PST — by The Famous Brett Watson
  Critical mass isn't a barrier. If you want a network defined by the absence of activity and content (no copyright infringement, no porn, no spam), you can succeed in as much time as it takes to set up a private…

The Evolution of the ITU's Views on Internet Governance (2006-2012)

• Comment posted Oct 05, 2012 10:23 am PDT — by The Famous Brett Watson
  I stand by my remark. Governance is primarily about the wielding of power, and the main power that people are coveting in this political game is the control over the DNS root, along with the associated perks such as the…

• Comment posted Oct 04, 2012 3:20 pm PDT — by The Famous Brett Watson
  It seems to me that the difference between the definitions of "Internet governance" offered by Touré and the WGIG is that his is realistic, and theirs is idealistic.

Microsoft's Takedown of 3322.org - A Gigantic Self Goal?

• Comment posted Sep 20, 2012 1:45 pm PDT — by The Famous Brett Watson
  Just FYI, this article has been cited by Brian Krebs in his commentary on the subject.

Cyber Criminals Infiltrate Even Small Businesses

• Comment posted Jul 20, 2012 7:27 am PDT — by The Famous Brett Watson
  It's not Linux that's going to protect you from phishing in this system: it's the fact that your email and your banking are kept separate. The Live-CD system should be the exclusive domain of sensitive operations like Internet banking, and…

• Comment posted Jul 08, 2012 10:15 am PDT — by The Famous Brett Watson
  If you follow Brian Krebs at all, this kind of thing is regular news, and has been so for years. The best advice that I know of, and which Brian Krebs repeats regularly after recounting the small business cyber-heist du…

Occam's ITRs

• Comment posted Jun 22, 2012 1:38 am PDT — by The Famous Brett Watson
  Geoff, can you please provide attribution for the quotations, or clarify that they are not quotations, as appropriate.

The ICANN Hunger Games

• Comment posted Jun 08, 2012 5:15 am PDT — by The Famous Brett Watson
  Many have been asking "is ICANN a casino?" The answer is no. Casinos do not force people to play. While I agree in general with your comments, I'm afraid that this last remark oversteps a rhetorical line. If you don't…

Google Launches Storage Service, "Drive"

• Comment posted May 02, 2012 12:37 am PDT — by The Famous Brett Watson
  Google drive system requirements and supported browsers (includes Windows XP, Vista, and 7). What do I win?

Fake Bank Site, Fake Registrar

• Comment posted Apr 01, 2012 5:28 pm PDT — by The Famous Brett Watson
  Then someone will make a business out of using their "personal" certificate to register domains and than sell a copy of that cert with the domain name. I'm afraid I don't follow this at all. You're suggesting that people would…

• Comment posted Apr 01, 2012 8:27 am PDT — by The Famous Brett Watson
  You folks suggest the registrar checks a cert for a domain registration. "You folks" is just me at the moment. I'm happy to take sole responsibility, and I stress that I'm not advocating this idea, just using it as a…

• Comment posted Mar 30, 2012 3:10 am PDT — by The Famous Brett Watson
  Domain registrars should require a similar form of validation. What about requiring that registrants have a digital certificate as part of the transaction? This makes the cost of verification an external cost, borne by the consumer. CAs are supposed to…

Most Abusive Domain Registrations are Preventable

• Comment posted Mar 12, 2012 8:36 am PDT — by The Famous Brett Watson
  Wrong. You couldn't know this, you've never asked me and I never said it. If I'm wrong, then there are reasonable conditions under which you would countenance private domain name registrations. Please tell: I'd be interested to hear about them.…

• Comment posted Feb 20, 2012 3:39 pm PST — by The Famous Brett Watson
  I see. Very well, allow me to clarify. My remarks were primarily a response to this paragraph of yours. Next, saying I'm encouraging identity theft by requiring enforcement of existing rules is like saying the government is encouraging teenagers to…

• Comment posted Feb 19, 2012 4:36 am PST — by The Famous Brett Watson
  Your argument is that they will do anything to get their hands on domain names no matter how high the barrier. I said absolutely nothing of the sort. In fact, that is so completely unlike my argument that no meaningful…

• Comment posted Feb 18, 2012 3:52 am PST — by The Famous Brett Watson
  ...saying I'm encouraging identity theft by requiring enforcement of existing rules is like saying the government is encouraging teenagers to buy fake IDs by enforcing cigarette and alcohol restrictions. It's a strained analogy. The barrier of obtaining fake ID is…

Phish or Fair?

• Comment posted Feb 08, 2012 9:54 am PST — by The Famous Brett Watson
  It's hard to tell in this case, just by looking at the domains, as to whether they were registered with marketing intent, or registered by others then seized with the force of law (and held in perpetuity so it won't…

• Comment posted Feb 07, 2012 4:19 pm PST — by The Famous Brett Watson
  That's not a "little" game: I called it quits with 105 right, 0 wrong. For all its untrustworthiness, WHOIS is still great for cheating on tests like this — and this is one of the few tests on which I…

IP Address Reputation Primer

• Comment posted Jan 28, 2012 3:43 am PST — by The Famous Brett Watson
  In the case of IPv6, the (presumably) increasing ease in which one may obtain IPv6 addresses will probably mean it'll be straightforward to get a block, use it, discard it, and get another. It would be unwise to increase the…

• Comment posted Jan 27, 2012 12:01 pm PST — by The Famous Brett Watson
  There's a lot of rhetoric in your comment (the second paragraph in particular), but not a lot of reasoning to back it up. Concentrating on the reasoning alone, I see two points: the vastness of the IPv6 address space, and…

Implications of Canada's CASL - Toughest Anti-Spam Law the World Has Ever Seen

• Comment posted Jan 24, 2012 7:37 am PST — by The Famous Brett Watson
  From time to time, I have wished that ACMA would take stronger action sooner. When a party believes that their unsolicited bulk mail is not spamming, they can become a nuisance very quickly. However, my present (and general) lack of…

• Comment posted Jan 21, 2012 4:14 am PST — by The Famous Brett Watson
  I appeared as a witness in the case against Clarity1 (Wayne Mansfield). This was an unusual case in that Wayne decided to challenge the law head-on. He continued to spam quite brazenly after the act came into law, whereas most…

Greylisting Still Works - Part II

• Comment posted Dec 10, 2011 2:41 am PST — by The Famous Brett Watson
  This data would be more useful if you included statistics on the timing of sender retries. If the bulk of the successful retries are happening five minutes after the original connection, for example, then it would come as no surprise…

Why Brands Need Their Own TLD - The Mulberry-Sale Site that Scammed Me

• Comment posted Oct 18, 2011 10:08 am PDT — by The Famous Brett Watson
  I'm inclined to agree that the monetary and bureaucratic barriers to TLD registration will be sufficiently high to prevent petty fraud of this sort. Nobody is going to sink that much time and effort into hit-and-run counterfeiting. Registering a TLD…

IPv6 Transitional Uncertainties

• Comment posted Sep 20, 2011 9:43 am PDT — by The Famous Brett Watson
  Making IPv4 addresses irrelevant is the long term solution, and everyone has a long term plan to adopt IPv6. The problem is the lack of incentive to get cracking on the long term plan right now: it's all too easy…

• Comment posted Sep 19, 2011 4:20 pm PDT — by The Famous Brett Watson
  In my view, the issue is slightly broader than "backwards compatibility" — it's more like "incentive to migrate", where "backwards compatibility" is just a thing that would provide some incentive by smoothing the path. With IPv6, there's a perverse incentive…

FttH Is Not About High-Speed Internet Access - It Is About the Internet of Things

• Comment posted Aug 12, 2011 5:20 pm PDT — by The Famous Brett Watson
  I hope you're wrong (or at least inaccurate) about the IoT concept. Recent history suggests that we lack the ability to secure anything from attackers with access to the same network, given enough time and motivation on the part of…

Alignment of Interests in DNS Blocking

• Comment posted Jul 27, 2011 10:51 am PDT — by The Famous Brett Watson
  Christopher Parente said, "Is your argument that if people want something online they will get it, so why bother trying to stop it?" I think that's the wrong emphasis for this issue. I would put it the other way around:…

Will Anyone Qualify As a Community TLD?

• Comment posted Jul 16, 2011 9:45 am PDT — by The Famous Brett Watson
  Constantine, you haven't done what I asked. "Music" has only one meaning — so what's your point? Are you saying that this is reason to be awarded an extra point in criterion 2B? An extra point in criterion 2A? How…

• Comment posted Jul 15, 2011 12:30 pm PDT — by The Famous Brett Watson
  I've read the exchange above, and I feel that I understand Antony's points, but I am confused by Constantine's responses. After a couple of false starts at constructing a reply, I have decided that a different approach might be better.…

EFF: Government Domain Name Seizures Violate First Amendment

• Comment posted Jun 22, 2011 10:58 am PDT — by The Famous Brett Watson
  According to this somewhat more informative article from Wired, the site is primarily a discussion board. Discussions posted by users on such a site are "commercial" only in the same sense that my private email is commercial because it's hosted…

DHCP for IPv4 vs. IPv6 - What You Need to Know

• Comment posted Jun 04, 2011 6:24 pm PDT — by The Famous Brett Watson
  In the first and third paragraphs, you expand DHCP as "Dynamic Host Control Protocol", but it should be "Dynamic Host Configuration Protocol".

A True Final Ultimate Solution to the Spam Problem?

• Comment posted May 21, 2011 4:21 am PDT — by The Famous Brett Watson
  Presumably, if these companies could be persuaded to stop supporting spammers… ...other companies or payment techniques would soon rise to fill the vacuum. Yes, you would see a temporary drop in spam, much as you do when C&C;clusters are taken…

Facebook.com/Brand vs. a New TLD: What's a Brand to Do?

• Comment posted May 16, 2011 3:03 pm PDT — by The Famous Brett Watson
  One caveat with regards to a domain name--any domain name, not just TLDs--is that they are rather easy to block. Jothan's analysis, above, considers not only policies and fortunes, but also third-party interference and the possibility of "forum shopping" to…

Password Policies Need to Be the Same if We Want Users to Take Our Advice

• Comment posted May 03, 2011 9:59 am PDT — by The Famous Brett Watson
  But aren't there other ways to sanitize the input without restricting users' abilities to keep themselves secure? Restricting characters in input is completely the wrong way to go about it. Any half-decent database API has facilities for automatically quoting and…

Defending Against the Hackers of 1995

• Comment posted Apr 30, 2011 6:52 am PDT — by The Famous Brett Watson
  There's nothing in this article that I want to disagree with, as such, but one of my pet peeves is the amount of attention that man-in-the-middle (MITM) attacks get. MITM attacks are part of the security model that significantly pre-dates…

Real. Or. Phish?

• Comment posted Apr 12, 2011 8:27 am PDT — by The Famous Brett Watson
  2. The mail wasn't sent from marriott.com, or any domain related to it. Instead, it came from "Marriott@marriott-email.com". Looking at WHOIS for that domain, we see that it's been registered since July 2008. That's not short, but it's not long…

On Mandated Content Blocking in the Domain Name System

• Comment posted Mar 21, 2011 12:06 am PDT — by The Famous Brett Watson
  Because internet infrastructure is a public resource allocated by a public process for public benefit. The typical private individual using an ISP is allocated an IP address anonymously. Perhaps we should end this practice, and make it a matter of…

• Comment posted Mar 20, 2011 5:42 pm PDT — by The Famous Brett Watson
  That's an argument for being able to social network anonymously but it hardly justifies having a domain name anonymously.  A domain is in Internet terms an identity, and allowing such identities without any domain holder accountability is a unique-to-the-Internet form…

• Comment posted Mar 20, 2011 4:45 am PDT — by The Famous Brett Watson
  ...there is no public benefit in Whois privacy, only private benefit. The need to make one's contact information public has a chilling effect on those who want to set up a personal domain which promotes views that offend people in…

• Comment posted Mar 20, 2011 3:45 am PDT — by The Famous Brett Watson
  I'm not willing to debate the harm done to children by the distribution of Child Abuse Materials.  ICANN should not debate that point either. Neither will I. That's why I'm calling for accurate whois and rapid takedowns on crimes that…

• Comment posted Mar 19, 2011 1:07 pm PDT — by The Famous Brett Watson
  That's easy: Just help organize an effective, voluntary system to addresses the problem of criminal behavior on the Internet… This must be some strange new usage of the word "easy" that I wasn't previously aware of. Which nation's laws do…

No False-Starts, Do-Overs, or Mulligans for Email

• Comment posted Mar 17, 2011 1:45 pm PDT — by The Famous Brett Watson
  So long as it's just an advisory header in the email, the recipient's Mail User Agent must be part of the conspiracy before it can be used against the recipient's interests. Granted, a lot of the MUA role is played…

• Comment posted Mar 17, 2011 11:04 am PDT — by The Famous Brett Watson
  If I were designing email from scratch, I would include an "expires" field in the message metadata to indicate a time at which the sender claims the message ceases to be relevant. It's an eminently sensible idea, particularly if you…

Foreign Hackers Attack Canadian Government

• Comment posted Feb 19, 2011 1:59 am PST — by The Famous Brett Watson
  There's definitely a case for multi-factor authentication here. So long as people can be fooled into divulging all their authentication credentials, phishing is going to remain dangerously effective. You need to include something the user can't effectively divulge as an…

Big Business Has Been Using the New TLD Concept for Years

• Comment posted Feb 18, 2011 4:55 am PST — by The Famous Brett Watson
  Why did Nike choose this address as opposed to the commonly used www.nike.com/nikeid? There may be a human comprehension component to the decision, but it also has the purely technical benefit that the product-specific website does not need to be…

Spam Volumes In 2010

• Comment posted Jan 04, 2011 6:43 am PST — by The Famous Brett Watson
  Interestingly, the Cisco IronPort SenderBase stats you show in the first figure indicate that spam remained remarkably steady as a percentage of global email volume, varying less than 1% in the last six months (between 85.1% and 85.8%), despite the…

Has the FCC Created a Stone Too Heavy for It to Lift?

• Comment posted Dec 29, 2010 5:43 am PST — by The Famous Brett Watson
  I've read your link. It contains some good advice, like… Don't call the other guy a liar, even if you think he or she is one. Perhaps you would care to retract some earlier statements (or comment titles, at least)…

• Comment posted Dec 29, 2010 3:08 am PST — by The Famous Brett Watson
  ITIF is a tax-exempt, 501(c)(3), not-for-profit, public policy think tank, not a lobbying shop. Okay, fair enough. Anyone who knows the first thing about the American political process understands the difference between advocating policies that are beneficial to the nation…

• Comment posted Dec 29, 2010 12:43 am PST — by The Famous Brett Watson
  Richard, ITIF's very own "about us" page says their mission is "to formulate and promote public policies", a task better known as "lobbying". I have no doubt that the policies so formulated and promoted are harmonious with the aims and…

Open Internet and Democratic Principles Under Attack

• Comment posted Dec 11, 2010 3:49 pm PST — by The Famous Brett Watson
  I don't know what you think extortion is, but I still can't see any extortion there. The second quotation only establishes that Wikileaks receives donations. Big surprise: we know that. The US government is aiding that by giving the guy…

• Comment posted Dec 11, 2010 3:05 am PST — by The Famous Brett Watson
  I also notice you have nothing to say about the DDoS attacks on the web sites of the various financial institutions that have refused to take part in Assange's extortion racket. I see you don't shrink from dishonest commentary yourself.…

Two Years Later Dozens of Registrars Still in the Shadows

• Comment posted Dec 04, 2010 2:19 am PST — by The Famous Brett Watson
  There's no doubt in my mind that the Bruens are crusaders, and that "the knujon pattern is sticks" rather than carrots, but they have a very good point even so. It would be better to focus on that worthy point…

The Internet Monopolies?

• Comment posted Nov 15, 2010 11:36 pm PST — by The Famous Brett Watson
  Try to parse the paragraph and see if it holds together. He's saying we should enjoy things while Google's code of conduct is still "don't be evil". I'm not sure where he gets the idea that most of them have…

Broadband Challenge Isn't About Plumbing

• Comment posted Oct 27, 2010 1:32 am PDT — by The Famous Brett Watson
  I don't profess to be an NBN expert, but my understanding is that you don't really need to know about the NBN in order to use it. The NBN is intended to replace all sorts of communications infrastructure. Once it's…

Why App Stores Won't Survive

• Comment posted Oct 21, 2010 5:08 am PDT — by The Famous Brett Watson
  I don't have any immediate comment on the substance of your post, Martin, but there are some things I find curious about its circumstances — and subsequently about you. You registered your CircleID account yesterday, evidently for the express purpose…

ARF is Now an IETF Standard

• Comment posted Oct 05, 2010 11:14 pm PDT — by The Famous Brett Watson
  Thanks for the heads up. I note, however, that this is mentioned in the RFC at the end of section 3.2. Hopefully implementers are paying close enough attention to it.

DNSSEC vs DDoS Protection: Is It Really a Choice?

• Comment posted Oct 01, 2010 12:18 am PDT — by The Famous Brett Watson
  So it isn't really a choice between solving DDoS or deploying DNSSEC. Maybe not, but it's a shame that DNSSEC itself had to be such a great DDoS facilitator: it can act as a DDoS amplifier, thanks to its potential…

Policy Failure Enables Mass Malware: Part I (Rx-Partners/VIPMEDS)

• Comment posted Sep 23, 2010 5:22 am PDT — by The Famous Brett Watson
  And these sites, for the most part, would not exist if effective policy and procedure were implemented. Technically, I can't contradict this. "Effective" policy and procedure, pretty much by definition, achieves its intended results. But what will it take for…

Could .NAME be the Killer App ENUM is Waiting For?

• Comment posted Sep 19, 2010 3:05 am PDT — by The Famous Brett Watson
  To the famous Brett Watson and Goulnik, the need is to make the net universally accessible one on one. Here Thomas Barrett is trying to solve the Namespace problem. Universally accessible one on one? Namespace problem? I don't understand this…

• Comment posted Sep 18, 2010 7:18 am PDT — by The Famous Brett Watson
  He's "President and Founder of domain name Registrar: EnCirca, Inc.” [Source: LinkedIn]

• Comment posted Sep 18, 2010 4:48 am PDT — by The Famous Brett Watson
  I'd love to disagree, but I first require some vague idea as to how domain names based on telephone numbers are useful. I've glanced in the general direction of the ENUM concept from time to time, but it has always…

Silvia Hagen: It's Not About IPv6 Transition But Urgent Integration

• Comment posted Sep 15, 2010 12:51 am PDT — by The Famous Brett Watson
  If an ISP wants to keep on growing their network after IPv4 exhaustion, they must deploy IPv6 and integrate the IPv6 network with the IPv4 network. As an alternative, they can deploy as much RFC 1918 private IPv4 space as…

ARF is Now an IETF Standard

• Comment posted Sep 10, 2010 5:56 am PDT — by The Famous Brett Watson
  For those of us considering the implementation of an automated report handling system, is there anything important we should know about the differences between ARF (the draft) and RFC 5965? Also, how widespread is deployment at this time? If I…

Protection of Intellectual Property: The Core of the Net Neutrality Debate

• Comment posted Aug 18, 2010 12:30 am PDT — by The Famous Brett Watson
  As the Library of Congress' Copyright Office stated, "the files distributed over peer-to-peer networks are primarily copyrighted works...." The vast majority of all files that exist are copyrighted works. Very few works have been allowed to fall into the public…

Three Things Registrars Must Do to Enhance Security

• Comment posted Aug 10, 2010 4:20 am PDT — by The Famous Brett Watson
  The costs of having a criminal create a verified WHOIS would be much higher than that of a non-criminal. It does not follow that the costs would be high enough to actually deter any criminal activity of note. If the…

• Comment posted Aug 10, 2010 12:13 am PDT — by The Famous Brett Watson
  Mandatory Verified WHOIS would also help (as criminals would be unlikely/unwilling to verify themselves). You grossly underestimate the determination of the financially-motivated criminal, I believe. I'm not convinced that mandatory verified WHOIS would make a noticeable dent in cybercrime, particularly…

Taking Back the DNS

• Comment posted Aug 07, 2010 5:08 am PDT — by The Famous Brett Watson
  There must be a reason that ISPs do this (it's been suggested to minimize the risk of DDoS), but it seems a bit strong-armed. If I were searching for that reason, my first line of inquiry would be "money". Do…

Cyberwar vs No Cyberwar

• Comment posted Aug 05, 2010 3:51 pm PDT — by The Famous Brett Watson
  There's a difference between defining a term, and getting everyone to agree on a single universal definition of a term. The former is important; the latter is neither feasible nor necessary. In a traditional debate, the opening speaker for each…

• Comment posted Aug 05, 2010 6:23 am PDT — by The Famous Brett Watson
  It is not a question of (re)defining cyberwar at all - it is a question of whether it exists or not. You can't tell whether something exists or not in the absence of a definition for that term. Given a…

Taking Back the DNS

• Comment posted Aug 03, 2010 12:34 am PDT — by The Famous Brett Watson
  The attackers attack the switch. The history of DNSBLs suggests that this is true, but in the opposite sense to what you mean. You mean to suggest that the attackers will try to use the "off switch" to cause widespread…

DNSSEC Happy Talk Enters a New Era

• Comment posted Jul 19, 2010 4:15 am PDT — by The Famous Brett Watson
  > what problem is DNSSEC going to solve? Were you sleeping, or just failed to google "Kaminsky dns"? If it were just about fixing the Kaminsky bug, there were immensely simpler ways to go about it. I refer you to…

The [Dot]Brand Tribes - Part 3

• Comment posted Jun 10, 2010 1:31 am PDT — by The Famous Brett Watson
  You're pitching this as something to do with security? Security theatre, perhaps — a song and dance of men in uniform to give the impression that things are being secured — but actual security, no. Here's why. I will concede…

The Sad State of WHOIS, and Why Criminals Love It

• Comment posted May 14, 2010 3:32 pm PDT — by The Famous Brett Watson
  That was indeed the original intent. It was also the original intent of the domain name system that it be deep, rather than broad. That hasn't happened either. It was not anticipated that every man and his dog would have…

Is Australia a Hot-Bed of Zombie Activity?

• Comment posted Feb 10, 2010 2:18 am PST — by The Famous Brett Watson
  According to Spamhaus, the top countries currently responsible for spam are the USA, China, and Russian Federation. Australia is not in the top ten. Given the correspondence between spam and zombies (as expected) in the number one and two positions,…

The Greatest Free Riders of Our Time

• Comment posted Feb 03, 2010 6:28 am PST — by The Famous Brett Watson
  No; the costs aren't shifted to the downloaders. The downloaders (and re-uploaders) are on flat rate connections and therefore pay no more. They don't pay any more, but they're still paying for it. We seem to have a difference of…

• Comment posted Feb 03, 2010 1:17 am PST — by The Famous Brett Watson
  They shift their bandwidth costs to the ISP… No, they shift their bandwidth costs to the parties doing the downloading. The parties doing the downloading then pay their ISPs. There's no free ride here, except when the P2P is used…

Google Puts Its Foot Down

• Comment posted Jan 25, 2010 8:28 am PST — by The Famous Brett Watson
  What's likely to follow is this: the Chinese government refuses to budge on the censorship issue, and denies any involvement in the attacks. We now have an official statement which is as close to a denial as we are going…

Google and China: Some General Thoughts

• Comment posted Jan 24, 2010 4:32 am PST — by The Famous Brett Watson
  I'm not 100% clear that Google's decision is entirely selfless. I can't find any claim on their part that it was entirely selfless. In fact, I think you can rest assured that their own self interest was a factor in…

Google Puts Its Foot Down

• Comment posted Jan 14, 2010 3:50 am PST — by The Famous Brett Watson
  People are jumping a little ahead of the game here: Google hasn't pulled out of China yet. They have thrown down the gauntlet, however, and the safe bet is that China won't back down, but we should still distinguish between…

How Do You Do Secure Bank Transactions on the Internet?

• Comment posted Nov 13, 2009 4:56 pm PST — by The Famous Brett Watson
  relatively few individuals have lost thousands much less hundreds of thousands of dollars performing such transactions. Well, that can be explained entirely by the fact that relatively few individuals have the kinds of bank balances associated with businesses. Businesses have…

The Tempest in the TLD Teapot

• Comment posted Nov 13, 2009 4:43 am PST — by The Famous Brett Watson
  The business model requires it. Let me see if I follow the logic. The long list of benefits you cited are not provided by the domain name, in and of itself, but by your business model. Your business model, in…

How Do You Do Secure Bank Transactions on the Internet?

• Comment posted Nov 13, 2009 12:54 am PST — by The Famous Brett Watson
  Having to reboot just to check a bank balance or do a quick transfer would be annoying to me, even if it was much safer. The businesses that have lost tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars through compromised computers…

• Comment posted Nov 10, 2009 1:57 am PST — by The Famous Brett Watson
  A practical solution to the "insecure endpoint" problem, within everyone's reach, is to boot the computer from a Live CD/DVD (like Ubuntu) when doing online banking. Such a system may contain security vulnerabilities, but the read-only nature of the system…

The Tempest in the TLD Teapot

• Comment posted Nov 10, 2009 12:54 am PST — by The Famous Brett Watson
  How can you predict the future based on the past? It seems like a more sound method than predicting the future based on wishful thinking. So new .music gTLD has no public benefit? How about this for musicians: None of…

Net Neutrality in the US Under Fire

• Comment posted Oct 24, 2009 1:25 am PDT — by The Famous Brett Watson
  Apparently we have different definitions of 'freedom'. Everyone is pro-freedom — they just have wildly incompatible ideas about who should be free to do what to whom.

An Authenticated Internet

• Comment posted Oct 10, 2009 1:18 am PDT — by The Famous Brett Watson
  Are you suggesting that cache poisoning is not a MITM attack? Yes: most cache poisoning is effected by exploiting bugs in DNS implementations, not by intercepting and modifying traffic between DNS clients and servers. I think our difference here is…

• Comment posted Oct 09, 2009 6:06 am PDT — by The Famous Brett Watson
  You really want to argue cache poisoning hasn't happened in the field? No, I want to argue that it isn't happening as the result of MITM attacks.

ITU Putting Global Cyber Security on Top of Its Agenda

• Comment posted Oct 09, 2009 2:52 am PDT — by The Famous Brett Watson
  As you well know, the next world war could happen in the cyber space and that would be a catastrophe… ...for the military-industrial complex.

An Authenticated Internet

• Comment posted Oct 09, 2009 2:44 am PDT — by The Famous Brett Watson
  If you are referring to this incident, then the vulnerability was limited to specific bugs in specific DNS implementations, and it was a shameful indictment on those implementations that they were vulnerable to such an old exploit. It wasn't a…

• Comment posted Oct 09, 2009 2:06 am PDT — by The Famous Brett Watson
  I did read your previous comments. They are quite good, and require research to answer, so bear with me. By "verification solely through the MX record", do you mean that certification authorities base their certification on the ability to receive…

• Comment posted Oct 08, 2009 6:20 pm PDT — by The Famous Brett Watson
  I don't think the risk of an attack from your ISP is very high. Maybe not an intentionally malicious attack, but every now and then some executive gets inspired by the SiteFinder stunt and starts forging DNS results for profit.…

Securing a Domain: SSL vs. DNSSEC

• Comment posted Oct 08, 2009 5:38 pm PDT — by The Famous Brett Watson
  If someone were to poison the end user's DNS cache with a bad IP for well-known banks, setup a sort of http(s)-proxy with a set of bad certs for these institutions, the end user would be none the wiser. This…

• Comment posted Oct 08, 2009 3:43 am PDT — by The Famous Brett Watson
  [Note: SSL has been advanced and standardised as TLS: Transport Layer Security. It is used not only in conjunction with HTTP (where it is known as HTTPS), but also in several other TCP-based protocols (e.g. SMTP and its variants).] "Defence…

An Authenticated Internet

• Comment posted Oct 06, 2009 4:17 am PDT — by The Famous Brett Watson
  What DNSSEC does do is make it much harder for someone to use a DNS-based MITM attack. The DNS has been openly vulnerable to such attacks since day one. MITM attacks are popular with cryptographers, because that's the kind of…

Sender Address Verification: Still a Bad Idea

• Comment posted Oct 06, 2009 3:39 am PDT — by The Famous Brett Watson
  This very post was subject to a valid email sender verification. You're confusing SAV with challenge/response. You're not the only one to do this: Sendio.com markets a challenge/response system using the term "sender address verification". This is why I prefer…

An Authenticated Internet

• Comment posted Sep 30, 2009 7:37 am PDT — by The Famous Brett Watson
  I think your problem, fundamentally, is that you think things work better than they actually do. My first problem is that you are framing my objections as though they are a defence of SSL and other technologies over DNSSEC. They…

• Comment posted Sep 30, 2009 2:59 am PDT — by The Famous Brett Watson
  It sounds to me like some of your optimism is based on the fact that DNSSEC hasn't had a chance to fail in the real world in the same way that SSL has. Battle plans rarely survive contact with the…

• Comment posted Sep 29, 2009 2:46 am PDT — by The Famous Brett Watson
  This is one of those articles that needs a counterargument because it overstates its case. This won't be a thorough rebuttal: I'm just going to pick the low-hanging fruit. DNSSEC is a security measure that can help mitigate this risk…

The Chinese Domain Name Bubble Bursts

• Comment posted Aug 19, 2009 5:14 am PDT — by The Famous Brett Watson
  ...more than a million Chinese have decided against renewing… What makes you think that they were Chinese, as opposed to, say, spammers and malware pushers of indeterminate ethnicity who registered random disposable domain names in bulk for strategic (blacklist-evading) reasons?…

New Analysis Suggests Recent Cyberattacks Against US and South Korea Originated from UK Not N. Korea

• Comment posted Jul 14, 2009 9:59 pm PDT — by The Famous Brett Watson
  Nobody knows where these attacks originated yet. The UK link is merely another compromised host in the long chain of intermediate systems behind which the real miscreant is hiding. Wired Threat Level is already reporting that the UK host was…

Turn the Table on Content Filtering

• Comment posted Jul 05, 2009 8:33 am PDT — by The Famous Brett Watson
  My point, poorly expressed, was that it will be *far* easier to gain widespread acceptance of an ESMTP/EHLO extension than it will be to gain widespread acceptance of another SMTP verb. I have reservations about the design of VHLO, but…

• Comment posted Jul 04, 2009 7:47 am PDT — by The Famous Brett Watson
  You will need some other property of that MTA (other than the fact that it issued VHLO rather than EHLO) to trigger the acceptance of mail from it. VHLO provides a means for the sending system to assert association with…

The Browser Is the OS (Thanks to Firefox 3.5, Chrome 2, Safari 4)

• Comment posted Jul 02, 2009 4:16 am PDT — by The Famous Brett Watson
  Surely I'm not the only one who finds it curious that while the software component of a new computer is fast approaching 50% of the cost (up from around 10% a decade ago), the heart of the system (the browser)…

Extending the JPA is the Right Thing to Do

• Comment posted Jun 24, 2009 4:10 pm PDT — by The Famous Brett Watson
  Mr Gunnarson, thank you for writing this article, which is outstanding both in terms of its informative content and its moderate tone, particularly relative to some other recent writing on the subject of ICANN at CircleID. The clarification on the…

How is ICANN Spending Your Money?

• Comment posted Jun 18, 2009 4:49 am PDT — by The Famous Brett Watson
  Isn't it time we rehashed the investment losses from last year and made them out to be irresponsible speculation rather than the inevitable result of a global economic decline? Why rehash when you can just review our earlier discussion? A…

IPv6 and LTE, the Not So Long Term Evolution?

• Comment posted Jun 02, 2009 12:36 am PDT — by The Famous Brett Watson
  Perhaps nobody else will will notice that what you call "extreme worst case scenario" is nothing more than the *consistent* (as opposed to selective, convenient, self-serving) application of market logic to the overall situation created by the privatization of IP…

Why DNS Is Broken, Part 2: DoS Target

• Comment posted May 22, 2009 3:47 pm PDT — by The Famous Brett Watson
  This isn't a pitfall of DNS: it's a pitfall of public-facing network services in general. It's safe to assume that DNSSEC will suffer this problem more than vanilla DNS simply due to its additional data overhead. Deployment of DNSSEC will…

Obama's Missed Opportunity

• Comment posted Mar 27, 2009 6:19 am PDT — by The Famous Brett Watson
  As I said earlier, nobody ever opposes an innate good like transparency or truth in advertising. We don't have to go to the cynical extreme of Goebbels and the lie oft repeated to understand what's going on. It's a simple…

• Comment posted Mar 26, 2009 1:20 pm PDT — by The Famous Brett Watson
  I didn't here Richard or anyone else oppose transparency and truth in advertising. Nobody ever opposes those things, same as nobody opposes Mom and Apple Pie, or The Safety of Our Children, and so on. What you do instead is…

DPI is Not a Four-Letter Word!

• Comment posted Mar 17, 2009 5:21 am PDT — by The Famous Brett Watson
  Joe, I think you are going to save yourself a lot of time and aggravation by avoiding this issue rather than tackling it head on. It seems perfectly likely to me that Comcast are not upholding their promises in relation…

What ICANN Participants Have in Common with (and Could Learn from) Quakers

• Comment posted Mar 01, 2009 8:42 am PST — by The Famous Brett Watson
  Part of the trouble with ICANN and domain name policy in particular is that the popularisation of the Internet has meant that there will nevermore be "one heart" on the subject of domain names. There are at least three competing…

Yellow Parking Violation Fliers on Windshields Get Drivers to Visit Malicious Website

• Comment posted Feb 04, 2009 3:36 am PST — by The Famous Brett Watson
  The source of this newsbite is SANS, so far as I can tell. Further details likely to be of interest: the website in question coaxes users to install malware under the guise of "picture search toolbar". If installed, the malware…

Law Requiring Sex Offenders to Hand Over All Internet Passwords Going Too Far?

• Comment posted Jan 28, 2009 2:56 am PST — by The Famous Brett Watson
  Susan, law is not my speciality, so I would like your opinion on a couple of points. 1. Does this requirement potentially fall afoul of constitutional protection against unreasonable search? It is rather analogous to providing law enforcement with a…

The Problem With HTTPS SSL Runs Deeper Than MD5

• Comment posted Jan 07, 2009 4:15 am PST — by The Famous Brett Watson
  But you've essentially agreed with me that a secure bookmark manager (possibly an online validation service with digitally signed results) could be a very good solution. I didn't say it would be a very good solution. I said it would…

• Comment posted Jan 07, 2009 2:09 am PST — by The Famous Brett Watson
  Most phishing attacks involve either a lure to a false URL or malware at the client end. Given that your proposal addresses neither of these problems, I don't see that it warrants much attention. Having said that, your proposal may…

• Comment posted Jan 06, 2009 2:45 am PST — by The Famous Brett Watson
  Like most proposals for a security solution, this article dedicates insufficient time to analysing the security problem. What are the possible threats? Which of the possible threats does this solution address? What avenues of attack remain open given each suggested…

One Good Outcome from the Wall Street Journal: Google Flap

• Comment posted Dec 28, 2008 10:47 am PST — by The Famous Brett Watson
  So, Google — though it is coming from the opposite direction — winds up in the same place: as an infrastructure owner whose infrastructure can discriminate in favor of its own content. But there's a big difference. The claim that…

What If I Were Wrong About Edge-Caching?

• Comment posted Dec 19, 2008 2:50 am PST — by The Famous Brett Watson
  Network neutrality isn't the only issue known to man in this field, so let's try to draw some reasonable boundaries around it. For example, the behaviour of a network service provider might be anticompetitive without being a violation of network…

Eugene Kaspersky: We Need Interpol for Internet, Law Enforcement Agencies Have Jurisdictional Limits

• Comment posted Dec 15, 2008 1:18 am PST — by The Famous Brett Watson
  Even if the Internet were Kaspersky's ideal police state, it wouldn't help much. It would give law enforcement the ability to trace a crime back to the last compromised computer in the chain that was used to conduct the crime…

The Path Towards Centralization of Internet Governance Under UN: Part 3

• Comment posted Dec 05, 2008 1:01 am PST — by The Famous Brett Watson
  This essay is conspicuous in its omission: it speaks of the centralisation and institutionalisation of Internet governance as though it were not already centralised and institutionalised. There is a complete lack of comparison between the status quo under ICANN and…

Old New Telco Thinking

• Comment posted Nov 22, 2008 10:47 am PST — by The Famous Brett Watson
  Comcast had the right to terminate ALL P2P traffic, because it is contrary to its terms of service. But it was being nice; it only limited P2P when the network got congested. That's a novel theory. By extension, I suppose,…

• Comment posted Nov 20, 2008 5:36 am PST — by The Famous Brett Watson
  As was reported in Comcast's filings with the FCC just last month, Comcast was not, as you claim, "selectively discriminating against particular P2P applications." According to their filing with the FCC, their network management technique involved inserting TCP RSTs into…

• Comment posted Nov 19, 2008 3:55 am PST — by The Famous Brett Watson
  Why wait until late 2008 to respond to this article from early 2006? However, broadband providers have been forced into metering by the recent FCC ruling, which slapped Comcast for imposing implicit limits on customers' usage and preventing bandwidth hogging.…

Expansion of Top-Level Domain Names: Why Current Brand Protection Procedures Will Be Impractical

• Comment posted Oct 30, 2008 2:23 am PDT — by The Famous Brett Watson
  For online copyright infringement, the Digital Millenium Copyright Act (DMCA) procedures are successfully used by rights holders to take down infringing content. Actually, the DMCA is effective for taking down content whether it is infringing or not. All the rights…

The Root of All Email

• Comment posted Oct 07, 2008 4:09 am PDT — by The Famous Brett Watson
  My thesis will be available online after it has been examined (and any necessary changes made), which probably means it will be available early next year. I'll probably post an extract or two here as articles in the meantime.

• Comment posted Oct 07, 2008 12:13 am PDT — by The Famous Brett Watson
  RFC 706 foreshadows the denial of service attack, not spam. Despite the title's use of the term "junk mail", the unwanted messages in question are simple network packets, not email messages. It foreshadows the firewall more than it does the…

GNU Founder Richard Stallman Warns Against Cloud Computing

• Comment posted Oct 01, 2008 1:29 am PDT — by The Famous Brett Watson
  Yes, "cloud computing" is gibberish, but it should not be dismissed on that basis. Many new ideas start out as gibberish. Let me share a fine quotation from Paul Feyerabend's Against Method (3rd ed., p.17): It is often taken for…

Net Neutrality an 'American Problem', Australians Suggest Alternatives

• Comment posted Oct 01, 2008 1:14 am PDT — by The Famous Brett Watson
  Ian Peter said: But there are some potential issues there still and my Australian friends have not solved that problem with their higher (and probably more realistic) charges than their US counterparts. Quite so. In my opinion, we've solved the…

Comcast is Right, the FCC is Wrong

• Comment posted Sep 30, 2008 12:54 am PDT — by The Famous Brett Watson
  I'm sorry, Richard, but I thought we digressed from "what Comcast is doing with DPI" into "what Comcast (and others) could do with DPI" when you mentioned it as a possible QoS tool. My additional apologies for pointing out the…

• Comment posted Sep 29, 2008 11:11 pm PDT — by The Famous Brett Watson
  Push for the adoption of DiffServ by the carriers, and application support will follow. In any case, the fact that a ten-year-old solution hasn't gained much traction in the real world should give you some idea as to how important…

• Comment posted Sep 29, 2008 11:02 am PDT — by The Famous Brett Watson
  Prioritisation and other nuances of packet handling are not bad ideas when implemented appropriately. We have a ten-year-old architecture for this, known as diffserv, and if you want to promote it, go right ahead. It is, however, a bad idea…

• Comment posted Sep 29, 2008 2:59 am PDT — by The Famous Brett Watson
  I've said this many times before, but I'm afraid I'll have to say it again, just to ensure that a lie oft-repeated isn't accepted as truth. Time and time again, Richard Bennet has pushed the idea that TCP Resets are…

Comcast's Network Management Practices: A Brief Analysis

• Comment posted Sep 24, 2008 4:10 pm PDT — by The Famous Brett Watson
  Larry Seltzer said: Analyzing Attachment A is basically just for historical interest. I agree. It doesn't disclose much that we hadn't already guessed, and it won't be current practice for much longer, but it is particularly interesting in light of…

IGF Meeting Blacklisted

• Comment posted Sep 18, 2008 10:33 pm PDT — by The Famous Brett Watson
  If a recipient is blacklisting that aggressively (on all Received headers, not just the immediate SMTP client IP), don't expect the shift to IPv6 to save you. In fact, there is plenty of scope for things to get worse. There…

Soon in a Mail Box Near You: Internationalized Email Addresses

• Comment posted Sep 09, 2008 2:50 am PDT — by The Famous Brett Watson
  "Experimental" status means that the RFCs aren't even being proposed as a standard — they are not on the standards track. That's not to say that they shouldn't be implemented, but let's not misrepresent their status with the the suggestion…

Hunting Unicorns: Myths and Realities of the Net Neutrality Debate

• Comment posted Aug 11, 2008 4:59 pm PDT — by The Famous Brett Watson
  The language you've used assumes variable pricing for limited services: specifically, you introduce the "bigger bills" bugbear, and all the associated fuss over whether traffic was solicited or not. For plans which are fixed in price but bandwidth-capped, these are…

• Comment posted Aug 11, 2008 2:27 pm PDT — by The Famous Brett Watson
  You make it sound like it's a choice between metered access and unlimited access. As I've pointed out elsewhere, the bulk of broadband services in Australia are neither metered nor unlimited, but rather limited on a gigabytes-per-month basis, and throttled…

• Comment posted Aug 09, 2008 3:44 am PDT — by The Famous Brett Watson
  Dan, the trouble with drawing the copyright aspect of the issue into the argument is that it downplays the damage being done to the legitimate users of the application. By analogy, just because ~95% of email is spam doesn't mean…

• Comment posted Aug 08, 2008 4:45 am PDT — by The Famous Brett Watson
  Dan, I realise that you like to address every conceivable aspect of a problem simultaneously [example], but I find that this muddies the waters. It's therefore somewhat exasperating to me that you've introduced the matter of "ILLEGAL STEALING OF COPYRIGHT…

• Comment posted Aug 05, 2008 6:02 pm PDT — by The Famous Brett Watson
  Myth 1: The Internet can be "neutral" towards all types of applications Status: true! The Internet can be and usually is neutral towards applications. No matter which ISP you use, most of the Internet is someone else, and although your…

Google's Cerf Offers Alternate Strategy to Metered Broadband Billing

• Comment posted Aug 05, 2008 11:31 am PDT — by The Famous Brett Watson
  Over the years, most Australian broadband ISPs have settled on fixed price plans with data limits and throttling (although not exclusively so). A low-end (but not bottom-end) service might offer 3GB of data per month, plus a bonus 3GB in…

Another Wrong-Headed WSJ Editorial

• Comment posted Aug 04, 2008 6:36 am PDT — by The Famous Brett Watson
  Richard, if I weren't open to the idea that management using TCP Resets might be a reasonable idea, I would not have hammered you for specific details in such a frustrating and unfruitful exchange over such a long period. In…

• Comment posted Aug 03, 2008 2:00 pm PDT — by The Famous Brett Watson
  Is flow management the issue here, seriously, or is it just an irrelevant example? If flow management is the problem, then the solution would seem to be "don't do it". Why bias performance in favour of those who open many…

• Comment posted Aug 02, 2008 6:48 am PDT — by The Famous Brett Watson
  Richard Bennet claims, as he does at every opportunity… the TCP Reset is actually the only way to reduce the connection count down to something reasonable. If your network depends on there being a manageable quantity of open TCP connections,…

Possible First Attacks on DNS Flaw Have Been Reported

• Comment posted Jul 30, 2008 5:32 am PDT — by The Famous Brett Watson
  My observation (about the need to block spoofed UDP packets) is surely common knowledge… One would certainly hope that it's common knowledge in the appropriate circles. Even so, just in case it's slipped someone's notice, it's worth mentioning that address…

No Fines for Comcast

• Comment posted Jul 28, 2008 10:18 pm PDT — by The Famous Brett Watson
  Shouldn't an ISP like Comcast have enough Bandwidth/Infrastructure to support the advertised Bandwidth if all customers are concurrently using all of their connections' Bandwidth? No. There would be no economy of scale worth mentioning if that were the case, and…

Shouting 'Bug' on a Crowded Internet...

• Comment posted Jul 22, 2008 10:37 pm PDT — by The Famous Brett Watson
  Shouting 'bug' on a crowded internet is just as dangerous as shouting 'fire' in a crowded theatre, even in societies where free speech is valued and protected by law, and we should not assume that full disclosure is always the…

No Fines for Comcast

• Comment posted Jul 15, 2008 11:06 pm PDT — by The Famous Brett Watson
  I'm not sure if I'm reading you right, but I sense that you have a bit of doubt that the P2P problem actually exists. I don't doubt that P2P is posing a problem. I don't doubt that it creates a…

• Comment posted Jul 15, 2008 1:37 am PDT — by The Famous Brett Watson
  This is a re-statement of the problem, not an explanation. Furthermore, this re-statement seems to be slightly different to the problem we have already discussed: it does not mention the DOCSIS upstream congestion problem, and seems to exclude cable modems…

• Comment posted Jul 14, 2008 4:30 am PDT — by The Famous Brett Watson
  Richard Bennett wrote: I'm yet to read a comment from you, Brett, that puts forward a serious argument. Making personal attacks may be amusing, but it doesn't advance the debate. The lack of a "serious argument" on my part is…

• Comment posted Jul 14, 2008 1:38 am PDT — by The Famous Brett Watson
  Richard Bennett said: ...I make my living doing network engineering and I don't want my profession equated with dealing drugs. For one thing, I don't recall having seen that parallel drawn before. For another thing, it's a ridiculous assertion and…

• Comment posted Jul 13, 2008 2:56 pm PDT — by The Famous Brett Watson
  Ian Woollard said: I'm constantly stunned at how badly Richard Bennett fails to get this stuff. I think you have a problem with your expectations. Richard is clearly an advocate or apologist for Comcast: his knowledge and competence are being…

Potential Danger Ahead for Registrants: dot-info Abusive Domain Use Policy

• Comment posted Jun 23, 2008 3:07 am PDT — by The Famous Brett Watson
  Spam and botnets are illegal under certain laws in certain countries for certain values of "spam" and "botnets". An indeterminate number of other things are also illegal, depending on whose law is being enforced. The USA, for example, has an…

Domain Registrars Releasing Suspended Domains to Attackers

• Comment posted Jun 12, 2008 5:37 am PDT — by The Famous Brett Watson
  Fergie wrote: This must be corrected, or the Internet will continue to slide into a state where every domain is untrusted, every domain is suspect, and there will be no trust in the entire domain registry process system whatsoever. What…

CIRA Creates Backdoor WHOIS Exceptions for Police and IP Owners

• Comment posted Jun 11, 2008 4:10 pm PDT — by The Famous Brett Watson
  Privacy is a balance. Well, actually it's an all out tug-o-war between conflicting interests. Unfortunately, it's usually the legitimate users who have the most to lose. I suspect that the average cybercriminal only uses anonymous registration because it's checked by…

Microsoft's Contribution Was TCP/IP

• Comment posted Apr 26, 2008 3:24 am PDT — by The Famous Brett Watson
  Microsoft has such a large influence on the desktop computing environment that any technology decision they make has the potential to swing adoption one way or another. Should we thank Microsoft for TCP/IP? I don't think so: they merely chose…

Don't Register Your Domain in the U.S. if it's Controversial

• Comment posted Mar 07, 2008 2:47 am PST — by The Famous Brett Watson
  John, I don't disagree with your analysis, but I think you've misunderstood my point. There are two issues here, and I've tried to keep them separate. The first issue is that the US Treasury Department is able to enforce this…

• Comment posted Mar 06, 2008 2:12 am PST — by The Famous Brett Watson
  @Dave Zan: If the US government starts exerting control farther up the chain, such as on US-based registries, or ICANN itself, it may well precipitate a revolution. The revolution may split the DNS very badly, but it's a question of…

IPv6 in Slovak Academic Network

• Comment posted Mar 01, 2008 3:53 am PST — by The Famous Brett Watson
  Datastream is not delivered to every user (unicast) but to the whole group of users (anycast). Don't you mean "multicast" for delivery to all members of a group?

IPv6: Do as I Say or Do as I Do?

• Comment posted Feb 11, 2008 11:46 am PST — by The Famous Brett Watson
  VoIP on IPv6 allows you to talk to other VoIP on IPv6 users, which leaves it far from "killer app" status at this point in time.

Up to 300 Megawatt Worth of Keepalive Messages to be Saved by IPv6?

• Comment posted Jan 08, 2008 12:53 am PST — by The Famous Brett Watson
  But does IPv6 result in reduced power consumption, particularly in light of its substantially increased header size? Think of all those extra bytes in every single packet, and all the energy they consume. IPv6 might cause the ice caps to…

DNSSEC: Once More, With Feeling!

• Comment posted Dec 17, 2007 5:12 am PST — by The Famous Brett Watson
  Geoff Huston said: Who does, who should, and who should not have the ability to authorize changes to the root zone and the process of consultation and signoff for such changes may well be a fascintating topic, but to suppose…

• Comment posted Dec 12, 2007 3:22 am PST — by The Famous Brett Watson
  DNSSEC may have quite dismal prospects of being deployed in actual practice, but look on the bright side: if DNSSEC were completely and perfectly deployed right now, it would not be addressing the latest and greatest DNS-related attack, which involves…

68,000 Open Recursive DNS Servers Behaving Maliciously; "This is a crime with few witnesses"

• Comment posted Dec 12, 2007 12:55 am PST — by The Famous Brett Watson
  The attack discussed in the article involves the use of malware to modify the resolver settings on the (Windows-based) victim system so that it queries a malicious DNS server. This is a more advanced form of the old trick where…

In Praise of Relatively Dumb Pipes

• Comment posted Dec 05, 2007 5:42 pm PST — by The Famous Brett Watson
  You seem confused about TCP, making the common error that it’s a network protocol. It is, in fact, an *INTERnetwork* protocol, good for moving data between one network and another. I'll admit a certain degree of bemusement as to that…

• Comment posted Dec 04, 2007 3:23 am PST — by The Famous Brett Watson
  It "works" like a hammer works on a screw. It manages traffic by effecting a DoS attack on the connections established by the endpoints until they give up trying to establish them. I'm repeating myself because I'm still trying to…

• Comment posted Dec 03, 2007 4:12 pm PST — by The Famous Brett Watson
  RED and packet dropping affect the rate at which TCP hosts transmit data over an established connection. Quite. And RST abnormally terminates an established connection (cf. normal termination with FIN), or indicates that a socket is not listening for connections.…

• Comment posted Nov 29, 2007 10:45 pm PST — by The Famous Brett Watson
  Richard, the source you cited includes the following explanation. So the only way to make this protocol stable is to actively limit the amount of data queued at the cable modem for upstream delivery, and only way to do that…

• Comment posted Nov 29, 2007 5:09 am PST — by The Famous Brett Watson
  From a technical perspective, TCP RST packets are not a reasonable way for an intermediate party to enforce bandwidth policies. In fact, I can't think of a legitimate reason why an intermediate third party would ever generate this signal. For…

An Internet Security Operations Viewpoint of IGF

• Comment posted Nov 29, 2007 3:41 am PST — by The Famous Brett Watson
  Gadi, I appreciate your taking the time to revisit this conversation. I have a reasonable amount of experience with both DNS and cybercrime, and I understand that DNS can act as a good choke-point to disable a criminal operation —…

• Comment posted Nov 23, 2007 1:25 am PST — by The Famous Brett Watson
  Why? What is the purpose of the experiment? To see if registrars effectively enforce their ToS or respond to external complaints of ToS violations? How will the outcome impact this argument?

• Comment posted Nov 22, 2007 10:08 pm PST — by The Famous Brett Watson
  Actually, I'm not looking for a fight; I'm looking for an argument. There's a difference. Specifically, I'm challenging your second point: the idea that the public info out there — specifically the registrant info — is in any way necessary.…

• Comment posted Nov 22, 2007 6:50 am PST — by The Famous Brett Watson
  This information has been public as a status quo, there is no hurry to change it, so don’t make it look like we are TAKING PRIVACY AWAY, we are in fact trying to give users MORE PRIVACY than they CURRENTLY…

• Comment posted Nov 21, 2007 11:57 pm PST — by The Famous Brett Watson
  Another subject of interest to me was my discussion with Milton Mueller on his advocacy of some information being removed from publicly accessible WHOIS data. Although ideologically I am with him on this privacy issue, practically it is the only,…

ICANN CEO: "High Politics" Fueling IGF Debates

• Comment posted Nov 14, 2007 3:00 am PST — by The Famous Brett Watson
  Many critics fear opening ICANN up to an organization like the United Nations could allow governments to politicize the Internet and more easily impose censorship. By changing just a few database entries, for instance, all Web sites for a specific…

NANOGGING

• Comment posted Oct 31, 2007 6:23 am PDT — by The Famous Brett Watson
  To the best of my knowledge, the idea for mapping the IPv4 address space onto a Hilbert curve can be attributed to Randall Munroe of xkcd. He cites the benefit that "[it] preserves grouping — any consecutive string of IPs…

Getting Rid of Whois

• Comment posted Oct 31, 2007 2:29 am PDT — by The Famous Brett Watson
  Indeed, the SOA record is supposed to have an email address in it already, which pretty much covers the technical point of contact for the domain. Additional information could be provided in TXT or RP records, and it would have…

Are Domain Name Portfolios Actually Worth What They Are Touted to Be?

• Comment posted Oct 30, 2007 5:20 am PDT — by The Famous Brett Watson
  customer said: Not a bubble and here is why… Supply and demand. Every bubble is based on supply and demand. The difference between a bubble and the common or garden variety of supply and demand is that prices in a…

• Comment posted Oct 29, 2007 6:01 am PDT — by The Famous Brett Watson
  Ok...Books.Com was purchased by B&N;a while ago.  So?  Not sure why this is so significant or why it hurts my argument… That should be obvious. Suresh is making a perfectly credible counter-argument that the valuations of generic domain names are…

• Comment posted Oct 28, 2007 2:58 pm PDT — by The Famous Brett Watson
  Why did Barnes & Noble buy Books.Com? Clearly, it was done to crush their arch-enemy, amazon.com! Amazon's superior Internet mind-share will not stand long against the power of this short, relevant, generic .com domain, and the indubitable tsunami of direct…

• Comment posted Oct 25, 2007 4:10 am PDT — by The Famous Brett Watson
  If you agree so far, the rest is easy.  Those who decide to establish an online business need a good home for their venture.  Same rule of real estate applies:  location, location, location.  In this case, your online location is…

If WHOIS Privacy is a Good Idea, Why is it Going Nowhere?

• Comment posted Aug 29, 2007 7:19 am PDT — by The Famous Brett Watson
  Several people have pointed out that the current WHOIS doesn’t satisfy European privacy laws, to which a reasonable response is so what? In other words, it's not a problem for Americans, and "sucks to be you" if you aren't one.…

How Spammers Get Around SPF

• Comment posted Aug 21, 2007 3:14 pm PDT — by The Famous Brett Watson
  SPF doesn't stop spam or phishing. SPF can stop some spam as a side-effect, but savvy spammers know how to avoid it — ditto for phishing. SPF regulates use of a domain name in the "mail from" address, also known…

Defending Networks Against DNS Rebinding Attacks

• Comment posted Aug 10, 2007 2:34 am PDT — by The Famous Brett Watson
  The problem here is one of authorisation. As the zone administrator of a domain name, I have the ability to make DNS records in my zone refer to any valid resource, whether or not that resource has anything to do…

Phishers Now Targeting Domain Registrars

• Comment posted Aug 09, 2007 12:54 am PDT — by The Famous Brett Watson
  DNSSEC protects against unauthorised changes to DNS records. If you've been phished, the attacker has your authentication credentials, and DNSSEC won't help you.

• Comment posted Aug 08, 2007 3:15 am PDT — by The Famous Brett Watson
  Could it be that the target of the phishing here is not so much the domain name as access to the hosting facilities which GoDaddy also offers? The ability to construct websites under subdomains of existing domains would be quite…

Commentary on the FTC Spam Summit

• Comment posted Jul 26, 2007 5:13 pm PDT — by The Famous Brett Watson
  the true problem IS the ability to register domains using bogus contact information You need to think that through a little more. For one thing, not all spammers register domain names. I'll let that slide, and pretend that domain name…

CADNA Launches National Campaign Against Typosquatting

• Comment posted Jul 25, 2007 8:44 am PDT — by The Famous Brett Watson
  I feel almost out of place commenting on an article (press release?) which presumes that Internet users can be divided into two groups: "consumers and businesses". This seems to presume that the Internet is a good in the sense that…

Researchers Explore Redesigning Internet Infrastructure from Scratch

• Comment posted Apr 14, 2007 2:16 am PDT — by The Famous Brett Watson
  And not only the politics, but also the practicalities. Even if you could design a much better Internet from scratch, would it be worth anyone's while to actually deploy it? It usually takes a "killer app." or a factor-of-N improvement…

Splitting the Root: It's Too Late

• Comment posted Apr 11, 2007 4:46 pm PDT — by The Famous Brett Watson
  If I send a packet to 192.5.5.241, port 53, the ISP *must* deliver it to 192.5.5.241. Silently proxying it to another machine *is* hijacking (unless I consented to this redirection). You consent to that sort of thing when you sign…

• Comment posted Apr 07, 2007 2:52 am PDT — by The Famous Brett Watson
  This is a verbatim re-post of an old article (December 2005).

Putting Some Circuit Breakers Into DNS to Protect The Net

• Comment posted Apr 04, 2007 3:23 am PDT — by The Famous Brett Watson
  It seems that the suggestion here is to insert a DNS "circuit breaker" to solve a problem that exists completely outside the DNS. The problem with DNS, if anything, is that it provides too good a service, and bad people…

ICANN Asked to Adopt Specific TLD for Banks

• Comment posted Mar 31, 2007 7:38 am PDT — by The Famous Brett Watson
  I think that's an unfair characterisation of this proposal. The point of having a TLD like ".safe" is that it's much harder to spoof. Go ahead and register "verysafebanking.com"; the first phisher to come along will look upon it with…

• Comment posted Mar 30, 2007 3:44 pm PDT — by The Famous Brett Watson
  As far as I can tell, the party issuing this call is F-Secure in a press release. It’s interesting that F-Secure is advocating this particular approach, but is the press release backed up by any intention to actually drive the…

Recent COPA Ruling Shedding Light on Usefulness of XXX as Voluntary Self Regulatory Vehicle?

• Comment posted Mar 26, 2007 8:43 am PDT — by The Famous Brett Watson
  This is an absurd argument that ICM has presented in referencing COPA. I disagree. The short version is that the overthrow of COPA, being yet another in a long line of defeats for censorship laws enacted in the name of…

The Real Problem with dot-XXX

• Comment posted Mar 19, 2007 3:46 am PDT — by The Famous Brett Watson
  John, although that is an accurate quotation, it's not directly relevant to the discussion of ".xxx". To the extent that it is relevant, it can only be described as ad hominem — drawing attention to the speaker, not the argument.…

An Alternative to .XXX: IANA Adult Port Assignments

• Comment posted Mar 18, 2007 4:50 am PDT — by The Famous Brett Watson
  I can think of a large number of variations on this theme, such as the inclusion of a keyword in the URL, using "xxx" as a bottom-level domain name (instead of the traditional "www" — cute, huh?), using PICS or…

The Real Problem with dot-XXX

• Comment posted Mar 17, 2007 9:49 am PDT — by The Famous Brett Watson
  Michael Roberts starts this article with a quotation from "The Music Man", among others. "Professor" Harold Hill, who proclaimed "trouble right here in River City", was a classic American con man: he whipped up fear where none was warranted, declared…

Are We Slowly Losing Control of the Internet?

• Comment posted Mar 12, 2007 8:06 am PDT — by The Famous Brett Watson
  Karl, I'd like to separate your discussion into two distinct but related issues. The bulk of your article talks about protocol design, albeit slightly obliquely. I will be the first to agree that the art of protocol design isn't anywhere…

The Fragile Network

• Comment posted Feb 12, 2007 1:58 pm PST — by The Famous Brett Watson
  Interesting remarks, Karl. The question of "are we doing good engineering" (in protocol design) raises another question: do we have any kind of consensus on what constitutes good engineering in protocol design? There seems to be a dearth of literature…

Attack Seriously Slows Two Internet Root Servers

• Comment posted Feb 09, 2007 11:15 am PST — by The Famous Brett Watson
  Every DNS service already maintains a cache of the root servers (usually called the "hints" file), although I grant that the size and rate of change in the root zone is greater than the root server hints. On the other…

• Comment posted Feb 08, 2007 1:12 am PST — by The Famous Brett Watson
  Are there any compelling reasons not to recommend caching of the whole root zone locally as a best current practice? I mean for networks that are already providing recursive DNS service, which is most of them. Under those conditions, DDoSing…

Are Domain Name Registrars Free-Speech Friendly?

• Comment posted Feb 04, 2007 9:14 am PST — by The Famous Brett Watson
  The price of a domain name registration is both plainly visible up front and easily comprehended. A dollar cost forms a nice, simple, scalar quantity. Registrar behaviour, on the other hand, is a little harder to judge, and I'm pretty…

Google's Top-10 Search Terms Dominated By Trademarks

• Comment posted Jan 16, 2007 9:28 am PST — by The Famous Brett Watson
  I raised an eyebrow at the inclusion of "ebay" in a list of generics, since it is clearly a trademark. Still, searching on the term "ebay" is not necessarily the same as searching for eBay(TM). I'd expect the first hit…

Map of the Internet: The IPv4 Space of 2006

• Comment posted Dec 29, 2006 5:08 pm PST — by The Famous Brett Watson
  Tom, thanks for the pointer to the IANA high-level delegation file. A brief non-exhaustive comparison of this data with the diagram uncovers no obvious discrepancies. The latter does contain more detail than the former in some cases, such as the…

• Comment posted Dec 29, 2006 3:37 am PST — by The Famous Brett Watson
  Tom, it seems to me that the most important thing about this representation is the allocated vs unallocated difference — that is the areas which are green relative to those which are not. The top right-hand corner of the map…

• Comment posted Dec 28, 2006 3:15 pm PST — by The Famous Brett Watson
  I don't care if it's produced by a webcomic author: the fractal layout is a cool idea, and the only remaining question of any relevance is that of accuracy. (I'll find an answer to that question if I need to…

Huge Increase in Spam in October Email

• Comment posted Nov 30, 2006 6:09 am PST — by The Famous Brett Watson
  If everyone were obliged to give a verifiably true name and a location where they can be found and beaten with a lead pipe as part of their domain registration, spam would not cease. I doubt that it would even…

More than 99% of Email is Spam?

• Comment posted Nov 07, 2006 6:15 am PST — by The Famous Brett Watson
  While I agree in large part with the sentiment of this article, the reasoning is at least a little specious. Any large spam-filtering service provider (whether specialist, or part of a general email service) is in a good position to…

Release of IE7, Firefox 2.0 Will Drive Significant IDN Demand

• Comment posted Nov 01, 2006 1:47 am PST — by The Famous Brett Watson
  I wonder what portion of overall IDN registrations will be attributable to phishing and typo-squatting in the long run. I don't mean to imply anything negative about IDN in saying this, but I suspect that phishers in particular will take…

ICANN Board to Vote on Domain Tasting Measure

• Comment posted Oct 23, 2006 3:23 am PDT — by The Famous Brett Watson
  John, I consider your "car dealership" analogy so deeply flawed that it actually generates confusion. Let me explain why, off the top of my head. A car dealership owns its cars up until the time it sells them: nobody is…

Spamming the News Cycle: Spamhaus Non-Story Goes Viral

• Comment posted Oct 15, 2006 7:45 am PDT — by The Famous Brett Watson
  Hang on, I wasn’t saying that was the criteria that Spamhaus uses on deciding whether to stick someone on their blacklist. -- Kieren McCarthy It looks like you are describing criteria when you say the following. Spamhaus sticks people like…

Another View of the New ICANN-DoC Agreement

• Comment posted Oct 03, 2006 12:52 am PDT — by The Famous Brett Watson
  George, the sticking point is not whether or not ICANN did the right thing in blocking .xxx, but whether or not it did so for the right reasons. Assuming that Milton's assertion is true, and that the primary reason for…

ICANN and the DOC

• Comment posted Oct 03, 2006 12:44 am PDT — by The Famous Brett Watson
  Suresh, I'm not an advocate of total anonymity: I'm just opposed to a situation in which only the dishonest can maintain privacy. That's a perverse incentive we ought to avoid. I think that the workable middle ground looks something like…

• Comment posted Oct 02, 2006 7:10 am PDT — by The Famous Brett Watson
  Milton, please note that everything in my previous comment beyond the paragraph in which I say, "please forgive in advance my use of sarcasm here", is sarcastic, insincere, not representative of my beliefs, and damnable sophistry to boot. One can…

• Comment posted Sep 30, 2006 1:17 am PDT — by The Famous Brett Watson
  "...we still haven’t figured out a rational way to involve individuals and we still don’t have a rational process for adding new gTLDs." [Susan] I certainly don't envy ICANN the job. I suspect that objective, rational solutions to this problem…

.MS: Alternate Root and Monoculture as Good Things

• Comment posted Sep 19, 2006 6:24 am PDT — by The Famous Brett Watson
  The problem with the "hosts" file itself — the primary reason why the domain name system was invented at all — is that it doesn't scale. That's why DNS is a distributed database. I seriously doubt that the hosts file…

Tiered (Variable) Pricing Compromise?

• Comment posted Sep 08, 2006 5:49 pm PDT — by The Famous Brett Watson
  I particularly liked the Wired article that mentioned companies that were only established “on paper” - as if any corporation is established on something else… parchment or granite, one might suppose.  As a legal entity, corporations only exist on paper,…

EarthLink Criticized for Redirecting Nonexistent Domains

• Comment posted Sep 08, 2006 3:55 am PDT — by The Famous Brett Watson
  What I find interesting is the shift towards Site Finder shenanigans being acceptable on balance — where appropriate profit motive exists. Apparently the powers-that-be at EarthLink have realised that they, as an ISP, are actually in a better position than…

IPv6: Extinction, Evolution or Revolution?

• Comment posted Sep 03, 2006 1:20 pm PDT — by The Famous Brett Watson
  What is this "TAMARA" of which you speak? I can find no network protocols by that name with a Google search.

Tiered (Variable) Pricing Compromise?

• Comment posted Sep 01, 2006 3:32 am PDT — by The Famous Brett Watson
  One of the concerns raised here is the question of long-term stability. As has been said, ten years seems like a long time in Internet terms, but I'm sure that I'm not the only one here with a domain name…

Why We Need to Find Solutions on Internet Governance As Soon As Possible

• Comment posted Aug 31, 2006 2:25 am PDT — by The Famous Brett Watson
  Konstantinos, it's now clear that what you mean by "Internet 2.0" is "Web 2.0". I had an inkling that you meant this, but steered away from that interpretation earlier on the grounds that I couldn't fathom what possible relevance it…

• Comment posted Aug 29, 2006 10:56 pm PDT — by The Famous Brett Watson
  Konstantinos, I am going to criticise your article here, hopefully in a way that you will find constructive. On a first reading, there are two obvious problems with this article. One is that it's overburdened with unnecessary buzzwords. In particular,…

Conflict of Opinion

• Comment posted Jun 22, 2006 10:53 am PDT — by The Famous Brett Watson
  John, You can't mention "syllogism" without attracting my nit-picking attention. It could be argued that your own complaint here is based on a logical fallacy. The claim that "all cybersquatters describe themselves as 'domainers'" does not imply that "anyone describing…

Domain Tasting Target of US Federal Cybersquatting Lawsuit

• Comment posted Jun 13, 2006 1:32 pm PDT — by The Famous Brett Watson
  In comment #54, John Berryhill said the following in reference to me. You seem to want to draw a distinction between “domain tasters” and long-term registrants. I draw a distinction between obtaining something below cost, and obtaining something above cost.…

• Comment posted Jun 12, 2006 2:00 pm PDT — by The Famous Brett Watson
  In comment #45, John Berryhill says the following in reference to me. Considering that the registry fee is orders of magnitude above cost, I would guess that you are against any sort of volume discounts offered in any line of…

• Comment posted Jun 10, 2006 10:31 am PDT — by The Famous Brett Watson
  John, I feel like I'm stating the obvious, and I hate doing that, but I suppose it's necessary to mention the elephant standing in the corner of the room now and then. I don’t understand the “free ride” argument at…

• Comment posted Jun 10, 2006 2:51 am PDT — by The Famous Brett Watson
  For a publicly held company to define a revenue net-positive practice as “abusive” would not be responsible. That, in a nutshell, is why abusive cost-shifting practices like spamming and industrial pollution ultimately require government intervention. As it stands, the whole…

.XXX and Conservative Groups

• Comment posted Jun 02, 2006 4:35 am PDT — by The Famous Brett Watson
  Some of the comments here might lead one to believe that the ".pro" registry works in a certain way, where the actual practice is rather different. For example, the domain "sex.pro" was registered on 2004-06-01. The same registrant obtained "porn.pro"…

Why ICANN Nominating Committee Has Difficulty Finding Directors

• Comment posted May 19, 2006 7:51 am PDT — by The Famous Brett Watson
  I don't want to be overly harsh, because ICANN-bashing is getting pretty old and tired. Even so, it's hard not to think that these wounds aren't largely self-inflicted. By how many orders of magnitude has the task increased since Jon…

.XXX and Conservative Groups

• Comment posted May 18, 2006 1:37 pm PDT — by The Famous Brett Watson
  Patrick Vande Walle said, "… ICANN should think about replacing the current DNS system." Under absolutely no circumstances should ICANN even contemplate such a thing: it is completely outside their mandate. Such a system would be handled in various aspects…

ICANN Rejects Dot XXX Top-Level Domain Name Agreement

• Comment posted May 11, 2006 6:06 am PDT — by The Famous Brett Watson
  The decision to reject ".xxx" may not have been driven by specific political pressure, but it was most certainly driven by political (rather than technical) considerations. To wit, "the decision largely came down to whether by creating an 'xxx' domain…

Internet Agency Weighs '.tel' Top-Level Domain

• Comment posted Apr 15, 2006 6:00 am PDT — by The Famous Brett Watson
  Telnic's proposal, as it stands, seems so ridiculously lame that I can't help but wonder whether it's a ruse. Their own FAQ describes the purpose and nature of ".tel" in the following terms. What will .Tel do? The Internet-Communications sTLD,…

New Code of Practice to Combat Spam

• Comment posted Mar 29, 2006 2:57 am PST — by The Famous Brett Watson
  Primary source information on this matter can be found at the Australian Communications and Media Authority's website: ACMA registers internet industry code on spam. From a technical perspective, this code of practice is noteworthy in that it considers publication of…

Report on DNS Amplification Attacks

• Comment posted Mar 24, 2006 12:52 am PST — by The Famous Brett Watson
  I think the conspiracy theorising is a little over the top in the face of an actual multi-gigabit DDoS attack. TCP SYN flooding was a purely theoretical attack for a while there too before anyone actually exploited it maliciously. Such…

China's MII Publishes New Email Regulations

• Comment posted Mar 10, 2006 3:17 pm PST — by The Famous Brett Watson
  Does anything in these new Chinese regulations mention the Chinese-character TLDs? Is there any other existing Chinese regulation which mandates something in relation to those TLDs? I'm half-expecting China to promote adoption of their new Chinese-character TLDs through regulation, but…

The Future of Some Email May Not Use Email

• Comment posted Mar 08, 2006 1:38 pm PST — by The Famous Brett Watson
  Brad, Is this what it comes down to: that any attempt to make a (legitimate) sender pay for email connectivity, beyond the base cost of Internet service, is beyond the pale? I don't want to put words in your mouth,…

• Comment posted Mar 08, 2006 5:01 am PST — by The Famous Brett Watson
  Brad says: That spammers attack the innocent is no reason to decide it’s ok to punish the innocent in order to build anti-spam systems. Where behaviour involves attacking the innocent — even potentially — I agree, but asking senders to…

• Comment posted Mar 08, 2006 1:58 am PST — by The Famous Brett Watson
  Brad, the comparison with those ISPs that want to be paid twice is invalid for one very good reason: spam filtering is an added service. This isn't just a case of "how can we wring more money out of the…

China's New Domain Names: Lost in Translation

• Comment posted Mar 03, 2006 4:29 am PST — by The Famous Brett Watson
  Karl, I'm unable to decipher a lot of the obscure and invented jargon being thrown around in this thread, but this much is clear. There is a downloadable plug-in (for IE, I assume) which adds Chinese-character domain names to the…

• Comment posted Mar 02, 2006 3:49 am PST — by The Famous Brett Watson
  James, I'm happy to focus on what is happening, rather than what could, but your explanation so far falls short of reality as we know it. Can you be any more specific about this "client available for download on CNNIC…

• Comment posted Mar 01, 2006 3:16 pm PST — by The Famous Brett Watson
  Well, be careful which hypothesis you're testing: I wasn't claiming that ".com" had lost universality. I was speaking in reference to comment #1 by James Seng, where he said the following. In practice, they did not actually use any alternative/parellel…

A Day Which Will Live in Infamy: ICANN Board Approves VeriSign Settlement

• Comment posted Mar 01, 2006 11:28 am PST — by The Famous Brett Watson
  James, I think you'll find that it's the terms of the settlement, rather than the act of settlement itself, which is the bone of contention here.

China's New Domain Names: Lost in Translation

• Comment posted Mar 01, 2006 7:31 am PST — by The Famous Brett Watson
  Firstly, regardless of whether this constitutes an alternate root or not, there's no point panicing about it. Secondly, regardless of wether this constitutes an alternate root in some narrow technical sense, it operates as though it were an alternate root,…

Hypertext Mail Protocol (a.k.a. Stub Email): A Proposal

• Comment posted Feb 20, 2006 3:59 am PST — by The Famous Brett Watson
  Nathan, I don't know what your direction is with this proposal: whether you intend to make a scholarly study of it, an implementation of it, or whether you were just running it up the flagpole to see if anyone would…

Internet Governance: An Antispam Perspective

• Comment posted Feb 15, 2006 5:31 pm PST — by The Famous Brett Watson
  Meng's article suggests a dichotomy: that the world will be "default accept" or "default deny", and the latter choice is the only one that will solve the problem of phishing. This is not a sound argument because the dichotomy is…

Questioning "Net Neutrality"

• Comment posted Feb 11, 2006 5:28 am PST — by The Famous Brett Watson
  Karl, I agree with much of what you say, but I'm concerned that some of your remarks here create more confusion than they dispel. In particular, the idea that the Internet "was designed from the outset not to be content…

AOL and Goodmail: Two Steps Back for Email

• Comment posted Feb 03, 2006 3:29 am PST — by The Famous Brett Watson
  It's a bit of a challenge sorting the facts from the rhetoric here. Matt Blumberg, the article author, represents a competitor of Goodmail, and Daniel T. Dreymann, author of comment #2, represents Goodmail itself. All in all, I don't feel…

Ask Vint Cerf: The Road Ahead for Top-Level Domains

• Comment posted Jan 18, 2006 2:37 am PST — by The Famous Brett Watson
  Vint, can you please describe ICANN's guiding principles with regards to the top level domains? Obviously one such guiding principle is that of technical feasibility — a principle that needs no further justification. Apparently another such guiding principle is that…

Europe is to the US Controlled GPS as Europe is to the US Controlled DNS Root?

• Comment posted Jan 09, 2006 2:25 pm PST — by The Famous Brett Watson
  Suresh, you wonder whether there is "some mechanism beyond market forces" to ensure uniform telephone numbering. So far as I am aware, the standard for international telephone numbers, specified by ITU-T E.164 has no legal force. It is merely a…

What's in a Name?

• Comment posted Jan 05, 2006 5:32 am PST — by The Famous Brett Watson
  Dave, my articles and comments here are available under one of the most relaxed Creative Commons licenses, so reprinting anything I write here should not be a problem. Your comment about the conseqences of domain names as property is interesting,…

• Comment posted Jan 05, 2006 2:23 am PST — by The Famous Brett Watson
  Christopher, thanks for the comments. I think a stronger analogy exists between telephone numbers and IP addresses than domain names, although neither analogy is perfect. As far as similarities go, I think you're more or less right: if someone provides…

Europe is to the US Controlled GPS as Europe is to the US Controlled DNS Root?

• Comment posted Dec 30, 2005 1:20 am PST — by The Famous Brett Watson
  At the risk of stating the obvious, I'll point out that the analogy falls down at a critical point. Whereas two independent navigation systems can coexist without conflict, two independent domain name systems will naturally contradict each other unless carefully…

What's Wrong with Domain Names?

• Comment posted Dec 23, 2005 11:35 am PST — by The Famous Brett Watson
  Well I suppose you could also describe spamming — sorry, bulk email deploying — in those terms if you wanted to be charitable. Not every innovative use of technology is a net social plus, even if it's profitable for the…

• Comment posted Dec 23, 2005 3:55 am PST — by The Famous Brett Watson
  Adding further to Daniel's comments, I observe that if it weren't for typosquatters, there would be no need for the legitimate domain holder to register "typo" domains. The number of possible typo-domains is huge, and can place an onerous burden…

VeriSign-ICANN Proposed Settlement Discussed in Vancouver

• Comment posted Dec 02, 2005 3:08 am PST — by The Famous Brett Watson
  I have a problem with all this talk of competition and letting the market sort it out. The problem is that domain name registries only compete with each other in a limited sense, while in another sense they are monopolies.…

WSIS and the Splitting of the Root

• Comment posted Nov 16, 2005 11:57 am PST — by The Famous Brett Watson
  Brad, my point with regards to trademark and branding is that the differences between those ideas and the domain name system render dubious any "lessons" we might learn from them. Given the differences, are the supposed parallels actually parallel in…

• Comment posted Nov 16, 2005 5:02 am PST — by The Famous Brett Watson
  That people would cling to ".com" is evidence that we've grown somewhat dependent on names in that space. That it became so disproportionately popular in the first place is evidence that it was a mistake — perhaps. Given that the…

Would the Real Network Neutrality Please Stand Up?

• Comment posted Nov 16, 2005 2:30 am PST — by The Famous Brett Watson
  [continued from previous post] There are circumstances in which I want my ISP to become rather "non-neutral" on my behalf. If some host elsewhere on the Internet has gone haywire and is flooding me, I'd like my ISP to firewall…

• Comment posted Nov 16, 2005 2:27 am PST — by The Famous Brett Watson
  There are technical issues here, and there are political issues. The OSI seven-layer model of networking isn't God's Own Truth; rather it's a useful pedagogic tool. It illustrates the usefulness of dividing the networking problem into subtasks which interact in…

WSIS and the Splitting of the Root

• Comment posted Nov 15, 2005 4:53 am PST — by The Famous Brett Watson
  A critical analysis of this article could take a very long time. I'll therefore restrict my comments to the part of your article which sets off every mental alarm bell I have: the phasing out of generics, like ".com". This…

Facing the Facts on Internet Governance

• Comment posted Nov 15, 2005 12:32 am PST — by The Famous Brett Watson
  A shift from rhetoric to reality would be a breath of fresh air indeed. The sheer quantity of propaganda surrounding this issue makes me wonder whether there is any interest in matters of fact at all, or whether it's a…

Questioning the Illusion of Internet Governance

• Comment posted Nov 10, 2005 12:05 pm PST — by The Famous Brett Watson
  Randy, for what it's worth, the Russian guy is "Dmitry Skylarov". Without going into a "cynic's digest" of this article, I'd summarise it as having two main points: first, that the argument over the DNS root is largely a side-show;…

Nom-Com Appoints Independent and Diverse Candidates to ICANN Leadership Positions

• Comment posted Nov 07, 2005 5:42 am PST — by The Famous Brett Watson
  Yes, to do absolutely anything at all different from what we are doing now would be new and unproven. My point is that you are using "new and unproven" with a tone of fear, uncertainty, and doubt. The opposite tone…

• Comment posted Nov 07, 2005 1:24 am PST — by The Famous Brett Watson
  "...the WSIS and UN Internet Governance debates that seem to propose new and unproven methods in lieu of the working ICANN model." (Emphasis added.) FUD will never go out of fashion, will it?

You Paid to Join; You Can Leave Anytime

• Comment posted Nov 04, 2005 6:22 pm PST — by The Famous Brett Watson
  Wayne: the main thrust of my second comment wasn't "US vs AU", but that the situation has a tendency to reinforce itself. Also, it's not really about "content" and "eyeballs" — at least not from the perspective of the tier…

• Comment posted Nov 04, 2005 2:50 pm PST — by The Famous Brett Watson
  Suresh, you may note that there's a positive feedback situation in effect here. I'm in Australia, and our Internet access prices tend to be on the high side thanks in part to the one-way transfer of money situation described in…

• Comment posted Nov 03, 2005 3:34 am PST — by The Famous Brett Watson
  Although the technical theme of the article is a bit of a blend (tier 1 peering + DNS), the social theme is quite unified, and can be summarised thus. We are the USA. We hold all the cards and call…

VeriSign and ICANN Settle Lawsuit

• Comment posted Oct 25, 2005 2:56 am PDT — by The Famous Brett Watson
  "A search service for users who mistype web addresses," is VeriSign's description of SiteFinder. Here's mine. SiteFinder was, ostensibly, a search service for users who mistype web addresses. It was technically remarkable in that it relied on the addition of…

Forgotten Principles of Internet Governance

• Comment posted Oct 25, 2005 2:01 am PDT — by The Famous Brett Watson
  Domain names are governed by copyright, because databases are intellectual property? That's a frightfully simplistic analysis, Joe. In fact, it's such a non sequitur I'm almost at a loss as to where to start criticising it. It's like saying that…

Breaking the Internet HOWTO

• Comment posted Oct 20, 2005 8:58 am PDT — by The Famous Brett Watson
  The teacher (UN) comes in and says:"Don’t fight over a toy! OK, stop! Let me have it, this fight is over!” Except that in this kindergarten, there are no teachers! The UN is at best "class captain", and only gets…

• Comment posted Oct 13, 2005 1:09 am PDT — by The Famous Brett Watson
  Since sarcasm appears to be on-topic, here's my (uncharacteristically brief) satirical take on the process. (Scene: a kindergarten. "US" has the "DNS root" toy, and "EU" wants to play with it.) EU: "Share!" US: "No! Mine!" EU: "Let me play…

If It's About to Break, Fix It!

• Comment posted Oct 03, 2005 11:32 pm PDT — by The Famous Brett Watson
  Politics isn't my game, so I'm not going to hazard a guess as to how soon the unity of the DNS root will break. What needs emphasis is this: unity is only maintained through mutual cooperation. There are plenty of…

Sitefinder Writ Small

• Comment posted Sep 15, 2005 3:34 am PDT — by The Famous Brett Watson
  The key difference between CentralNic and Verisign is that CentralNic is the registrant of ".uk.com", where Verisign is merely the custodian of ".com". Regardless of whether the wildcard is a wise move, CentralNic is merely exercising their prerogative, whereas Verisign…

.XXX as Proposed is Wrong for Families & Kids

• Comment posted Sep 14, 2005 4:09 pm PDT — by The Famous Brett Watson
  Joe, I composed another reply to you, but when I pressed "preview", I was informed that I'd gone twelve characters over the length limit. Furthermore, CircleID assumed my browser would cache the text-box when I clicked "back", so it discarded…

• Comment posted Sep 13, 2005 5:05 am PDT — by The Famous Brett Watson
  Q: "Why should we move forward with the creation of a program that we know will not solve a real social problem?" A: Because real social problems can not, in general, be solved by domain name policy. The "porn problem"…

Criticism of Trademark Owner Deemed Legitimate Interest under ICANN UDRP

• Comment posted Aug 26, 2005 2:25 am PDT — by The Famous Brett Watson
  To: Daniel, in relation to the remark, "a .com address makes no logical sense". If there were a ".critic" or some other such TLD which clearly categorised noncommercial criticism, you may have a case. While ".org" is noncommercial, it suggests…

So You Think You're Safe from DNS Cache Poisoning?

• Comment posted Aug 18, 2005 3:44 pm PDT — by The Famous Brett Watson
  Let me see if I have this straight. The BIND4 or BIND8 instance that's acting as a forwarder cleans the received response for the purposes of populating its local cache, but passes the unscrubbed response back to the original requesting…

About Those Root Servers

• Comment posted Aug 03, 2005 12:03 am PDT — by The Famous Brett Watson
  You are only partly right when you say that the root is already mirrored in all nameservers. A DNS server requires a root-hint file containing information about the root zone nameservers, but those hint records form only a rather small…

• Comment posted Aug 02, 2005 4:23 pm PDT — by The Famous Brett Watson
  I'd like to thank JFC Morfin for that comment. I'm afraid that I started to lose my grasp on what was being communicated towards the end, but the earlier part about the nature of root server traffic and the possibility…

We Hate Spam Except, Of Course, When It's Inconvenient to Do So

• Comment posted Jul 01, 2005 3:59 am PDT — by The Famous Brett Watson
  The only influence you need is the ability to take your business elsewhere. It's the only way to educate an ISP that wilfully accepts pink money, and it also solves your blacklist problem. But I can see that you'd rather…

• Comment posted Jun 30, 2005 7:45 pm PDT — by The Famous Brett Watson
  Paul, that's not a change of subject — I think you've misunderstood. I believe John is suggesting you should push your buddies at Yahoo to ditch the spammer in your capacity as *current customer*, rather than *ex employee*. So why…

Twenty Myths and Truths About IPv6 and the US IPv6 Transition

• Comment posted Jun 22, 2005 8:04 am PDT — by The Famous Brett Watson
  You started losing me with point number two, Aside from the fact that you used "stealing" where you meant "unauthorised reproduction" (a bit of double-speak that I really hate, but can overlook), you also intimate that IPv6 vs IPv4 has…

Hope for Human Resources with .Jobs Domain

• Comment posted Jun 22, 2005 6:02 am PDT — by The Famous Brett Watson
  Here's a consideration. You can't prevent a phisher or other malicious party from registering "companyname.jobs", even if you already have "companyname.com". You *can* prevent them from creating "jobs.companyname.com" under the same conditions. I don't suppose the original poster's friends in…

• Comment posted Jun 21, 2005 4:22 am PDT — by The Famous Brett Watson
  I agree with Thanos on all points. Further, I note, with a cynical lack of surprise, that the sponsoring organisation has chapters all over the nation. That's "The Nation". You know, *The* nation. Nevermind. Registration in .jobs requires supporting documentation.…

An Infrastructure TLD: Avoiding the Side Effects of Today's .Net

• Comment posted Jun 02, 2005 2:52 pm PDT — by The Famous Brett Watson
  Karl, ".arpa" no longer refers to the original ARPA. During 2000, the abbreviation was redesignated to "Address and Routing Parameter Area". RFC 3172 documents best current practice for this domain.

Phish-Proofing URLs in Email?

• Comment posted Apr 19, 2005 2:16 am PDT — by The Famous Brett Watson
  On the matter of HSBC, that would explain the tactic used in the latest HSBC-phish I received. "You did not read our internal security message that have been dispatched last week. You have received an important internal message from our…

Study Finds Spammers Use P2P Harvesting to Spam Millions

• Comment posted Apr 19, 2005 2:04 am PDT — by The Famous Brett Watson
  Spam is odd in the sense that practices change so drastically and suddenly. A couple of years back, if you wanted to be spammed, you put an email address on a web page and let it be harvested. I put…

Port 25 Blocking, or Fix SMTP and Leave Port 25 Alone for the Sake of Spam?

• Comment posted Apr 17, 2005 7:52 pm PDT — by The Famous Brett Watson
  A minor point of disagreement: the SPF "-all" declaration is not the same as null MX. The SPF "-all" declaration means, as you say, "this domain does not ever send mail". The null MX, on the other hand, means "this…

Shambles at the .Pro Registry

• Comment posted Mar 20, 2005 11:14 pm PST — by The Famous Brett Watson
  "I'm shocked---shocked to discover that there is gambling going on in this cafe." And I'm shocked---shocked to find registrars and registries accepting money where they should be defending the semantic integrity of the TLD, as per their contractual obligations. I'm…

Protecting the Internet: Certified Attachments and Reverse Firewalls?

• Comment posted Mar 17, 2005 1:32 am PST — by The Famous Brett Watson
  The analogy with telephone equipment is limited in its utility. Telephone equipment is regulated in terms of its electrical characteristics, and most domestic modems are likewise regulated because they *are* telephone equipment. And even when the devices are not explicitly…

Person to Person Security and Privacy Infringement

• Comment posted Jan 04, 2005 5:46 am PST — by The Famous Brett Watson
  I hate to say it, but this article is at best highly unclear, particularly to the extent that it proposes a solution. On re-reading the last two paragraphs several times, I came no closer to understanding how the solution addresses…

Engineers on TLDs: Do You Want Me With Fries?

• Comment posted Dec 24, 2004 4:36 am PST — by The Famous Brett Watson
  After some consideration, I am leaning toward the judgement that this is not a case of NIH syndrome, but something similar to it: traditionalism. NIH syndrome relates to technologies, and the question of which TLDs should or should not be…

Cornucopia: A Radically Different Approach to TLDs

• Comment posted Dec 04, 2004 4:03 am PST — by The Famous Brett Watson
  Brad, while I have your attention, here's a request: please put dates on your essays. It makes them much easier to cite. Also, even now that you've made me aware of your prior work on this matter, I'm unable to…

• Comment posted Dec 04, 2004 2:21 am PST — by The Famous Brett Watson
  On the matter of random-letter TLDs versus meaningful generic TLDs: a meaningful TLD is very attractive if it happens to be in your language and have a relevant meaning. If it also has loose registration permissions, then it will result…

Thoughts on IPv6 Day

• Comment posted Nov 19, 2004 5:38 pm PST — by The Famous Brett Watson
  Thanks, Mark, for that well-considered response. Some of the points you've raised are quite interesting. A sparsely populated address space like IPv6 will certainly have an impact on how malicious code propagates. But in response to your last point, the…

• Comment posted Nov 18, 2004 7:00 am PST — by The Famous Brett Watson
  I'd like to hear a better argument than that. Security by obscurity is where I don't tell you what my IP address is. NAT is (roughly speaking) where you can't address a packet to my host unless it contacts you…

• Comment posted Nov 18, 2004 1:21 am PST — by The Famous Brett Watson
  I don't particularly want to see the end of NAT. There is something comforting about a routing boundary between the Internet and my own private networks: the assurance that there is no theoretical way for hosts on my private network…

Sender-ID Back from the Dead

• Comment posted Nov 01, 2004 8:54 am PST — by The Famous Brett Watson
  Daniel, I am almost lost for words. Sender-ID may be a reasonable technology for checking email headers — I won't argue that point. I am, however, quite boggled by how lightly you dismiss the legal baggage associated with it. By…

Internationalizing Top-Level Domain Names: Another Look

• Comment posted Oct 19, 2004 4:30 am PDT — by The Famous Brett Watson
  Jothan, your comment seems a little wide of the mark, given the article to which it is attached. The primary issue addressed by this article is that of allowing non-English-speakers the possibility of addressing *existing* TLDs in their own language.…

Languages in the Root: A TLD Launch Strategy Based on ISO 639

• Comment posted Oct 06, 2004 5:01 pm PDT — by The Famous Brett Watson
  I agree with Jothan that languages would be better as delegations under a single TLD, rather than each being a TLD in its own right. It's true that countries get slightly preferential treatment in this matter, being at the root,…

Can TCP/IP Survive?

• Comment posted Sep 21, 2004 1:20 pm PDT — by The Famous Brett Watson
  The marketing effort that has been invested in this report is impressive. A friend of mine who has no Internet-specific expertise (although interested in technology generally) heard about it on the radio here in Australia and asked me if I…

Sender ID: A Tale of Open Standards and Corporate Greed? - Part I

• Comment posted Sep 02, 2004 3:49 pm PDT — by The Famous Brett Watson
  The question of whether and how sender identification is beneficial to the fight against spam is the subject of a paper I presented at the recent Conference on Email and Anti-Spam. If that question interests you, you can find the…

What's Wrong With Spam Prosecutions

• Comment posted Aug 26, 2004 9:21 am PDT — by The Famous Brett Watson
  The point about private funding of law enforcement efforts is well made. If it takes the financial backing of the DMA to enforce the law, then who is going to enforce the law where DMA members are concerned? I don't…

Open Ends: Civil Society and Internet Governance - Part II

• Comment posted Aug 17, 2004 3:00 am PDT — by The Famous Brett Watson
  "In my view, the US government's power over the Internet has been to a large extent a theoretical concern." Largely theoretical, yes. But let us not forget the practical concern known as "SiteFinder". Regardless of its intrinsic merits or evils,…

Spam and the Introduction Problem

• Comment posted Aug 08, 2004 1:15 am PDT — by The Famous Brett Watson
  Attacking the spam problem head on is simply not possible. In its most general form, spam isn't "unwanted bulk mail", but rather "unwanted mail". The most significant sources of unwanted mail operate in bulk, but the "bulkness" isn't the root…

Sender Address Verification: Solving the Spam Crisis

• Comment posted Jul 27, 2004 10:27 am PDT — by The Famous Brett Watson
  Lovely. Given how many anti-spam companies there are, all claiming to possess the holy grail of anti-spam, can CircleID readers now expect to be presented with advertorials like this on a regular basis? Without studying the matter beyond this article,…

The Site Finder Reprise

• Comment posted Jul 23, 2004 4:06 pm PDT — by The Famous Brett Watson
  Keith says, "The security and stability report claims that domain names that are active, but for which many protocols are not live, break the end-to-end principle of the Internet." Based on the reference to "the end-to-end principle", I can only…

10 Reasons Why Involving Government in Spam Control is a Bad Idea

• Comment posted Jul 20, 2004 5:28 am PDT — by The Famous Brett Watson
  Counterarguments to your ten reasons. 1. Most jurisdictions lack case law demonstrating that spam is, in fact, abuse, rather than a legitimate form of speech. Adding law clarifies this situation and makes enforcement possible. Legal precedent, where available, may suffice.…