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"Toll Free" Broadband Service: Double Billing Ripoff Or Better Than Best Efforts Premium Option?

• Comment posted May 12, 2012 1:32 am PDT — by Phil Howard
  It's a ploy to cut off peer to peer communication and regain the model, even if other corporations are part of it, of corporate gatekeepers of content.  But can is succeed now that so much independent content is available?  Will…

Canadian Telcos Fast Tracking FttH to Combat Cable Operators

• Comment posted May 12, 2012 1:28 am PDT — by Phil Howard
  Is this the same shared fiber that FiOS is doing?  This is little more than cable over glass which still has severe limits from reach the gigabit holy grail that is already showing up in a few places.  Of course,…

Business Case for IPv6 - Part 1

• Comment posted May 08, 2012 8:49 pm PDT — by Phil Howard
  I'm looking at putting my photography work online as a blog.  One thing I am thinking about is making the full resolution images (under Creative Commons license), including camera raw files, available linked from the blog, but accessible only via…

Intune Collapses the OSI Model

• Comment posted Apr 11, 2012 11:14 pm PDT — by Phil Howard
  TCP/IP doesn't use all 7 layers as it is.

BYOD Woes and Worries

• Comment posted Apr 10, 2012 7:56 am PDT — by Phil Howard
  We are trying to move to a model where personal devices stay just that, and devices for use with business purposes stay just that.  We've just about reach the point of issuing a company laptop to all employees (with the…

Global Payments Breach Confirmation

• Comment posted Apr 07, 2012 10:07 pm PDT — by Phil Howard
  When is the old legacy "grossly insecure" credit card payment system going to be fixed or replaced?  It's a system that depends on the trust of the millions of merchants all over the world to be honest. It needs to…

IPv6 DNS Blacklists Reconsidered

• Comment posted Apr 01, 2012 5:57 pm PDT — by Phil Howard
  Since an end user is supposed to be allocated a /64, shouldn't DNSBL queries be made only for the first 64 bits?  Of course that can be applied as an end user's entire network of many servers.  But shouldn't it…

Wither WHOIS!: A New Look At An Old System

• Comment posted Mar 28, 2012 5:58 pm PDT — by Phil Howard
  There needs to be a way for contacts to always be contactable.  There's way too much evasion of being contacted going on.  Sure, I presume a lot is due to spam.  But a lot seems to be people that just…

Spectrum Key to Broadband Utility

• Comment posted Mar 28, 2012 5:41 pm PDT — by Phil Howard
  There's only so far you can push spectrum to get more data out of a fixed bandwidth.  Space utilization, as in smaller and more numerous cells, needs to also be part of the process of boosting capacity. Even more spectrum…

DNS Changer

• Comment posted Mar 28, 2012 5:21 pm PDT — by Phil Howard
  If their computer is working, why should they worry?  After a certain point (and I think that point has been reached, now), you just have to give up on stupid people and let them find their own way. Phase 2:…

There Are at Least 10 Million DNS Resolvers on the Internet Today

• Comment posted Mar 25, 2012 7:13 am PDT — by Phil Howard
  10 million seems low to me.

Growth in IPv6-Capable DNS Infrastructure

• Comment posted Mar 19, 2012 6:53 pm PDT — by Phil Howard
  The only thing left in my case seems to be waiting for Comcast to deploy IPv6 to my location (not a major market) and replace my modem (which I have determined from checking their site that it is an older…

ICANN's Contract Not Enforceable on WHOIS Accuracy

• Comment posted Mar 12, 2012 9:51 pm PDT — by Phil Howard
  If only we had a regularly updated list of domain names and which registrar the domain is registered under, then we could more easily block out the bad registrars via all of the domains registered there.

Port 43 Failures Continue to Haunt

• Comment posted Mar 07, 2012 8:13 am PST — by Phil Howard
  How hard is it to keep a WHOIS server running?  It would seem to me that it would be easier than keeping even a DNS server running.  And that's not too terribly hard to do.  Have these companies even given…

How Spam Has Damaged Mail Forwarding - And Ways to Get Around It

• Comment posted Mar 06, 2012 9:40 pm PST — by Phil Howard
  I don't even understand this comment.  Either an email provider provides a forwarding service or they don't.  I can't see how government regulations can require a .forward file to even be implemented, much less give email users shell access to…

Nominet to Apply for .Wales and .Cymru Top-Level Domains

• Comment posted Mar 04, 2012 4:37 am PST — by Phil Howard
  Rwy'n hoffi hwn

US-NL Cybercrime Treaty Signed

• Comment posted Feb 26, 2012 8:25 pm PST — by Phil Howard
  It certainly would not surprise me that a "treaty" to pursue (in the law enforcement sense) and prosecute "hackers" (presumably of the bad type) is perceived by politicians as a form of security.  That may be revealing about them, and…

Feds Ask for DNSChanger Deadline Extension As Millions of PCs Could Be Cut Off from the Web

• Comment posted Feb 23, 2012 2:21 pm PST — by Phil Howard
  Do they even have an end-game plan?

Email and Social Media Accounts Under the Spotlight in UK's Proposed New 'Spy' Plan

• Comment posted Feb 23, 2012 2:16 pm PST — by Phil Howard
  Would this law also apply to storage locker services?  That's the kind of service where I get some finite amount of space (for example 1 gigabyte) that I can access wherever I have access to the internet.  Now what if…

Spectrum Crisis: Wireless Auctions Preferred Method

• Comment posted Feb 21, 2012 3:47 pm PST — by Phil Howard
  One thing I want to see be avoided in spectrum auctions is that this "back end market" of buying spectrum does not end up damaging the "front end market" of selling services based on that spectrum.  If one company gets…

The .net Top Level Domain and Cross-Coupled Failures

• Comment posted Jan 22, 2005 6:40 am PST — by Phil Howard
  I have always suggested that anyone setting up a domain use name servers "in bailiwick".  I think this advice should apply to all top level domains.  Thus the name servers for .net should be in .net, the name servers for…

Closer Look at Domain Name Transfer Policy and the Hijacking of Panix.com

• Comment posted Jan 20, 2005 12:29 pm PST — by Phil Howard
  My next worry is a less than honorable registrar, or one that is directly broken into.

Preventing A New World Internet Order

• Comment posted Jan 18, 2005 10:13 pm PST — by Phil Howard
  I don't understand why these few countries feel they need to propose global rules.  They seem to be doing it internally within their own countries, anyway.  I'm sure they would want to resist any global effort to open them up. …

Customer Service is Law: The Panix Story

• Comment posted Jan 18, 2005 4:37 am PST — by Phil Howard
  Thanks for setting the facts straight, Bruce.  I sure hope you can let people know about your perspective on what happened, and how this might be avoided in the future.  Regardless of any errors at your end, it sure seems…

• Comment posted Jan 18, 2005 1:00 am PST — by Phil Howard
  It's good news that Bruce Tonkin of MelbourneIT fixed this.  But we also need some answers to important questions about what went wrong, some of which need to come from MelbourneIT.  The first is why (if VeriSign says the registrars…

Hijacking of Panix.com: A Call for An Emergency Rollback Procedure

• Comment posted Jan 18, 2005 12:34 am PST — by Phil Howard
  It looks like panix.com is back. But, something obviously needs to be fixed.  What I'd like to know is what went wrong in the first place.  The rumor mill (e.g. Slashdot) says panix.com was in a locked state and that…

A Year of CAN SPAM

• Comment posted Jan 17, 2005 12:15 am PST — by Phil Howard
  What went "wrong" with CAN SPAM happened in 2003.  I think we know that it wasn't really intended to address the problem of the volume of spam.  To members of Congress and the bulk of their constituents, who know nothing…

IP or NAT IP: Mostly IP

• Comment posted Feb 24, 2004 2:47 am PST — by Phil Howard
  I believe that certain security requirements should be required of users, and be forced upon them, to prevent the major forms of abuse that is otherwise hard or impossible to mitigate.  The most prevalent form right now is viral infections…

Using Whois to Enforce Law?

• Comment posted Feb 24, 2004 2:23 am PST — by Phil Howard
  How about a whois system that allows those who wish to provide verifiable identity to do so, and those who elect to remain anonymous to do that, but to outlaw the presentation of an identity that is specifically fraudulent, either…

WSIS: What Is It 'Really' All About?

• Comment posted Jan 02, 2004 6:29 am PST — by Phil Howard
  There really is nothing stopping any country from simply going ahead and establishing their own regional root servers.  They can just do it and distribute their own hints files.  They could even mandate their use in law.  Whether they do…

ICC and the U.N. Takeover

• Comment posted Dec 12, 2003 7:09 pm PST — by Phil Howard
  I should point out that there seems to be a problem with the "Business @ WSIS" web site, which sometimes shows no content at all, and sometimes shows incomplete content.  Having FLASH on a website that should be providing information…

• Comment posted Dec 12, 2003 3:17 am PST — by Phil Howard
  Dear Mr. Corbett In your posting, you refer to articles regarding Mr. Abu-Ghazaleh's proposal on 2 websites.  Neither provides a link to the actual proposal text.  As they say, "the devil is in the details".  All too often governments tell…

Blacklisting Under Wrong Assumptions

• Comment posted Nov 12, 2003 8:47 pm PST — by Phil Howard
  I would definitely not consider myself to be a "less-experienced" system administrator as you mention in your article; I have 24 years of such experience, of which the last 10 involves internet access and email servers.  Yet, I do regularly…

NAT: Just Say No

• Comment posted Nov 09, 2003 7:27 pm PST — by Phil Howard
  A "correct firewall" will also deny by default, and provide the owner/operator/administrator with a simple tool to designate what services are to be open.  A user not smart enough to know he needs to turn services on to make the…

• Comment posted Nov 09, 2003 5:45 pm PST — by Phil Howard
  Having all IP addresses public is not any less secure or vulnerable, given a correct firewall configuration.  If you deny by default, and open exactly what should be allowed (address and port tuple), you are as secure as the firewall…

An Unsanctioned Whois Database

• Comment posted Nov 09, 2003 4:50 pm PST — by Phil Howard
  Some domains may be registered, but have no active DNS for whatever reason.  So we should not get rid of the usual whois database.  But otherwise, DNSWI would be a very good way to augment the traditional whois data.  And…