At a recent shareholders' meeting in Stockholm, Ericsson's CEO has reaffirmed company's vision of having 50 billion internet-connected devices by 2020: "Today we already see laptops and advanced handsets connected, but in the future everything that will benefit from being connected will be connected." As an example of connected devices, a research engineer showed real life mobile health applications and how heart monitoring can be done remotely over mobile networks. more
Every public tweet since Twitter's inception in March 2006 will be acquired and archived digitally by the U.S Library of Congress, according to announcements made today. The Library has been harvesting data from the web since 2000 and currently holds "more than 167 terabytes of web-based information, including legal blogs, websites of candidates for national office, and websites of Members of Congress". While an official press release has not been issued yet, the Library says "[e]xpect to see an emphasis on the scholarly and research implications of the acquisition". The Library chose to make its first mention of the Acquisition via its official Twitter account @librarycongress. more
You may have seen media reports a few weeks ago describing how servers behind the so-called Great Firewall of China were found delivering incorrect DNS information to users in the rest of the world, thereby redirecting users to edited Web pages. Reports indicate that this apparently occurred due to a caching error by a single Internet Service Provider. While the problem was fairly limited in scope, it could have entirely been prevented in a world where DNSSEC was fully deployed. more
Bennett Haselton, who runs the Peacefire anti-censorship site, is one of the more successful anti-spam litigants. He says he's filed about 140 suits, mostly in small claims court, and has won the majority of the suits that got far enough to be decided on the merits. But last month, in Federal court in Seattle, he lost a suit against Quicken Loans that he should have won, partly because of his own mistakes, but largely because of the pernicious effect of Gordon vs. Virtumundo. more
The impact of the changes set in motion by President Obama back in late 2008 in relation to the direction the telecommunications are slowly becoming apparent and are taking many Americans by surprise, even many of the experts and analysts in this industry. This has created a lot of noise and confusion, as people are trying to understand what is happening and how it will affect them. more
The year 2010 is turning out to be the "year of DNSSEC" from Registry implementations, Registrar implementations, ISP support, to the Root being signed this summer. Because we are dealing with such critical infrastructure, it is important to not lose sight of careful implementations. more
Leading Internet content distribution service provider, Akamai, has announced that its global network is now serving as much as 3.45 Terabits per second (Tbps) of content per day. "The traffic peak of 3.45 Tbps is roughly equivalent to the capacity needed to download the entire printed contents of the U.S. Library of Congress in less than a minute," says the company. Paul Sagan, Akamai's President and CEO, says increasing demand for high definition video streaming is a key factor in these recent delivery milestones. more
OECD, Organization for Economic Co-Operation and Development, has released a report for policy makers assessing the level of IPv6 deployment around the world. "[T]he timely deployment of IPv6 by network operators and content/application providers is an increasing priority for all Internet stakeholders. In terms of public policy, IPv6 plays an important role in enabling growth of the Internet to support further innovation. In addition, security, interoperability and competition issues are involved with the depletion of IPv4." more
The fact that businesses around the world are knocking on the doors of their governments asking for spectrum is a clear indication that this telco real estate market is hotting up. The reason for this is not too hard to guess -- the enormous growth in the demand for mobile broadband. There is a large amount of pent-up demand as the mobile operators didn't want to open up this market while they were in the middle of adding new customers to their mobile voice services. more
Brian Krebs has a post up the other day on his blog indicating that the amount of spam ending in .cn has declined dramatically due to steps taken by the Chinese government making it more difficult to get a domain ending in .cn... A cursory glance seems to confirm that the amount of spam from .cn as opposed to .ru has switched places. Indeed, if the CNNIC requires people to start writing in application forms, with a business license and identity card, that is seriously going to slow down the rate at which spammers can sign up and register new domains. more
A study conducted by RIPE Labs indicates that about 1.89% of spam are received over IPv6. "With the increased deployment of IPv6, we were curious to see how much the amount of spam sent over IPv6 increases. We looked at the e-mail system of the RIPE NCC and produced some statistics that could be seen as an indication for the overall trend of spam sent over IPv6," says RIPE in a blog post explaining the analysis. Group also notes that the study was based on one week’s worth of data and that it excluded messages already rejected by blacklisting and greylisting. more
Neil Schwartzman writes: Steven R. Chabinsky, Deputy Assistant Director, Cyber Division of the Federal Bureau of Investigation gave a keynote at the GovSec/FOSE Conference in Washington, D.C., March 23, 2010. Full text of the speech here. more
A court in Illinois rejected a motion to dismiss case filed by defendants in a class action brought on behalf of plaintiffs who received SMS spam marketing for an animated film called "Robots". The court's ruling is not surprising, given the other cases which have come to a similar conclusion. more
Google has received over 1,100 community requests in response to their up coming experimental, "ultra high-speed broadband networks," according to the company. Google plans to announce their target communities by the end of the year. "Of course, we're not going to be able to build in every interested community -- our plan is to reach a total of at least 50,000 and potentially up to 500,000 people with this experiment," says Google's Product Manager, James Kelly, in a blog post. more
At the round tables on privacy held by the Federal Trade Commission, Indiana University law school professor and member of the board of the Privacy Projects, Fred Cate said out loud what long has been silently known about consumer protections based on the notices web sites post to describe their data protection practices and the consumers' choice to click on or away. Cate said: "Choice is an illusion." There is more than a bit of substance behind the bumper sticker... more
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