Do you know someone who deserves recognition for helping build the Internet in their region or country? Or someone who made the Internet more secure through the work they've done? Or someone who made some major technical innovation that made the Internet faster or better? more
One of the consequences of the war between Russia and Ukraine is that Russia has largely stopped participating in many large worldwide web applications. Russia has blocked Facebook and Twitter. Other applications like Apple, Microsoft, TikTok, Netflix, and others have withdrawn from Russia. The European Union is in the process of trying to block Russian-generated content, such as the state-owned news outlets of RT (formerly Russia Today) and Sputnik. more
The Internet Governance Forum (IGF) has, for several years, experienced technical problems that have nothing to do with the local staff or host countries of the event. In fact, the volunteers who were part of the local staff of its 17th edition, held in the Ethiopian capital of Addis Ababa, were constantly overcompensating for issues with a great deal of goodwill. more
Last Saturday marked the 53rd anniversary of the Internet. While the vast majority of its five billion users have been online for less than a decade, the Internet was taken into use on October 29th, 1969, when two computers connected to the ARPANET exchanged a message. Although the Internet has been around for a while, it remained below most people's radar until the late 1990s when the dot com boom started. more
The ever-entertaining Fifth Circuit has recently upheld a strange Texas law that forbids most kinds of social media moderation. (Techdirt explains many of the reasons the court is wrong, so I won't try.) This brings us to the trendy question of whether Facebook, Twitter, et al. should be treated as common carriers. You can make a good argument to separate the point-to-point data transport from the ISP and make the former common carriage. more
At his farewell speech in August outgoing, Telstra CEO Andy Penn mentioned that the cyber threat has never been as serious as the present. He mentioned the deteriorating geopolitical situation and the big shift in how criminals operate in the cyber domain. One thing is for sure is that in order to enjoy all the positives resulting from the digital economy, we need to be far more vigilant about the barrage of information that we are receiving and/or have access to. more
A Chinese law that went into effect six months ago required online service providers to file details of the algorithms they use with China's centralized regulator, the Cyberspace Administration of China (CAC). In mid-August, CAC released a list of 30 algorithms used by companies such as Alibaba, TenCent and Douyin, the Chinese version of Tiktok, with a brief description of their purpose. more
Recently, an article I wrote for Bitcoin Magazine talked about how we can use DNS underscore scoping to better abstract Lightning addresses and even create a de facto specification that could work on any resource (like a wallet or a smart contract) across all blockchains. more
Let's take a second to look back some 50 years to the world of 1972 and the technology and telecommunications environment at that time. The world of 1972 was one populated by a relatively small collection of massive (and eye-wateringly expensive) mainframe computers that were tended by a set of computer operators working around the clock and directed by specialized programmers, trained in the obscure symbol set used by the job control systems on these computers. more
In the early days of Online Brand Protection (OBP), before it was commonly understood how damaging to revenue infringements could be, this was an extremely popular topic. I remember delivering webinars on the subject then and even running a couple of half-day in-person workshops for brand owners at major conferences. more
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