ICANN participation

A recent story today about discussions for an official defense Botnet in the USA prompted me to post a question I've been asking for the last year. Are some of the world's botnets secretly run by intelligence agencies, and if not, why not? Some estimates suggest that up to 1/3 of PCs are secretly part of a botnet. The main use of botnets is sending spam, but they are also used for DDOS extortion attacks and presumably other nasty things like identity theft. But consider this... More...

Researchers at Information Security Research Team (INSERT) have dissevered a serious flaw in Google's Gmail service. The group demonstrates how anyone with no special Internet access privileges other than being able to connect to SMTP (TCP port 25) and HTTP (TCP port 80) servers is able to exploit a single Gmail account in order to be granted nearly unrestricted access to Google's massive whitelisted SMTP relay infrastructure. Read more from the report... More...

Researchers at Information Security Research Team (INSERT) have dissevered a serious flaw in Google's Gmail service. The group demonstrates how anyone with no special Internet access privileges other than being able to connect to SMTP (TCP port 25) and HTTP (TCP port 80) servers is able to exploit a single Gmail account in order to be granted nearly unrestricted access to Google's massive whitelisted SMTP relay infrastructure. Read more from the report... More...

Public Interest Registry, the organization in charge of ".org" top-level domains, disclosed a planned fee increase in a May 1 letter to ICANN [PDF]. The fee increase does not require the ICANN's approval. PIR did not cite a reason in its letter. Earlier this year, VeriSign Inc., the company in charge of managing ".com" and ".net," also announced price increases. More...

Public Interest Registry, the organization in charge of ".org" top-level domains, disclosed a planned fee increase in a May 1 letter to ICANN [PDF]. The fee increase does not require the ICANN's approval. PIR did not cite a reason in its letter. Earlier this year, VeriSign Inc., the company in charge of managing ".com" and ".net," also announced price increases. More...

The new Clearwire could be game-changing, but the rules of the game may not be quite as Clearwire presents them. I have been wondering since last July whether something significant would happen in the Google/Sprint world. The deal announcement earlier this weekseems to be that key development... In a nutshell, Sprint will contribute its substantial spectrum licenses in the 2.5 GHz range and its WiMAX-related assets and intellectual property. Google, Intel, Comcast, Time Warner Cable, and Bright House Networks will invest a total of $3.2 billion. More...

I see and hear a lot of confusion about next generation networks (NGN). In most cases people are using the term roughly as the ITU-T defines it: "A Next Generation Network (NGN) is a packet-based network able to provide services including Telecommunication Services and able to make use of multiple broadband, QoS-enabled transport technologies and in which service-related functions are independent from underlying transport-related technologies." but many people don't realize how little this has to do with the Internet... More...

With IPv4 addresses in short supply, they could become increasingly interesting and marketable goods. This is a concern for Regional Internet Registries (RIR) that are in charge of managing IP address allocations. Heise Online reports: "If they officially permit transfers or sales in the future, they will be implicitly accepting commercialization and privatization. Any attempt to insist on the return of addresses to the RIRs could drive trading, which is probably inevitable, underground..." More...

With IPv4 addresses in short supply, they could become increasingly interesting and marketable goods. This is a concern for Regional Internet Registries (RIR) that are in charge of managing IP address allocations. Heise Online reports: "If they officially permit transfers or sales in the future, they will be implicitly accepting commercialization and privatization. Any attempt to insist on the return of addresses to the RIRs could drive trading, which is probably inevitable, underground..." More...

I saw an interesting news item that broke Monday courtesy of DomainNameNews and SlashDot that hasn't been broadly covered yet. I'm surprised no one has posted on this yet on CircleID, so here goes. Apparently VeriSign has been awarded a patent for the resolution of mis-typed domain names. This was at the heart of the controversy back in 2003 around their SiteFinder Service. Amidst a storm of criticism ICANN insisted VeriSign shut down the service, and the company eventually agreed. More...

There are more than just blue, black and white hat hackers. There are a few more types of folks out there that don't fit into the above categories. This article is taken from Stratfor with some commentary by myself... Many of the hackers described in my previous post are also coders, or "writers," who create viruses, worms, Trojans, bot protocols and other destructive "malware" tools used by hackers... More...

One of the other web sites I subscribe to is Stratfor. It's a global intelligence website and doesn't really have much to do with spam. But I like politics so I read it. They have some articles which you can get for free, but the better stuff you have to pay for. About two weeks ago, they ran a three-part series on Cyberwarfare. The first article was the title of this post, which you can access here (requires registration). In the article they described different types of cybercriminals and not-so-criminals which they referred to under the umbrella as "hackers." More...

The Wall Street Journal is reporting the terms of a yet unannounced deal which will finance a massive rollout of WiMax by a Sprint-Clearwire joint venture. Outside funding is to be provided by Intel, Google, Comcast, and Time Warner Cable as well as Bright House, a small cable company. Assuming the deal is for real, this is good news for US users of broadband and, indirectly, other users around the world. More...

Last Friday (HT: IPDemocracy), Google filed a petition [PDF] asking that the Commission ensure that Verizon understands what those "open platform" requirements for the C Block really mean. Verizon has taken the position in the past that its own devices won't be subject to the "open applications" and "open handsets" requirements of the C Block rules, and Google says it is concerned that Verizon doesn't plan to follow those requirements in the future. This is big. Here's the background... More...

n 2004 Jaynes became the country's first convicted spam felon under the Virginia anti-spam law. He's been appealing his conviction ever since, most recently losing an appeal to the Virginia Supreme Court by a 4-3 decision in February. As I discussed in more detail at the time the key questions were a) whether the Virginia law had First Amendment problems and b) whether Jaynes had standing to challenge it. The court answered No to b), thereby avoiding the need to answer a), the dissent answered Yes to both. More...

A quick notice: the deadline for input on ALAC review is ending today (Fri 2 May 2008), so get your comments in as soon as possible if you want your perspective to be considered in the initial review of suggestions.

What do the independent reviewers want to hear about? Any observations you may have about the role of the At Large Advisory Committee, or its structure, or its operation. All submissions/comments are confidential.

What is the ALAC? It is the part of the ICANN organisational structure that deals with the “at large” community, which means Internet users as a whole. You can find out more about ALAC at its website: http://www.atlarge.icann.org/.

And more information about the review itself is available here.

Please email comments to alacreview@westlakenz.com.